In today’s modern world, we encounter countless temptations and distractions. This raises the question: How can we remain devoted to God in such an environment?

After confessing my sins, I was deeply moved by the priest’s blessing to go forth and free myself from past transgressions. However, several questions lingered:

- How do I avoid running into sin in this digital age?
- If I see sexual content online randomly on a normal site, am I sinning?
- If I do see that content, is it my mindset that makes it a sin or act of viewing it?
- How can I change my mind that was tempted before to now not recognize these temptations?
- How do I continue to devote myself to God when my mind wanders?
- What can't be forgiven when there is guilt but still encountering the temptations?

These questions have weighed heavily on my soul because I don’t want to fall back away from God when I’m trying to get closer to Him. I’m actively doing daily meditations and self-reflections with the daily readings on the free AMEN APP offered by The Augustine Institute. I’ve even started this before I finally decided to go to confession. I believe that I’m working towards a way to be closer to God, but I’m uncertain at times because I do keep noticing things that have led me into temptation before.

The biggest thing I’ve struggled with is how I view the opposite sex and how, if I find that person attractive, how to not think in a way to sexualize them or be tempted to think of that person in a sexual way. I don’t have a solution to this matter and am unsure of what direction to follow. For now, I believe there shouldn’t be a problem with finding someone of the opposite sex attractive, but try and not to fantasize a fictional relationship that leads to sexual acts. My best counter has just been to see a more wholesome future and the best way of getting to know that person in our pursuit of God.

Being someone who uses a computer every day for work, it’s hard to move away from these encounters when searching the web. With the use of web cookies, the internet tries to orient the ads we see and the content we consume, but some sites will accept any ads that will pay them, and those could take over the content. I’ve been lucky recently to be looking up a lot of different things about God and listening to podcasts from Ascension, Pint with Aquinas, etc… They have been bringing me closer to the lord through their different actions through guests or discussions on the spiritual life. My Facebook page has started to show more Catholic or Christian-themed ads, rather than the opposite sex in revealing clothes or sexual actions. This is weird because, at least to my knowledge, I’ve not been consuming any content that revolved around that content. I then took some time to see what ads were playing on the sites I visited and noticed that even news sites have ads that are given for anyone because a company pays to put their ad content on the page rather than using cookies of types of content read.

Getting back to the question at hand: How can we remain devoted to God in such an environment? I believe we can reach this by putting ourselves into an environment and mindset that works towards the pursuit of God. Even if, temptations that can lead us to sins are encountered in our lives, our faith in the Lord will help us overcome all evil.