Hey Dave,

First of all let me thank you for your dedication to this ministry. I really appreciate you and all that you have done to help me with my struggles with masturbation and pornography. May God continue to use and bless you as you continue to serve Him.

To begin with I should share how I started masturbating. When I was a freshman in high school, I was on a band trip. While at the hotel we discovered that they had porno channels, and all of us in the room watched them at night. To be perfectly honest, I had never experienced this before, and so to begin with I found it to be quite interesting. After getting back home, it was several weeks before I tried to masturbate, but I eventually tried it out. It started as mostly seeing if it was possible to "have sex" without having a girl there to have sex with. As many people have discovered, I realized that, hey this feels pretty good, so I continued to masturbate. Then I discovered pornography on the internet. The pornography was the use of whatever free sites I could get to and probably the worst were the sites where there were fictional writings. I say these were the worst because when I masturbated I would put myself in as the main character, and use whatever the situation was to masturbate.

For the longest time I masturbated daily, not thinking anything about it because I was not really "having sex." Over time though God finally started to get my attention. I would try to stop by myself but I could never stop. The most I can remember was going two weeks before I started masturbating again. This went on for a while, where I would go through a period of doing good to failing for months. Whenever my non-Christian friends would talk about how they masturbated and all, I denied that I ever did, because I was so embarrassed that I as a Christian had this problem. Finally, I came here to OWU. When I first came I thought, I will not have to worry about this problem anymore, because I will be at a Christian school and therefore my problems will go away. They didn't. I even tried to get a few guys on campus to keep me accountable, but they did not due a great job of it, and since I was still involved with pornography (there wasn't a filter back then) I continued to feed my mind with the images and stories I would see on the internet, and continued to masturbate. Then the school got a filter. Unfortunately, I had already filled my mind with about six years of this filth, that it really didn't matter if I had seen it that day or not, I could still vividly remember some of the situations.

Prior to starting with PureHeart Ministries (PHM) I was masturbating about once a week, usually on weekends when my roommate was gone, although sometimes it would get so bad that I would just go to the bathroom during the week to masturbate as well. This was in part due to the filter and limited access to pornographic sites. Finally, I heard about Steve Russell and PHM at church, and I decided I really needed to do this, and got set up with my accountability partner, Dave. Since being set up with him I have not masturbated once. This has been for about three months now if I added up correctly, much of an improvement to my two weeks. The pornography was a little harder to stop. Yes there were filters, but they do not always stop everything. The biggest problem was just looking at sites like hotornot.com, and then AIM rate a buddy. It was a way to still get some sort of mild pornography, because my mind would store the images of the "hot" girls.

By the grace and help of God, and having to be accountable to Dave, I have been able to have success thus far. I realize my work is not over, and I must continue to press on, but I thank God for the success he has given me. Thanks again, Dave and Steve for your willingness and obedience to God and for helping me and all the other guys involved with this ministry.

Striving for a pure heart.