"I need to talk with you and Dad."

Those eight words can strike fear into a mother's heart. They certainly frightened me when my 18-year-old son, Brandon,* said them during a typically hurried morning.

My husband, Steve, set down his briefcase, and I left our half-prepared lunches on the kitchen counter. We followed our son into our bedroom, closed the door, and settled down onto the bed. Brandon stood in front of us like a condemned man, shifting from one foot to the other. What could be so difficult to say?

With a quivering voice, he told us he had an unconfessed sin in his life. Unconfessed sin? Brandon, our sweet Christian son who had never given us trouble? Finally the dam broke, and a flood of pain poured from our child's heart with one simple sentence.

"I'm addicted to pornography."

Steve and I just stared at our son. I had misunderstood him, of course. I waited for the words to reassemble themselves into the right sequence, into something that would make sense. Brandon continued talking, but I did not comprehend anything else for a couple of minutes. I was still working on that phrase "addicted to pornography." It just had no meaning, at least not in connection with my son.

Eventually more words began to cut through my mental fog. Brandon was explaining how he had stumbled onto a cable station, a pornography channel that was supposed to be blocked by the cable company.

Brandon said that since then he had watched the channel on many occasions and that, although he had tried over and over to stop, he felt drawn back to it each time. He began crying, saying again that he was addicted and thought he needed help.

Steve and I roused from our dazed state. I pulled our weeping son down onto the bed between us, and we both hugged him, reassuring Brandon that we loved him and that nothing would ever change that.

Questions flooded our minds. Steve asked, "How long has this been going on?"

Brandon thought for a moment and admitted, "Probably about a year."

I asked what had prompted him to tell us about this now. He replied that about three weeks earlier a man named Bill Berry, who had been addicted to pornography for more than 20 years, had spoken at a chapel service at the Christian college Brandon attends.

"His story scared me, Mom. He told us the things he had done to act out what he had seen in the pornography he looked at, and I thought, Is this where I'm headed?" Our son could not get this man's testimony out of his mind and became convinced that he, too, was addicted.

After a few more questions and many more hugs and reassurances, Brandon dried his tears and said he needed to leave for school. He walked out the door, leaving Steve and me sitting in the half light, staring numbly at each other. After Steve left for work, I tried to gather my thoughts for a busy day of homeschooling with our younger son.

I sleepwalked through the morning's lessons with poor Daniel, our 14-year-old, who must have wondered where his mother's mind was. After lunch, with Daniel safely busy practicing piano, I locked myself into the bedroom, turned on the television, and tuned to the channel Brandon had stumbled onto a year earlier. For the first couple of minutes, all I could see were wavy lines with an occasional blue screen.

Then the picture became clear for several seconds. I had seen sex scenes in R-rated movies before, but nothing like what I was now watching. It did not even pretend to be a movie. There was no dialogue, just soft, sensual background music. There was one purpose to this program: to show nude bodies in every imaginable sexual act.

I made myself watch for another ten minutes, though the program distressed me. I wanted to know what kind of images had entered my son's mind. In those ten minutes I saw sexual acts that, in my sheltered existence, I had never dreamed of. The women in these videos were not stunning beauties, either, and I was perplexed at the attraction they held for men. I wondered how they could degrade themselves in such a way. What had happened to them that they had so little self-respect? I turned off the TV in disgust. It was two weeks before I could stop recalling the images on that screen, and I was not an 18-year-old male with testosterone surging through my veins.