Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84Plough Quarterly • Spring 2016 61 Matthew Loftus lives with his wife and two children in South Sudan, where he teaches and practices family medicine. Visit matthewandmaggie.org to learn more about his work. Sandtown was known for. (It became even more well-known for these ills in April 2015 when Freddie Gray suffered his fatal injury here.) I helped to start a community mental health program with the church while also participat- ing in other ministries. After finishing my residency, I found a great job at a community health center that allowed me to balance voca- tion, family, and advocacy. Our fellow church members, poor as they were, joined forces to bless the even less fortunate by sending us overseas to a maternity and pediatric hospital in South Sudan. In my work in Sandtown, it felt good to be helping others as I had always wanted to do, loving my neighbor in word and deed. Yet I felt unable to help myself. I remember the day my hands started to shake as I walked the two blocks from my main office to our satellite location. This other office, I knew, had unfiltered, unprotected wireless internet, and simply thinking about the ease with which I could access pornography there made me feel nauseated. I reached in my pocket for my phone to call a friend and community leader, Elder, as he is known in Sandtown. “I just need you to pray for me. I’m feeling really tempted,” I said. “I will pray for you, brother, but I want you to think about our community,” he said, as he nearly always did when I called. Like many other young do-gooders, I began my ministry work full of idealism and quickly met the harsh realities of inner-city life. The church that Elder started several decades ago works closely with mine, guided by the same principles of Christian community develop- ment pioneered by the civil rights hero John Perkins, and we often shared our frustrations about addressing the issues that have made Sandtown infamous. Helping people here isn’t easy, and for a long time, “thinking about the community” meant thinking about my failures and shortcomings. Sure, I’d had some successes over the years, but I’d also learned how per- sistent the stigma and shame of mental health issues could be in a community like ours, and how devious Satan could be in destroying the lives of the people I was investing in. The struggle I was experiencing the day I called Elder mirrored what I’d seen my neighbors go through in dealing with their own mental illness and addictions. I found myself making the same excuses about getting help I’d heard them make, yet I was still faster to recognize their pride than my own. All the same, I worried that neither they nor I could ever get better, and I felt ashamed that my desire to love my neighbor did not extend to the people on my computer screen, or to my wife, to whom I had vowed to be faithful. While I had struggled with pornography since I was a teenager, in the course of my time in Sandtown, I’d begun using it more and more – a response to my anxiety about how much good I was really doing in my efforts to help the neighborhood. In effect, I was asking pornography to cover up my inability to be the perfect Christian social justice advocate. Though I knew I had a problem, to myself I justified my half-heartedness in the battle for purity by holding up the good works I was doing (or trying to do). My addiction held such power over me that I had grown accustomed to hiding the depth of my brokenness even from myself. Like most people, I far preferred to offer help than receive it. But my decision to reach out to