Drafted: Honor Bound

This post is part of the “Drafted” series —
reflections on how spiritual performance shaped my faith, identity, and sense of purpose.

In Called for Life, I wrote to my 17-year-old self with the compassion and clarity I didn’t have back then.

Now, I’ve arrived at the place that calling led me:
The Honor Academy.
Where “honor” wasn’t just expected — it was required.
And belonging came at the cost of becoming.

They told us we were called to live lives of honor.
But honor wasn’t always about the heart.
It became a performance. A pursuit.
I curated holiness so well, even I didn’t see myself slipping beneath it.

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I arrived at the Honor Academy with more reverence than reason.
I’d waited years for this.
I fundraised, fasted, prayed.
I had practiced surrender like a discipline and worn “calling” like a badge.
This was the place I believed God was saving me for.
The final step in the long obedience of making my life matter.

They didn’t call it orientation.
They called it The Gauntlet.

And honestly, it lived up to the name.
We were up before the sun for “corporate exercise” on the Sports Courts.
Die to self was the mantra.

I had surrendered everything (and done it well).
But this was the one place where surrender didn’t come easy.
Despite my emotional and spiritual discipline, I had always struggled with physical fitness.
It felt like the one part of me that refused to be sanctified.

🧠 In high-control environments, body-based shame is often spiritualized. Struggling physically can be internalized as moral failure, reinforcing the belief that discipline = holiness.

To put it in perspective: I was in JROTC all four years of high school.
I earned nearly every ribbon they offered
Even the meritorious achievement ribbon that hadn’t been awarded in nearly a decade.
The one ribbon I never received?
Physical Fitness.
No matter how hard I tried, I could never complete the 1.5-mile run in the allotted time.

I had been driven to achieve back then.
But something shifted the summer before I arrived in Garden Valley.
I knew part of The Gauntlet included hiking Pike’s Peak.
It was a rite of passage.
But before you could hike it, you had to pass a fitness test.

So I trained.
Not out of pride, but out of desperation.
A sacred kind of striving.
I needed to prove I belonged in the world I believed I had been called to.

And I failed.
I didn’t pass the test.

When 98% of the interns loaded onto the same buses that had carried me to summer mission trips year after year — and headed off toward the mountain — I stayed behind.
This was one of the first loose threads in the tapestry I’d woven of who I was supposed to be.

Why would God call me, but not equip me?
Why would He make my body this way?
Why wasn’t I disciplined enough? Holy enough? Small enough?

There was a small group of us who didn’t make the cut.
Left behind
(Insert rapture humor here. We did.)

While most of the interns were off conquering mountains and bonding on buses, we were given a different assignment:
Cleaning.
Not just any cleaning: dorm bathroom cleaning.

As if the humiliation, devastation, and confusion of not being good enough wasn’t traumatizing enough, scrubbing toilets made it feel like punishment.
Like I was being disciplined — not for disobedience, but for the limitations of my body.

🧠 When performance is tied to spiritual worth, any failure becomes internalized as evidence of moral inferiority. In this framework, correction isn’t just behavioral — it feels personal, even divine.

I had trained. I had prayed. I had believed.
But none of that mattered when it came to the stopwatch.

In a place where spiritual achievement was everything, I couldn’t help but wonder what this failure said about me.
Not just as an intern,
but as a disciple.

This moment didn’t break me, not outwardly.
But it lodged itself in me — sharp and silent —
a grain of sand to the oyster.
It didn’t go away, no matter how much I tried to scrub it down with obedience.

---

The chosen ones returned from their mountain-top adventure — sore, but spiritually glowing.
We clapped for them. We nodded at their stories.
And those of us who had been left behind?
We gathered whatever good spirits we’d managed to muster,
and walked straight into The Week of the Ring.

It was supposed to be sacred.
The symbolic start of our intern year.
A commitment. A covenant. A visible reminder that we were set apart.
The Honor Ring wasn’t just jewelry. It was identity.

We sat through hours of teaching about what it meant to wear it.
To carry yourself with integrity.
To rise above.
To lead by example.

Accountability was emphasized again and again.
It felt like orientation for some kind of spiritual hall monitor program.

They said iron sharpens iron.
They said we were our brother’s keeper.
That we were responsible for the holiness of those in our small groups.

And while I knew Scripture warned against pointing out the speck in someone else’s eye while ignoring the plank in my own…
I was also pretty confident I was seeing 20/20.

In retrospect, I can see now why I clung to it so tightly.
I was still suffocating under the weight of my body’s failure.
Judgment, cloaked in the language of accountability,
felt like a first breath.
It gave me something to exhale that wasn’t shame.

🧠 In systems where moral purity is equated with spiritual value, judgment becomes a currency of worth. Policing others becomes a way to regulate your own unworthiness — often without realizing it.

---

We made it through The Gauntlet and The Week of the Ring.
It was finally time for the Ring Banquet.

I dressed in my navy blazer with the hand-sewn Honor Academy patch, paired with a khaki skirt — the required uniform, but also a kind of bridal attire.
To me, it was just as symbolic as a wedding dress.

I wasn’t marrying a person.
I was marrying a calling.
A lifestyle.
A standard.

This wasn’t just a commitment.
It was a covenant.

I had spent years longing to be chosen.
Now, I was standing in a banquet hall, surrounded by other interns who had also survived the tests, the tears, the training.
And when I received my ring,
I didn’t feel pride.
I felt relief.
Like I had finally earned my place at the table.

I slipped the ring on my finger,
nestled right next to the True Love Waits band I’d worn since that Christmas when I was ten.

It felt fitting, really.
Two promises.
Two performances.
Both rooted in the belief that my worth was measured by my ability to wait, to strive, to withhold.

I had pledged purity before I even understood desire.
And now I was pledging honor — without fully understanding the cost.

The room erupted in applause.
Leaders smiled.
We posed for photos with our rings held high like trophies.
Like proof that we had been chosen. That we belonged.

In that moment, I was honored — proud, even — to be bound to this ministry.
To this calling.
To the story I had worked so hard to step into.

It didn’t feel like a burden.
Not yet.

🧠 This is a moment of fused identity. When individuals are praised for their performance of purity or sacrifice, it reinforces the belief that love and belonging are earned. Compliance becomes not just behavior — but identity.

This ring wasn’t like the forgiveness I’d been told flowed freely.
It didn’t promise grace.
It promised consequences.
It reminded me that belonging could be lost.
And if I stayed too human for too long,
I wouldn’t be worthy to wear it anymore.

---

I wore the ring with pride.
With purpose.
With everything in me that still believed I could become exactly who they said I was supposed to be.

And I did.
I prayed louder.
Worked harder.
Held others accountable with the same rigid grace I had turned on myself.
I smiled through the ache.
I journaled through the doubt.
I called it surrender.

The ring stayed on.
And I wore it like it meant everything —
because, at the time, it did.

If something had started to shift beneath the surface,
I didn’t feel it.
I didn’t question it.
I didn’t even know I could.

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🪑 From the Therapist’s Chair

When we’re young and eager to belong, we don’t always realize the cost of our own becoming.
We don’t call it trauma — we call it transformation.
We don’t call it control — we call it calling.
We don’t call it self-erasure — we call it surrender.

The ring wasn’t just a symbol. It was a system.
A way of rewarding compliance and dressing it up as character.
But what happens when you perform so well… you forget there was ever a “you” beneath it?

🧠 As a therapist, I now understand how high-control environments use external rituals to instill internal loyalty.
And how difficult it can be to separate your sense of self from the system that first taught you who you had to be.

If you’ve ever traded authenticity for acceptance…
If you’ve ever called obedience your identity…
If you’ve ever mistaken being chosen for being controlled…
You’re not alone.

There is nothing wrong with you for wanting to belong.
But you deserve to belong without having to disappear.

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👀 Coming Up Next: Drafted – A Living Sacrifice

After the Ring Banquet came the real work.
Ministry placements (what they called our “jobs”) were assigned like callings.
You didn’t just clock in.
You carried it like a cross.

There was a hierarchy to it — an unspoken scale of holiness and honor.
Some interns got to lead from a platform.
Others folded t-shirts or scrubbed toilets.
But no one was exempt from the weight of spiritual warfare.

They didn’t let the daily feel mundane.
Every moment was charged with meaning.
Every task, a test.
Even your labor had to be worship.

We were taught to be living sacrifices.
But no one warned us what it meant to burn slowly.
To give and give and still not be enough.
To carry the cross of someone else’s expectations.

📖 Read next: Drafted: A Living Sacrifice (coming soon)