I spent 30 years building a perfect life. God dismantled it in a Wednesday morning.
You’re exhausted, aren’t you?
Not from the work. From the performance. From the Sunday smile that doesn’t match the Saturday night panic. From white-knuckling through small group, hoping no one asks how you’re really doing. From the bone-deep fatigue of looking like you have it together when you’re barely holding the seams.
I know. Because for decades, I was the lead actor in my own salvation story. And I was damn good at it.
I grew up in church. Four, sometimes five times a week. I learned the choreography early: hands raised at the right moment, head bowed during prayer, Bible underlined in all the correct places. I could perform “godly” in my sleep.
But here’s what nobody tells you about performance Christianity: You can spend fifteen years looking biblical and never once encounter God.
By the time I was 40, I didn’t just have a pornography problem. I had a me problem. Sexual addiction that started in adolescence and calcified into adulthood. I had embraced a gay identity very young, and it had taken its toll. I was a perfectly functioning junkie. A well dressed, well groomed zombie. Numbing with drugs what the sex couldn’t distract me from. Relationships became transactions, not connections.
But the real addiction, the one underneath all the others, was this: I believed if I could just get the staging right, I could fix myself. If I looked independent enough, successful enough, spiritual enough then maybe I could out-perform the shame.
You can’t.
The thing you worship becomes either your savior or your prison.
Something that no one tells you when you are young and you embrace the “my body, my choice” lifestyle is that as with any good thing, too much of a good thing is not healthy. Sex wasn’t pleasure anymore. It was the only thing that existed. My entire life had narrowed to a single obsessive cycle: getting high and hooking up. Again. And again. And again. The thing I’d placed above God for decades had become my warden. I was miserable. Depressed. And for the first time in my life, I couldn’t pretend my way out of it.
It was a Wednesday morning. 10 a.m. I was on my living room floor with my laptop, doing what I’d been doing for weeks: doom-scrolling YouTube, half-looking for distraction, half-avoiding the collapse I could feel coming.
And there she was again. This loud, theologically sound, unapologetic woman preacher who kept showing up in my feed. I still don’t know how she got there, besides God. She’d been appearing in my playlist for weeks, and I’d been skipping her every time. But that morning, something made me stop. Maybe exhaustion. Maybe curiosity. Maybe the Holy Spirit finally wore me down.
I clicked play.
She didn’t look like your usual “woman of God.” You know the type; the ones who seem to think holiness requires frumpiness, as if the Spirit and style can’t coexist. But she wasn’t performing humble pastor lady either. She was just… herself. Fully, unapologetically herself. And I could tell, even through a screen, that this was the person God had created her to be. Not a costume. Not a religious mask. Just her. If God could use someone
Something in me stirred. Something that had been dead for a very long time.
She talked about growing up as a pastor’s kid. Three failed marriages. Alcoholism. Losing everything. And then encountering God. Not the God she’d been taught about. Not the distant, disappointed deity she’d stopped performing for. But a God who had pursued her through every bad decision, every rock bottom, every moment she’d turned her back on Him. She talked about accepting responsibility for her life. How she had laid hands on herself and prayed her own deliverance prayers. About letting God’s love heal her instead of trying to heal herself. About how He had fully restored her and called her to become the pastor of her father’s church.
I wept.
Not the polite, spiritual tears you cry during a worship song. The ugly kind. The kind that come from somewhere you didn’t know was still alive.
Because suddenly I knew. God had been there the whole time. He’d watched me make bad decision after bad decision, and He’d loved me anyway. He knew I was going to do all of it. I wasn’t a surprise to Him. My addiction, my pride, my decades of rebellion. None of it had shocked a God who’d been chasing me through all of it.
I cried out to Him right there on my living room floor.
“God, I’m sorry. I was so full of pride. I’ve made such a mess of my life. I was so wrong and I don’t deserve your love. But I need You.”
And as I cried out in honest brokenness, not performance, not staging, just raw desperation, I felt the Holy Spirit there with me. I knew Jesus was there, with open arms, ready to cleanse me.
And I became a Christian. For real this time.
When freedom interrupts you.
Here’s the part that still undoes me: The sex addiction that had controlled me for thirty years? The proud, born-this-way thoughts I had about my attractions and my identity? He delivered me instantly. The mental loop, the gravitational pull toward self-destruction was gone. Not because I finally got strong enough to self-help my way to freedom. But because something stronger than the lies I believed had walked into the room and rendered my whole performance obsolete.
I know how that sounds. Like toxic positivity. Like the exact “name it and claim it” garbage I’m supposed to be against. But here’s the distinction: I didn’t will my way to freedom. Freedom interrupted me.
I didn’t overcome the addiction. God dismantled it. I experienced what it’s like to have your hardened heart replaced by a new, resurrected Holy Spirit infused one. Supernaturally. Instantly. In a way that had nothing to do with my effort and everything to do with His power.
Was I instantly perfect? Hell no.
But for the first time since I was a child, I was completely free.
The messy middle nobody warns you about.
Here’s the part they don’t put in the testimony videos: The miracle was instant. The walking you do out of your wreckage is painfully slow. And that gap between instant deliverance and slow sanctification? That’s where most of us live. That’s the messy middle nobody warns you about.
Walking out this radical salvation has been the most beautifully messy, incredibly difficult, and absolutely transformative undertaking of my life. I am learning to let go of who I was, to forgive and heal from what broke me, to trust a God who is far better than the one I’d staged in my mind.
I still autopilot back into performance mode. Last week I caught myself calling a diet fasting; not because I was using it to draw closer to God, but because I didn’t want to admit to someone at church that I’d “failed” a time of corporate petition. Two months ago I had a full-blown panic attack because I lost control and blew up at my ex. An unwanted outcome I’d been trying to stage-manage for weeks. The old patterns don’t always die. They just get more subtle.
But at least now I can see them.
I’m learning that the opposite of performance isn’t chaos. It’s trust. And trust feels terrifyingly close to free-fall when you’ve spent your whole life gripping the guardrails.
My life now is a process of excavation. Stripping away the wallpaper of a false identity, the plaster of performance, the carefully arranged furniture of other people’s expectations—to find the solid, immovable foundation Christ laid underneath.
It’s uncomfortable. It’s loud with the sound of deconstruction.
And for the first time, it’s very, very real.
