By Toyin Adeniyi
A teenage girl, Eunice Ekanem has recounted how the Lord delivered her from the addiction of pornography and masturbation.
She shared her story in an interview monitored by Church Times on Lucky Udu’s channel on Facebook.
Giving the account, she said the whole addiction began when she started reading romance novels and then into more explicit and erotic ones. She then began imagining the scenes of the stories in her head, in her words “it was more like a live porn”.
By the time she clocked 15, she had gotten addicted to masturbation.
It got worse after her secondary education when she was 17 when she met a young man on Facebook who introduced her to pornography.
They started sex chatting. He would send her pornographic pictures and videos which she got addicted to.
This happened for about a year and then a friend preached to her. She “repented”. But the impact of the message did not last. After about 6 months she found herself doing what she hated doing.
This time it was a man she met on X (Twitter), who did not hesitate to make it clear that he wanted to sex chat with her and made it a compulsory thing for her to do every night.
At first, she thought she could handle it and just wanted to “play along” as she felt confident that she could not fall back but, in the end, she fell, even deeper than the first time.
It got so bad that she would go online to listen to erotic novels while on the road. It was all she could think of everywhere, even in church.
Sometimes she felt guilty and she tried her best to stop, she started a routine and promised herself not to read the novels again but somehow, she found herself going back to them again and again.
She did not know how to stop and did not know who to confide in as it was something she found shameful.
At some point, she gave up trying and just decided that it was something that could not go away.
But Jesus stepped in.
Eunice recalled she first experienced God’s saving grace after making up her mind to follow Jesus.
It was that grace that gave her the ability to identify triggers like the music she listened to, the movies she watched and the books read.
She said had to take a break from social media for a while in order not to be tempted. Those steps helped to secure her freedom.
She then counseled that those who want to be free should get someone they can be accountable to and also seek deliverance, which for her was reading the Bible every day.
While asserting she is now free from pornography and masturbation, she noted that pornography and masturbation are things many people have come to view as “normal” arguing that since it is the body that produces such hormones, there’s nothing they can do about it.
Some even cite scientific findings to argue that it has “benefits”.
However, Eunice states that it is not normal adding, “It has spiritual implications. It separates one from God and elicits other consequences as well like weakness, and erectile dysfunction for men, weakness and might even cause depression. It can also cause marital problems and jeopardize relationships with people. Nonetheless, freedom is possible, as Eunice Ekanem’s testimony demonstrates.