I spent 40 years building a perfect life. God dismantled it in a Wednesday morning. Let’s get uncomfortably honest about faith after the facade falls.

You’re exhausted, aren’t you?

Not from the work. From the “performing”. From the Sunday smile that doesn’t match the Saturday night panic. From white-knuckling your way through small group, hoping no one asks how you’re *really* doing. From the relentless, 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 15 years looking biblical and never once encounter God.

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 my gay identity very young, and it had taken its toll. I was a perfectly “functioning junkie”. I had become a fabulous zombie that numbed with drugs what the sex couldn’t distract me from. Relationships that were 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, maybe I could out-perform the shame.

You can’t.

The Thing You Worship Becomes Your Savior or Your Prison

By the time I hit 40, 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, very 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 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 restored her so completely that she was now the Pastor of her father’s church after his death.

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 been a shock to 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 was so rebellious and I don’t deserve your love. 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 messes with me: The Sex addiction that had owned me for 30 years? The proud, born this way I had thoughts about my attractions and my identity They just… weren’t there anymore. The mental loop, the gravitational pull toward self-destruction. Gone. Not because I finally got strong enough to self help my way to freedom. But because something *stronger* 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 sex addiction. God dismantled it. 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 instantly 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 walk 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 amazingly messy, incredibly difficult, and absolutely beautiful undertaking of my life. I am learning (so often clumsily) to let go of who I was, to forgive what was, to heal from what broke me, and 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’s will, but because I didn’t want to have to admit to someone at church that I had “failed” a time of corporate petition. Two months ago I had a full-blown panic attack because I couldn’t control myself 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.

What This Space Is (And Isn’t)

This space; All. New. Things. is my journal from that demolition site. It’s my ongoing documentation of what happens when you stop staging your life and start actually living it.

It’s not a blueprint. It’s not “5 Steps to Freedom” or “How I Overcame Addiction and So Can You.” It’s not going to tell you to just pray more, try harder, or get your act together. That’s the performance gospel, and it’s a lie that keeps you trapped.

This is for the burnt-out, the exhausted, the secretly drowning. For anyone who’s tired of looking the part and ready to admit they don’t have it together. For anyone who knows what it’s like to sit in church and feel like a fraud. For the deconstructing believer, the brokenhearted, and the wandering soul who’s really pretty lost and tired of pretending.

If you’ve spent years behavior-modifying yourself until you look biblical on Instagram but feel like a shell behind closed doors, you’re not alone.

If you’re hitting a wall of exhaustion from performing “good Christian” and wondering if this is really all there is, there’s more.

If you know the moment of collision but need a companion for the long walk home, that’s what this is.

Your story isn’t over. But maybe it’s time to stop directing it.

This is All. New. Things.

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***Fair warning: This gets messy before it gets beautiful. But I’ll be honest with you the whole way through. Because the only thing worse than admitting you’re broken is pretending you’re not.