IN an unguarded lunch hour lyme with friends at a prominent Kingston high school 16-year-old David Roberts, for the first time in his life, laid eyes on naked women in the pages of a pornographic magazine.

That single look awakened in the teen an insatiable appetite for more of the same, leading him to tirelessly scout pharmacies and book stores during his free time, effectively concealing his newfound pursuit and deeply secret quest from everyone around him.

When he transitioned to adulthood and independence, television and computer screens became a part of that mix and he experimented with multiple women, even the married ones, but none could top the thrill that came from that clandestine world with naked bodies topped by faces he didn’t know. That was until a preacher walked down the aisle where he was seated, two Sundays in a row, and spoke the words he needed to hear.

“I was at church one Sunday and the pastor was preaching up a storm, and he just stopped suddenly and walked all the way down to my row and spoke the words, ‘You need to stop watching those movies,’ and then walked back to the pulpit and continued preaching like nothing happened,” Roberts shared during an interview with the Jamaica Observer recently. He said he silently questioned whether those words were for him.

“I didn’t understand how in the world he could know this because no human being on the planet knew This was my greatest shame, this was my life’s shame — not even my closest friend knew about this struggle,” he said.

On another Sunday, during another visit, the same thing happened and Roberts became convinced that “this was no fluke”.

“I questioned myself, and I literally heard a strong, powerful, frightening male voice speak to me and the voice said, ‘I am talking to you, I am talking to you,’ because I was asking myself in the church is he [pastor] speaking to me? Then something threw me on the ground and I felt like fire; I was burning with no smoke. I felt myself literally using my hand and patting my chest; I felt I was going to die. I felt this flame, this burning, but I don’t see anything, and I was calling out to the people, ‘Help me, help me!’ but nobody attended to me,” he said of the experience which he shares in graphic detail in his book Delivered from Lust and Porn.

“Eventually I got back up and sat on my seat and I felt different, I felt light, and I felt free, and I also felt angry. Later on, I learnt about righteous anger. When I went home that day I entered my room with that righteous anger and I found myself pointing and speaking words that I don’t know where they came from. I felt like something had shifted in me, and after a while I realised that I had experienced what is called deliverance,” Roberts shared.

That experience that day led him on a journey during which he resigned his lucrative job as a banker to sit for five years under divine instructions and learn from the Bible what was wrong about the path he had been on. Now, years later, his own experience still fresh in his mind, Roberts is intent on enlightening as many individuals as possible.

“I spent five plus years ‘hidden’, not working, not earning a dollar. I lost everything — all my savings, all my assets. I became zero, literally became zero. It was the worst time in my life in terms of income… people were wondering where I was, what had happened to me. I was literally locked away with the Bible and when I put it down, five plus years had passed,” he told the Observer.

“Of all the things I have learnt is that there is like a mind behind this thing and it comes to steal and destroy. This thing comes with a plan for your life, and the plan is to cause you to waste your hours, waste your life, waste your years, waste your gifts, waste your talents, and waste your seed — because that happens during masturbation, you waste your sexual seed — and all of that equals disruption, wasted years, nothingness,” Roberts stated.

The emerging author, who has penned more than a dozen books on varying topics, said he was compelled to write to the Observer after reading a recent article carried by the newspaper on the subject.

“I tell people now dealing with this thing: ‘Whatever your goals, your plans, your aspirations, this is an enemy to all. Whatever plan you have on paper, porn is an enemy to every single one so think carefully if you want to invite that enemy in your life.’ At the end, it left me with wasted hours, wasted years, wasted money. It leads you into a lifestyle of promiscuity — women here and everywhere, excursions here and there all for the sake of trying to satisfy that built-up energy and desire to release and to manifest what has been planted in the body,” he said.

“The more you engage in lusting and pornography you are planting within your body and your soul a perverted form of sexual energy, and when that is planted it needs expression. So you understand why our children are behaving the way they are in school because they have planted so much of that inside that they are crying out for release. So it’s going to be masturbation, engaging in sexual activity before they should, sexual promiscuity, and, unfortunately sometimes, it expresses itself even in rape,” he posited.

Roberts, who will on Saturday, August 30 launch his book during a ticketed event at 23 Molynes Road in St Andrew, views the occasion as the official start of his campaign to help individuals who have been hooked get their minds and lives back, as he shares scriptural truths about the “strongholds of lust and pornography” as well as prayers and scriptural-based strategies.

Excerpts and copies of the book, which Roberts emphasises is “spiritual and not philosophical”, are available on the Amazon platform and can also be sourced at York Pharmacy in Half-Way-Tree.

Author David Roberts displays his book, Delivered from Lust and Porn, which chronicles his personal struggle with lust and pornography and gives guidance to individuals caught in the habit. (Joseph Wellington)