Drafted: Counting Conversions and Carrying the Cost

I didn’t just count conversions—I started using them to count my value.

Drafted is the story of a girl who was told she was called, chosen, and set apart — before she even knew who she was. It’s about the rush of revival weekends, the pressure to be holy, and the slow, silent trade of identity for belonging. I grew up on the frontlines of teenage Christianity, armed with a Bible, a purity ring, and a deep need to be enough. If you’ve watched Shiny Happy People, you’ve seen part of the story. But there are thousands of high-control Christian environments that shaped a generation — and I was in one of them. Teen Mania Ministries. Acquire the Fire. The Honor Academy. Follow me as I unravel what it looked like from the inside: faith on fire, identity on the line, and a girl who thought she was saving the world — but was slowly losing herself.
This is my reckoning with the years I spent disappearing into goodness — the story of how I lost my humanity in the name of holiness, and the slow, sacred work of reclaiming it.

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📖 This picks up after Part Three — Boots on Holy Ground — where belief became assignment. But the story begins long before Garden Valley. In From Altar Calls to Enlistment, I wrote about how a child’s ache to belong was baptized as calling. Then, in Signed, Sealed, Sent, I explored what it meant to disappear in the name of devotion, convinced that being willing to go made me worthy of love. If the altar was where I enlisted, and on-campus training was where I gave myself to the mission without hesitation, then this was where I was sent to prove it.

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The bus ride was long, and we were exhausted—but spiritually charged. Most of us were running on little sleep, kept awake by adrenaline, anticipation, and the quiet hum of worship music leaking from someone’s headphones. Conversations drifted easily between childhood memories and weighty talks about sin, salvation, and spiritual warfare. That contrast—innocent stories pressed up against eternal stakes—captured the blurred lines we lived in: not quite adults, but already expected to carry the weight of ministry.

🧠 Cognitive dissonance meets premature spiritual responsibility. Developmentally, we were still forming identities—but the stakes we were handed were already eternal.

Going through customs was a surreal experience. Everything I’d been taught up to that point had me convinced that simply possessing a Bible in another country could get me arrested—or worse. I clutched mine like contraband, heart pounding as if I were smuggling something dangerous rather than carrying the same book that sat on every shelf back home. The fear wasn’t rational, but it had been planted deep: to be a missionary was to be persecuted. And even before we stepped off the bus, I was already bracing for battle.

🧠 Classic fear-conditioning. When identity formation is paired with persecution narratives, even neutral environments feel hostile.

Once we cleared customs, everything hit at once—the heat, the noise, the unfamiliar signs, the sudden realization that we were here. The months of training, fundraising, and prayer were behind us. Now it was time to do the work. We stepped off the bus with soundboxes and salvation cards, ready to bring hope to strangers. Armed with skits, testimonies, and the conviction that we were world changers, we believed what we carried could shift eternity.

🧠 Spiritual grandiosity isn’t always narcissism—it’s often a trauma-adjacent coping strategy for feeling small and powerless.

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🔄 From Obedience to Addiction: The Cycle of Spiritual Validation

The days were full, from morning to night. Our schedule was packed with pre-planned ministry opportunities—each one designed to make an impact. I remember partnering with a local church hosting their version of vacation Bible school. We had come to bring the good news of salvation. But the children we met were already so full of joy. I remember being perplexed. How could they be so joyful? The church was made of cinderblock, the floor was dirt, and the poverty was evident. Somehow, their joy didn’t match the script I’d been handed about need and brokenness. And for the first time, I quietly wondered—who was really bringing good news to whom?

I could barely acknowledge that thought for more than a few seconds, and I buried it deep. I didn’t have the language—or the permission—to question the narrative we’d been handed. So I smiled, I served, I performed. I tucked the discomfort away like a loose thread, weaving it in so carefully I almost forgot it was there. The peace—and the certainty—of stitching myself into the story I’d been taught felt safer than tugging at what might unravel it.

🧠 When lived experience contradicts indoctrinated frameworks, the nervous system often suppresses discomfort to preserve belonging. Suppression for survival. When the cost of curiosity is belonging, performance becomes protection.

Like a child bringing a fingerpainting to their parents, I couldn’t wait to tell everyone back home how many lives had been saved from hell. I was proud—genuinely proud—of what we’d done. I wanted my youth leaders, my church, and maybe even God to hang it on the fridge. To say, “Well done.” I didn’t realize I was still chasing approval, just in a language that sounded spiritual.

🧠 Spiritual validation often becomes a proxy for emotional attunement. Especially in high-control systems, worth is earned through impact.

In a blink, it was over. It felt like I had spent forever carefully preparing a meal—only to watch it be devoured in seconds. I was left with a fleeting sense of fullness I couldn’t hold onto, and a mess I didn’t quite know how to clean up. The adrenaline had faded, but the craving for that sensational feeling of purpose only grew stronger. To go from standing in the gap between heaven and hell to sitting in algebra class was emotional whiplash.

🧠 Post-high crash: the brain registers the shift from spiritual intensity to routine as loss. Grief without language becomes longing.

I had just lived a story worth telling—one that made me feel chosen, powerful, and useful. But back home, everything felt painfully ordinary. I had been gone for two life-changing weeks, but life carried on as if nothing had happened. I was still performing—trying to hold on to the fire—but now painfully aware that my passion was being perceived as too much. The lights were off, the stage was gone, and I didn’t know who I was without the mission.

What I didn’t understand then was that I had become addicted—not to Jesus, but to the high of being needed. The rush of being righteous. The emotional and spiritual intensity of believing I was part of something eternal. And like any addiction, the comedown was brutal. The ordinary felt suffocating. The silence, unbearable. And I would do almost anything to feel that rush again.

🧠 Purpose-driven dopamine: the cycle of spiritual performance mimics addiction pathways. Withdrawal looks like restlessness, guilt, and numbness.

The hunger for purpose kept me moving, producing, performing. But the more I chased it, the more disconnected I became—from people, from presence, and from the parts of me that didn’t perform well.

🧠 Chronic overfunctioning is a trauma-adapted attachment strategy. Disconnection is the cost of survival-driven excellence.

I came home changed. I’m not sure if it was because I had drawn closer to God—or gotten further from myself. I had learned how to disappear in the name of calling. How to crave intensity over intimacy.

I would spend the next two years chasing every opportunity to go—
because when your identity is built on being sent, staying still feels like failure.

🧠 Rest felt like disobedience. Stillness felt like abandonment. And selfhood, once surrendered, became nearly impossible to reclaim.

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🪑 From the Therapist’s Chair

There’s a quiet kind of ache that forms when a young person is praised for disappearing.

What looks like passion is often performance. What gets labeled as calling can sometimes be a trauma response in theological disguise. And what feels like spiritual formation may, in time, reveal itself as the slow unraveling of identity… thread by obedient thread.

From the outside, it all looked good: purpose, obedience, service. But behind the cheesy Christian T-shirts, WWJD bracelets, and carefully counted conversions was a teenager whose nervous system was cycling through adrenaline highs and emotional crashes—confusing intensity with intimacy, and results with worth. I was taught to bring the good news. But beneath the mission was another message: that my worth lived in my willingness. That intensity meant connection. That impact meant approval.

When we tie a young person’s value to their usefulness, we don’t just shape their beliefs—we wire their bodies to confuse adrenaline with anointing, and output with identity.

And when the lights go out, when the crowd is gone, when the hands stop raising—we call it a comedown.
But really, it’s a reckoning.

Healing often starts in the silence.
Not with another call to “go,”
but with permission to stay.
To be.
To exist without earning it.

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👉 Coming up next:
The mission ended, but the hunger to matter refused to quiet down. I came home without a passport stamp or a stage, but I was still burning with nowhere to place the fire. The place I returned to didn’t recognize who I had become. And the more I tried to hold on to the purpose I had found, the more out of place I felt in the world I came back to.

📖 Read the next post: Drafted: Foreign on Familiar Ground