AMAZING STORY
Erik Bledsoe: A Prescription for Church
By Jeremy Callahan
The 700 Club
CBN.com - “I woke up in the middle of the night and I’m not a weird guy, but I swear to you it was almost audibly taunting me.”
Erik Bledsoe was held captive by pornography. He sat home alone, day after day. “When you’re alone with your thoughts, sitting on the couch…it’s awful. I felt and knew that something was so broken and so wrong in my heart.”
He grew up in church, and accepted Christ when he was six years old, but walked away after a humiliating conflict with Christian leaders during college. “I became very hurt and very bitter. I chose to run towards whatever would take me in.”
Erik dropped out of school and eventually moved to Nashville to pursue a music career. Alone in a new city, Erik turned to pornography for comfort. “I just didn’t want anything or anyone, and this was the only thing I could turn to, I thought.
Pornography was a great narcotic because it was whatever I wanted it to be. It lies to you that it will fulfill you, and then as soon as you’ve given yourself to it, it stabs you in the back.”
He eventually turned to women for companionship and bounced from one promiscuous relationship to the next. “I needed intimacy to feel loved, to feel like I was validated as a man, to feel in control because my whole life was in a tailspin, to feel a sense of belonging to anything.”
He also started going to a strip club. “That was my moment of ‘I am sick! I’m in a strip club, but yet, I can’t even enjoy it because I’m so overcome with compassion for this person because I want them to be whole,’ but I am in the same boat as she is.”
Erik ran to the only people he could trust—his parents. “They didn’t know any of the things that I was doing. I got in a huge fight about the purpose and value of my life, and it got so bad that eventually they just said, ‘Look, we love you, and we are out of our league here. You need some help.’”
He went to see a physician whose prescription caught him off guard. “He sat down, and he asked me a thousand questions with his chart, and they started off medical and they went more and more personal and psychological at some point. And he said, ‘Erik, the way that you believe and the things that you do are in such contradiction to each other that I think as your doctor, that you’re going crazy.’ He said, ‘If I were you, as your medical doctor and not your pastor, I think the best prescription I could write you is for you to go to church.’”
Erik drove home to Nashville and called a friend who just happened to be going to a Christian conference. He invited Erik to go along. “I knew that I couldn’t say.. ‘No’ to the Lord forever. All of those fears and emotions and shame and guilt are so loud in my head, and they are playing like a tape…over and over. ‘You need to get out! You should not be here! Wait ‘til they find out what you’ve done!’ All of the things… ‘They’re gonna reject you again. It’s gonna happen, blah blah blah.’ Oh, it’s so loud!”
He walked forward that night to re-dedicate his life to Christ. “When I set my face to walk down the aisle, it just stopped. Me putting my foot in the aisle and walking up front to talk to anybody required absolute surrender because of how far I had been.”
Erik began studying the Bible and found a man who would mentor him. “I was gonna die if I didn’t change, and it might not have been the week after, but I was on a path to either take my own life or lose it just out of sheer depression and lonliness. The only thing that I have ever seen, that I have ever heard work is when you cultivate such a relationship with Christ that it becomes a greater high than logging on to porn to be chaste and holy unto God, so much so that to sell out for porn is like a joke. I’m practicing renewing my mind, being around men and women of God, trying to listen to the Holy Spirit, being in church, doing the right things, and slowly over time, one thing is replaced for another, and eventually, it just clicked.”
Today, Erik is married with a young son.
“I long to be faithful to my wife now. Why would I give up my home and my marriage and my family for fifteen minutes with a computer? I mean, come on! There is a place that is only meant for God, and when we try to take anything that’s not God and fill that void in us with it, we also end up more empty and more alone, and more depressed. There is a God who sees you, Jesus, who knows the things that you’re choosing over Him, the things that you’ve been a part of, and He is waiting to forgive you for those things. He has decided that He would rather die than live without you.”
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