Anonymous

Texas

I am 38 years old and live in Texas where I am the pastor at a Southern Baptist church. I have been married to my wife for almost 17 years now, and I have three children.

I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. From the time I was 6 until I was 16, there were two primary abusers in my life. The first was a trusted family friend. He was a man who knew my dad when he was fresh out of high school and gave him a job in his business. He knew my parents while they were dating. He gave my parents money and cars and jobs, and he helped to finance my father’s college education. He was successful, in fact brilliant, in his field – respected in the community and throughout the state and nation. He was a major benefactor for a large university and for many young men over the years.  He was wealthy, owning expensive cars, houses and property. He was both feared and admired . . . and he was a pedophile and a rapist. 

He used trust built over the years with my parents to gain access to me.  He engineered circumstances to have me alone in one of his homes or his car.  He used gifts, money and intimidation to maintain my silence, and he took my innocence at a very young age. There were numerous occasions over this ten year period in which I was abused, molested and raped. He photographed me and threatened me with exposure to my parents as a “bad boy”. He was single-handedly responsible for sexualizing my mind and my thoughts as a very young boy. 

By the time that I was in middle school and early high school, the internal stress was beginning to take its toll on me. I threw myself into succeeding and I worked extremely hard to be the best at whatever I attempted.  Unfortunately, that only added to the stress, so that by the time I was in the 9th grade, I had a stomach ulcer and blood pressure problems. I desperately needed someone to confide in, and didn’t feel comfortable with my own parents. 

I instinctively turned to a very popular and charismatic church leader who listened very sympathetically and promised to help me. Unfortunately, his help turned into highly sexualized conversations, inappropriate touching and outright abuse. Again, however, he was very skilled in what he did. I saw him as an authority figure in my life and believed him when he told me that I was the one with the problem. He offered himself (sacrificially) as the agent to help me find out what my true sexuality was and even engineered circumstances on a ski trip to have me in his bed. Naturally, my problems continued to worsen.

I never spoke of the abuse from either man. I stuffed my emotions further down inside and tried to move on.

During this period, we took a church mission trip. The church leader/abuser made our rooming assignments and put me in a room and a bed with an adult sponsor who shared his same inclination for teenage boys. I woke in the middle of the night to find him touching me, but pretended to be asleep until it was over. 

All of these experiences crushed my spirit, my own self-image and completely disturbed my view of God. It was by the grace of God that we finally changed churches and I was removed from the abusive situation. I had also grown old enough that the family friend/abuser no longer had access to me, although he still threatened and bribed – and I believe carried out his own perverted lifestyle with other young men.

I carried the secret of my abuse almost ten years into my marriage along with a lot of confusion and struggle sexually. Combined with other stresses in life these issues just continued to build until I suffered a nervous breakdown in my early 30’s. It was at this point, with an incredible wife, a loving pastor and real therapy that I began to process and deal with all of these issues. 

For the first time, I heard about a God who was on my side. I began to understand that even though the thoughts and memories would never go completely away, they could become powerless over me and I could live a life of freedom. I also learned that freedom comes with a cost – a cost to maintain that freedom. We never stop growing. We never stop learning. The process of recovery is always evolving.