I remember the exact moment I realized I was lying in church.
Not intentionally. Not maliciously. But lying nonetheless—standing in a circle of believers, nodding along as someone shared their testimony of consistent spiritual growth, knowing my own story looked nothing like theirs. When it was my turn to share, I offered the edited version: the highlights, the victories, the forward progress. What I didn't mention was the argument I'd had with my wife that morning. The prayer life that had felt dry for months. The sin pattern I thought I'd conquered years ago that had quietly reasserted itself.
I was performing discipleship rather than practicing it.
The testimony format we've inherited is beautiful in its way—a three-act narrative where Act One shows our life before Christ, Act Two captures our conversion, and Act Three celebrates our transformed life. It's compelling. It's evangelistic. And it's deeply incomplete.
Because Act Three never actually ends. And it's rarely as triumphant as we make it sound.
What gets edited out of the Sunday morning spotlight is everything that comes after the conversion moment: the confusion, the backsliding, the days when you wonder if any of it was real. The moments when you choose poorly despite knowing better. The patterns you thought were broken that suddenly return with surprising strength.
We've been handed an idealized trajectory—a clean line moving steadily upward and to the right, where time equals increasing spiritual maturity. Church culture reinforces this at every turn. We celebrate "radical transformation" stories. We create programs with clearly defined stages: seeker, new believer, growing Christian, mature disciple, leader. We teach that sanctification is a process, but we imply it's a predictable process that moves in a single direction if you follow the right steps.
The language betrays our assumptions. We talk about "growing in faith" (always upward), "moving forward" (always ahead), "falling away" (the only recognized regression), and "backsliding" (a failure state, not a normal occurrence). This idealized trajectory becomes both our aspiration and our accusation.
I've spent enough years in church to understand where this myth comes from. Paul's Damascus Road experience became our template—a dramatic before and after that works beautifully for evangelism but fails miserably for discipleship. We've absorbed the self-help culture's promise of continuous improvement and measurable outcomes. We're uncomfortable with paradox, so we flatten the complexity of spiritual formation into a simple upward climb.
And we only give the microphone to people who've "overcome." The person still struggling stays in their seat. This survivorship bias makes us believe success is the norm and our struggles are the exception.
The cost of this myth is devastating.
It breeds shame when our experience doesn't match the expected trajectory. We assume something is wrong with us—we're not praying enough, not reading Scripture enough, not surrendering enough. It creates comparison, turning us into judges of spiritual progress. It pressures us into performance, saying the right things in small group and cultivating the appearance of maturity because admitting we're stuck feels like admitting failure.
Most damaging, it isolates us. When everyone is pretending to move steadily forward, no one can admit they're struggling. We sit surrounded by people, all of us hiding our reality, all of us assuming we're the only one who doesn't have it together.
Here's what every honest disciple knows but rarely says out loud: some weeks you feel close to God, other weeks you don't. Some seasons you're eager to pray, other seasons it feels like drudgery. You have the same argument with your spouse that you had five years ago. You fall into the same sin pattern you thought you'd conquered. You experience breakthrough followed by breakdown.
This isn't failure. This is reality.
The problem isn't your experience—the problem is the myth telling you your experience is abnormal.
What if the wobble isn't a bug in the system? What if it's a feature? What if the course corrections, the mistakes, the drift and recovery—what if all of that is exactly how discipleship works?
I stopped performing that day. Not because I had it all figured out, but because I finally understood that the pretending was killing something inside me. The wobble, I was beginning to discover, might be the most honest thing about my faith.
