6/19/2026 (12:30am)

One of the things I struggle with is idol worship. For a time, I didn’t even realize how almost anything can be an idol. I learned that whatever I am placing before God or spending more time in than God is an idol. Idolization can also look like struggling to let go of a sin that grieves God.

One of the idols is my life is lust. Now this is an idol that God is revealing and knocking down in my life. You never realize once you open the door for sin how it manifests and takes root in your life. It’s not something that can be controlled or regulated. It has a mind and spirit of its own, willing you into an unrecognizable person.

Have you ever been drunk or high before? So drunk or high you can’t remember the night before. When the next day debrief session happens all your friends are telling you what happened and you can’t believe it. You did and said what?! You can’t believe what you’re hearing and if there is evidence, you can’t believe what you’re seeing. That’s what sin does to us. Makes us unrecognizable so when God pulls us out the grave, we were so happy to lay in, we can’t begin to believe the evil we’ve done.

When God starts to sanctify and transform us, we often become stuck because we are so used to living in sin, we can’t see a future us that is righteous in Christ Jesus. Things we use to like we don’t anymore, stuff we used to say we can’t say anymore, things we use to do we don’t have a desire to do anymore. At first, it can feel fraudulent, the corporate world would call it “imposter syndrome”. But Gods tells us we are worthy and that He loves us. He doesn’t need us but wants us.

The changes God is making in us aren’t fraudulent we just aren’t used to righteousness. In time, God’s time, it’ll be our new norm.

Now to the point of this entry lol.

Lust has impacted me in many forms – food, money, sexual and slothful. The way I am coming to understand lust is that it is not just sexual but an overconsuming desire for something. In Exodus lust is described in a way I wasn’t familiar with. Jacob (Israel’s) sons had a lust for anger after finding out their sister was raped. That lust of anger led them to killing an entire group of people. The Israelites also were lusting after food they had while in captivity in Egypt. A place where God delivered them from. The Holy Bible shows us that lust is damaging not only to us but the people around us.

Recently, I have been calling on the Holy Spirit to deliver me from sexual thoughts and masturbation. This is something I deeply struggled with. I used to watch porn and masturbate at least once a day. When you make it a habit of giving into your sexual desires it becomes a behavioral and character trait. I can say it’s taken me almost 3 ½ years to get to this point. The summer before I entered my senior year of college, I had this feeling which I now know was God calling out to me. Telling me to throw away my toys and stop masturbating. Ever since then I have been in this cycle of buying and throwing away sex toys. Well by the grace of God the last sex toy I ever bought was March 31^st of this year and the moment it was delivered I threw it away.

Unknowingly this was only step one lol. I still struggled with watching and reading pornographic media/content. Now twitter was up next. Twitter was the source of my porn collection. Even typing that out it sounds so disgusting, which is crazy because a couple of months ago I would have almost boasted about how good the porn is on twitter. Now I’m writing this in a scrunched-up face.

Just because you don’t have sex toys doesn’t mean I still didn’t masturbate. There were still other avenues I was trying to use to satisfy my fleshly desires. As I said earlier twitter was one of them. I had so many videos bookmarked and at first, I thought, “Ok, I’ll just un-bookmark all the porn videos I have but still use twitter.” How naive was I??? I once again found myself in a cycle of bookmarking and un-bookmarking porn videos on twitter. That’s when I knew ok, I’m going to have to delete twitter. Queue the next cycle of me deleting and making new twitter accounts. Clearly there is a theme here. Dying to your flesh is not easy but God never said it would be.

I’m not sure the date in which I once and for all got rid of twitter but by the grace of God I haven’t made another account since the last time I deleted it. Now onto step 3 – not visiting porn websites. When you start to deny yourself of the desires you once happily gave into the flesh begins to find other ways to fill the void (you can never satisfy lust). So even though I didn’t have sex toys and twitter, I was still struggling not to go online and search porn. Now I wasn’t having sexual urges as often as I was in the past, but I still found myself falling short. I literally had to learn to just admit to God what my desire is and tell myself off. “You not gon kill me spiritually and physically tryna masturbate.”

Step 4, which I partially completed, was erotic novels. In like 2021/2022 I discovered booktok. More specifically the version that was strictly reading erotic novels. For the next 3 ½ years that’s all I consumed. I wasn’t a stranger to reading smut novels, I’m a girl who grew up reading fanfiction on Wattpad and Tumblr. I also got rid of those accounts too. Anyway, I grew up reading a lot of sexual content as a child and rediscovered it as an adult.

Wow, that’s like so weird to say. In those 3 ½ years I strictly read books with erotic scenes in them. I didn’t want to read anything that didn’t have sex in it. I even went as far as encouraging my friends to read these books as well, which I deeply regret. I tried to delude myself into thinking, “Oh, I can read these books and still have a relationship with God.”, “The characters are praying so it must be ok that in the next scene I’m reading a graphic sex scene.”, “These characters are married so its ok.”. Yeah…no it isn’t and wasn’t. At first, I just wasn’t reading any books then I tried reading one saying, “Oh the characters are married and as long as I don’t get aroused its ok”. Spoiler – it’s not ok just because they are married and I did get aroused. So, I had to cancel my Kindle Unlimited subscription and delete the app. I also had to unsubscribe, unfollow and remove myself from any groups related to the authors I was reading. Any content creators that did “spicy book” recommendations I had to unfollow.

The last thing the Holy Spirit is calling me to do is rid myself of any physical books I have. Now this, this showed me I still have idols. The thought of throwing anyway these books seems like too much. Like dang I can’t keep them as long as they there, but that’s like a recovering alcoholic keeping a bottle of alcohol for memories. It just doesn’t make sense nor is it healthy thing to do when you are trying to rid yourself of the things that are pulling you from Christ Jesus.

So yes, I will have to throw away those books. Even writing this I feel uneasy, but I know the result is peace. Peace that my desires and these things don’t have rule over me. Peace in knowing doing this reflects my love for my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Now before I do this, I want to find some bible verses that essentially speak to what I said. In all things we do and say we need to point ourselves back to scripture. That is where we find truth.  

06/19/2026 (evening)

So…I threw the books away lol. I watched this sermon called “A Conversation about Hell” by the Lionheart Church. That video completely changed the way I viewed Heaven and Hell. One thing I know for certain that for the rest of my God given life I will be chasing after God. Hell will NOT see me.

Its so crazy though because God is intentionally and gives you what you can handle. Earlier this week, I prayed to God asking Him to give me a vision of Hell like he has done many other believers. I knew if He wanted to, He would do it. When I tell you I was so scared to go to sleep that night. I was in fear about a vision…now imagine ETERNITY. Yeah nah! Anyway, I woke up and didn’t have a vision but today while scrolling on tik tok I saw a clip of the video I mentioned.

I couldn’t even handle what was being described, there is no way I could have handled a vision or eternity. I know that the Holy Spirit put that video in front of me so that I could get a glimpse of what Hell is like in a way that wouldn’t break me. All that sadness and hesitancy about getting rid of those erotic novels IMMEDIATELY went out the window. After I watched that video, I threw every erotic book I have in a trash bag and took it to the dumpster. I honestly felt so silly for even being hesitant about it.

I still struggle with sexual thoughts, but I am learning that not all my thoughts are my own. I’m learning to rebuke them in the name of Jesus. I feel like in a way I surrendered a big part of who I was before Christ. Filled with sexual immorality and giving in to my desires. I know I still have a long way to go but I know I will make it with the Holy Spirit guiding my every step.