Sunday morning, I knew exactly who I was supposed to be.
I'd walk into the sanctuary with my Bible, practiced smile firmly in place, ready to play my part. I'd greet people warmly, sing the songs, nod knowingly during the sermon, and offer thoughtful insights in small group discussions with relevant Scripture references. I knew my lines. I played my part well.
Monday morning, I wasn't sure who I was at all.
The alarm would go off and I'd ignore it. I'd snap at my kids over breakfast. I'd choose comfort over obedience, convenience over conviction. The distance between these two versions of myself—the Sunday version and the Monday version—felt like a chasm I couldn't bridge. And the most terrifying part? I suspected I wasn't alone, yet everyone around me seemed to be maintaining the performance flawlessly.
Church services are carefully curated experiences. The music builds to an emotional crescendo. The sermon offers clear principles and actionable steps. The testimonies showcase transformation. Everything is polished, timed, and designed to create a space where everything looks resolved. People appear joyful, faithful, and together. Problems are presented in past tense: "I was struggling with anger, but God has been working in my life."
Then Monday arrives.
The bills are still due. The marriage is still strained. The anxiety still tightens your chest. The same patterns reassert themselves. Monday's reality doesn't feel like the triumphant "after" photo from Sunday's testimony. It feels messy, complicated, and unresolved. You're left wondering: Is everyone else actually living the victorious Christian life while I'm faking it? Or is everyone else faking it too?
I learned to perform discipleship rather than practice it. I memorized the right answers for small group questions even when I wasn't living them out. I volunteered for visible ministry roles to demonstrate commitment. I used Christian language fluently—talking about "surrendering to God's will" and "walking in obedience"—while my actual daily decisions told a different story.
I became skilled at looking like a disciple without doing the difficult work of becoming one.
This wasn't conscious deception. I was responding to the incentive structure I'd been placed in. Church culture rewards the appearance of spiritual maturity. It celebrates the "got it together" Christian. It gives platform and authority to those who can articulate the faith convincingly. What it doesn't reward—and often subtly punishes—is honest struggle.
I stayed quiet because I was ashamed that I wasn't further along after so many years. I feared judgment, having seen how the community responded to obvious sin or public failure. I told myself I was protecting others from stumbling, protecting the Gospel from my hypocrisy. Mostly, I was just exhausted from trying to explain, tired of well-meaning advice about praying more and trusting more.
But the performance extracted a steep price.
I couldn't grow past problems I wouldn't acknowledge. Living with a significant gap between my public and private self created internal fragmentation—I wasn't one person, I was two. The deepest relationships happen when people meet each other in their actual reality, but I was hiding behind a mask, surrounded by people yet fundamentally alone. The energy I spent managing my image was energy that could have been directed toward actual growth.
Most dangerous of all, the performance started fooling even me. I confused my ability to talk about faith with actually having faith. I mistook my knowledge of spiritual disciplines for actually practicing them.
Then, in the 3 AM darkness, the question I'd been avoiding would surface: If discipleship requires this much performance, this much pretending, this much gap between what I claim and what I experience... is any of it real?
I was terrified that if I stopped performing, if I let people see the Monday reality, I'd discover there was nothing underneath. That I'd been faking it so long I'd forgotten what genuine faith even felt like.
But slowly, I began to consider something life changing: Maybe the performance itself was preventing me from discovering what's real. Maybe the gap existed not because I was failing at discipleship, but because I was trying to practice a version of discipleship that doesn't actually exist.
Maybe the wobble—the drift and correction, the struggle and recovery, the gap between intention and action—wasn't something to hide. Maybe it was the territory where real transformation happens.
Maybe it was time to stop performing the straight line and start navigating the wobble.