The 700 Club with Pat Robertson


AMAZING STORY

Donny's Escape from Pornography

By Tim Smith
The 700 Club

CBN.com“I loved the money. I loved the lifestyle. I loved being the big shot around town.”

Donny Pauling made over half a million dollars a year as a producer in the porn industry. It started out years earlier when Donny was in the 3rd grade and found a porn magazine on the ground.

“I really didn’t know what to do with that information at the time. It was intriguing, but it was also repulsive at the same time,” says Donny. “But pornography didn’t really get too big of a hold on me until I was married several years later.”

Once Donny became an adult, pornography became his god.

“Once a computer entered my house and my wife was at work, or asleep, I started really getting into it,” admits Donny. “It just consumed my life. It consumed all my thoughts. I was even using bonus money that I earned at work to finance a part-time porn career, because I wanted to get involved in this business, I liked it so much. So I was doing pornography production part-time behind my wife’s back for a total of three years.”

Donny’s part-time business was thriving.  He knew he had to tell his wife about his double life.

“I told my wife in a phone call from a porn convention and that’s all she wanted to hear,” says Donny. “She was, ‘we’re over. You need to get in counseling if you want any shot at keeping your family.’ When I returned from that convention in Phoenix, I just moved right into my office for a while until I found a house to live in. And the very first month that I didn’t have to hide it anymore, I brought in $50,350. I was like I’m not going back.  I was fueled by hatred and bitterness and money.”

Donny developed a hatred toward God when he was just a child.

“God seemed to be a list of rules and regulations instead of someone you had a relationship with,” says Donny. “He was the reason I couldn’t go to school dances or out on dates or even to spend the night with friends, so God became someone that I despised because the same people that would be telling me that in church. I would hear what their lives were really like when my parents openly spoke about it in our home. And so I saw them as such hypocrites, wanted nothing to do with that, absolutely despised it and began to really resent God.”

As Donny turned his back on god, he embraced his new career – now making thousands of dollars per day.

“The party life kept continuing,” says Donny. “But I wasn’t totally stonehearted. I still had a lot of compassion for the girls I was recruiting. I’d receive phone calls from girls who would be in tears. And they’d be begging me to remove the content that we’d produced of them, because it was destroying their life.”

You’d see these bright-eyed girls,” continues Donny, “who would come in to do work they thought was cool.  Our society now tells them it’s OK. And then over the course of time you couldn’t help but watch the lights go out in their eyes. And that’s really what happened. The bright-eyed eyes would become dull, because that’s the reality of porn.” 

Donny despised the man he had become. Then he met people from Triple X Church at an unlikely place, a porn convention in Vegas. 

“They would hand out Bibles, and the Bibles would say on the cover, Jesus Loves Porn Stars,” remembers Donny. “And on the back it says, Does Jesus really love porn stars? It says, absolutely.”

“The Christians I grew up around would never talk to a porn producer, much less broadcast it to their listeners,” says Donny. “But they were doing things in such a different way. They were actually loving people. It was such a non-confrontational approach. I couldn’t help but say, if I was going to be a Christian, this is the kind of Christian I’d want to be.”

Donny found himself at a spiritual crossroad. He quit the porn business, but that didn’t give him the peace he desperately wanted.
           
“Two weeks after I stopped producing porn was when I actually surrendered my life to God,” recalls Donny. “So that’s exactly what I did. I had that prayer right in my car. And I surrendered my life to Him, I asked Him to take control, I asked Him to forgive me of everything I’d done. It didn’t mean it was easy though.  It’s not like I surrendered my life to God and everything turned rosy. I was at peace, the most peace I’d ever had in my life.  But I was also in a hugely painful emotional state.  But it was so peaceful at the same time.  It felt kind of like detox.”

Donny didn’t get back with his wife, but he’s determined to keep moving forward with God’s help. He did start going to church and he has also begun his new marketing business from his home office.

“One of the things that I like to tell people who are struggling with an addiction to pornography, or just about any other thing in their life, is that it’s really true that there’s nothing you could do that would change the fact that God loves you and wants to redeem you,” says Donny. “It’s kind of like a parent who is watching their toddler learn to walk. And the toddler might fall down several times a day, but there’s never a good parent that ever says, ‘this walking thing isn’t for you. You should probably stay down there on the floor.’ But yet, some of us want to think that God’s that way and that our sin separates us from Him to such an extreme that He would never redeem us. But that’s not true. There’s nothing that we could do that would change the fact that when we turn to Him, and we ask Him to help us stand back up, He’s right there, willing to pick us up.”

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