So, what's with the porn talks????

Last week was the 5th Sunday of the month which means that the Relief Society and Priesthood meet together for the last block of meetings at church. Our bishopric surprised everybody by having an LDS therapist from the other ward come in and give a slideshow presentation about Pornography.

He did a great job, and when I left, I was thoroughly terrified.

Crazy statistics, like 28% of porn "users" are women, 20% of men look at porn at work (which most employers have a zero toleration policy), the people who make money off porn try to hook 8-11 year olds (EIGHT???) - deliberately trying to get them to view it accidentally - and the most staggering part of his message: Your kids will be exposed to pornography and there's nothing you can do to completely keep them away from it.

I wish he had spent more time talking about how you can overcome this sick and home-wrecking addiction, and more time giving parents concrete ways to deal with the problem with their children. But the time was limited and the audience too diverse, and he gave us lots of resources to find these things ourselves (including access to the slideshow he had, as well as his contact info, which was cool). Not everybody there was a parent. And while neither Danny nor I have ANY doubts about the evils, addictive nature, and seriousness of this issue, it really is important to be reminded of this.

I'm grateful that my friend Galad's Sunday school lesson that day was about the Woman at the Well. I sat there in her class, and reread that story. Obviously, she had some sexual purity issues. I think she had five husbands before, and when she met Christ at the well, her current relationship was with a guy to whom she wasn't married. Yet Christ sought her out. He offered her living water. He used her as a major missionary tool in Samaria.

Anyway, that was just a powerful reminder to me how Christ's love extends to everybody, even those with serious sexual sins. To partake of the living water, she would have to change, no doubt. But that he offered, that the atonement is available to all, that's really important to remember.

Tonight was the adult session of our stake conference. President Sosa, who is a close family friend of ours, gave an extremely powerful talk about boundaries. He chose to focus his talk on avoiding pornography. The main thing that I remember that struck me was that he said that if you put your boundary right on the edge, it is not an effective boundary. You need to put it as far away as possible from the danger. That makes sense to me.

He also said he thinks it's easier to live righteously 100% of the time rather than 98% of the time. That will have to be abroidered (this is the word that comes to mind and I think it's in French but I'm too lazy to find a synonym so just figure it out from the context) on a different night since I am going to eat some yummy pasta with my true love now.

I guess that the answer to this post's title is: this is a huge deal. Pornography destroys people, marriages, and families. Through Christ's atonement, we can be healed, but it's a zillion times easier and better to not be broken from it in the first place. I think our stake is just sending us the message that this is an important issue and education on how bad it is/how to avoid it is something we all really need.

Why do you think the sudden influx of "porn talks"?