Living Stones News - Midwest Edition

By Rick Lubbers
(Living Stones News Editor)

David Peightal watches the pages of a magazine burn, a metaphor that bears witness to his freedom from more than 30 years of addiction to pornography, when he studied the pages of Playboy as often as the pages of his Bible. Now he wants to start a ministry for men who want to break free from the lure and trap of pronography.

Duluth's David Peightal struggled to overcome an addiction to pornographic magazines for more than 30 years, but it wasn't until he shared his 'dirty secret' to a group of Christian men that he finally broke free of the bonds of that lifestyle.

David Peightal’s addiction to pornography began with a theft as a teenager and ended with the revelation of his secret more than 30 years later.
The years in between featured a continuous spiritual war where Peightal — a lifelong Christian — lived through repeated cycles of indulgence and chastity, pleasure and guilt, surrenders and battles, sin and forgiveness.
“I remember stealing a Playboy out of a convenience store close to my school when I was about 13,” Peightal said. “It started a steady habit of masturbation. Nobody wants to say that (word), but that’s what the addiction really is — the masturbation.”
Peightal, 48, emphasizes that he gave his life over to Jesus Christ around the same time he became addicted, and that his lengthy enslavement to erotic literature was caused more by an inability to find a way out than from a lack of trying. He lived a Christian Jekyll and Hyde existence.
Raised in Oregon and Washington, where his father worked as a missionary on an Indian reservation, Peightal’s commitment to Christ began at the age of 15. He soon spent every spare minute pouring over the Bible, meeting with other Christians, praying and sharing testimonies. Peightal was a Christian leader at his high school, but when found himself alone at home, his craving for pornography always reared its ugly head.
“I had an insatiable hunger for the Bible,” Peightal said. “I started skipping lunches so I could spend time reading it. Soon there was a whole group of us skipping lunches and studying the Bible.
“But then at night I would go home and study my Playboys just like I did the Bible, and it was an incredible war within me. I always knew that it was wrong and I would always try to give it up.”
Sticking to him like an invisible shadow, Peightal’s secret sin followed him while he attended a Bible school in Eugene, Ore., hid out of sight while he pastored a church in Dallas, Ore., and was present at a marriage doomed to fail at the start.
“I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was attracted to (my wife) because she reminded me of the girls that I studied all those years in those magazines,” Peightal said. “So really what I married was a promiscuous woman, and that’s what my radar had been set up for.”
Picking up the pieces from an eventual divorce and still carrying the burden of his addiction, Peightal left the ministry at the age of 28. He was discouraged, but still determined to rid himself of the sweet sin that always ended up tasting bitter.
“I always hated myself for it,” Peightal said. “It was a two-faced lie. I tried a lot of things to become pure, but nothing ever worked. I’m a Christian, you know, all the while I’m struggling with this addiction.”
Peightal’s obsession with purity literally drove him outdoors, where he spent several years living in a tent near Hudson, Wis. He made a three-year vow not to get involved with women in any form — whether in person or on the pages of a magazine.
“I tried very hard to find purity in those three years living in that tent. At the end of the three years I realized that I was just as dirty I had been when I started.”
During his low points, Peightal’s emotional round table included the additions of Despair and Doubt to his usual companions of Addiction and Guilt.
“After 30-some years of being addicted to pornography and masturbation, I began to wonder why God wasn’t strong enough to heal me of that,” Peightal said. “I had to live my life in the shadow of that doubt about God’s power.
“Of course He is all-powerful, but sometimes we misunderstand His power and we misunderstand the fact that He wants His power in many instances to flow through his people.”
It was through God’s people that Peightal said he began to turn back the tide of his addiction. He started to win meaningful battles, rather than the pyrrhic victories he experienced in the past. While living in the Twin Cities, Peightal became involved with a Christian movement called “Pure Desire” that eventually led to true release from dependence on pornography.
“For all those years, from the time I was 15 until I was in my 40s, I tried to find healing between me and God,” Peightal said. “It never came immediately. I could try harder and maybe do better for a little while just like a New Year’s resolution, but true healing never came because I was trying to find it apart from the Body of Christ.
“It was not until I realized that and became accountable to a group of men in the Body of Christ was I able to break that bondage completely. People need to know that most emotional healing that God gives us is intended to come through the body of Christ.”
That healing, however, did not flow without a painful cleansing. Peightal said that waking up to the fact he was addicted to “the drug of sex” devastated him and sent him into a near-suicidal depression. However, prayers, Christian counseling, accountability groups, being a part of a Christian music band, as well as the love of his son and daughter — Jesse, 15, and Helen, 11 — helped pull him through that dark cloud.
The next step for Peightal was living six months without any kind of sexual stimulus in order to convince his body and mind that he could live without it.
“I made it through the six-month point, and then...

...I made it to the year point, and now I’m at the year and a half point,” Peightal said.
Living with a joy and peace he hasn’t known for the bulk of his life, Peightal is ready for his next battle — helping other men break free from pornography’s talon-like grip, especially in the Church where he said the addiction is prevalent.
“I’ve read the percentages and I don’t even want to state them – percentages of pastors that are addicted, percentages of youth pastors that are addicted, percentages of Christian men that are addicted. It’s well over 50 percent,” he said. “There are a lot of people who want to be free of it and have tried to find freedom on their own. The power of this thing is in the secret of this thing. As long as it’s a secret, that’s Satan’s power.
“That’s why I’m so happy to be able to proclaim this thing publicly — because that’s what breaks Satan’s power.”
Now based in West Duluth, it’s Peightal desire to begin a Twin Ports ministry for men broken by the bondage of pornographic addiction. He helped plant a Foursquare denominational church in Pequot Lakes, Minn., and it is his mission to fill an empty church building of the same affiliation on Polk Street.
“I have envisioned helping men become free of this and that might be the focus of my ministry,” he said. “The Church has not been very open about this problem in the past. Now the Church is beginning to take this thing head-on … providing help for people. Men are gaining victory all across the country. We’ve got to fight it openly. It’s got to become a public problem in church.
“I really believe that the presence of this in our men of the Church is weakening the Body,” Peightal added. “Men can be stripped of all power to lead because this thing is in their life. They want it out, but they can’t get it out. They live under a sense of condemnation from Satan because of it.
“I know for a fact that God can use men that aren’t pure, because none of us are. I know for a fact that God can use men who are involved in sin of some kind. But Satan uses that so powerfully to make men feel like they can’t be used. It keeps men from rising up to be the leaders that God has called them to be.”
Peightal acknowledges that battling pornography’s lure is vastly different from when he first fell into its trap. The omnipresence of a permissive American pop culture and a “wired” community virtually place a war front at every step taken during a given day.
“We are living in a pornographic culture,” Peightal said. “It comes from everywhere from every side. It used to be that a man had to have guts enough to bring a magazine up to the counter and pay for it. You used to have to go looking for pornography, now it comes looking for you and it’s piped into our homes.
“The men in this program call the Internet the ‘crack cocaine’ of pornography.’”
For those interested in learning more about his victorious struggle and about the Pure Desire program, Peightal invites telephone calls at (651) 278-2755 or (218) 628-2899. He can also be reached at davidpeightal@yahoo.com by e-mail. All conversations will be kept in the strictest confidence.
“Call me, because I want to get some men together and deal with this,” Peightal said. “I just want to tell men everywhere that they can be free from that. The freedom is amazing. It really affects so many aspects of my life and makes me a so much more positive person. I have so much more joy.”


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