There are moments in life when you begin waking up — slowly at first, then all at once — and suddenly you realize just how long you’ve been asleep. Not spiritually dead, not faithless, just… unaware. Living beneath layers you didn’t know you had.
And the strangest part?
You wake up just enough to see how much further there is to go.
That’s where I’ve been living.
And the one practice — the one discipline — that has pushed me further than anything else is the one I avoided most of my life:
Confession.
Not the ritual version.
Not the “say it and move on” version.
I’m talking about honest exposure — the kind that drags the real you out of hiding and forces you to look at the truth you keep tripping over.
The kind that feels like stepping into cold water when you’d rather stay warm and numb.
Awakening Is Lonely — But Not Because You’re Superior
For years, I thought awakening would feel like graduating into some higher spiritual circle — a place where deeper people talked about deeper things. And when the first cracks of clarity opened, I went searching for a mentor, a Samuel, an Elijah… someone further down the path than me.
What I found instead were people who preferred sleep.
Masks.
Layers.
Surface-level answers.
Religious clichés dressed up as revelation.
It left me feeling strangely alone in my thoughts, like I was waking up in a room full of people who didn’t want the lights on.
And honesty — the real kind — can make you feel like you’re standing alone,
not because you’re superior, but because most people are terrified to look that deeply inside themselves.
The Masks We Wear Are Stacked Like an Onion
We talk about the “flesh” like it’s one obstacle.
It’s not.
It’s layers of self-protection, self-deception, ego, shame, and fear.
It’s the instinct to hide what hurts.
To conceal what’s fragile.
To control what feels unpredictable.
We don’t hide because we’re evil.
We hide because we’re wounded.
And wounded people cling to masks the way drowning people cling to driftwood.
Confession began unraveling that in me.
Not because I became righteous —
but because I became willing.
The Awakening of Empathy
One of the surprising parts of waking up is realizing how unawake you used to be.
There was a time when I thought “ministry” belonged to the young — the moldable — the ones with life ahead of them. People with “potential.” People who could still be shaped.
I didn’t see it then, but that thought carried a quiet arrogance — a subtle elitism dressed up as practicality.
It wasn’t cruelty.
It was blindness.
Then I watched Alverta walk into nursing homes with her little hymnal and that cracked, off-key voice — and I watched people I assumed were unreachable start tapping a finger to the rhythm. Faces I thought were “gone” flickered with recognition. Souls I wrote off quietly stirred.
And I realized something painful:
The problem wasn’t that they were unreachable.
It was that I had never truly tried to reach them.
Sympathy keeps people at a distance.
Empathy walks into their room.
And Alverta did that better than any preacher I ever sat under.
She didn’t modify the message; she embodied it.
She carried the Gospel the way Jesus did — entering rooms others avoided, touching people others dismissed, seeing value where others saw inconvenience.
Seeing that peeled back another layer in me.
It exposed a mask I didn’t even know I wore — one that judged who was “worth” reaching and who wasn’t.
Awakening isn’t just seeing your sin.
It’s seeing the value of others in a way you never did before.
And that realization changed me.
Wanting an Engineer, Getting a Field Tech
When I first began waking up, I begged God for someone brilliant, someone advanced — an Elijah, a Samuel, someone who could map out the terrain of the soul like a master engineer.
Instead, God gave me someone practical.
Human.
Steady.
Real.
And it took years to see the mercy in that.
Sometimes you don’t need an engineer to redesign the system — God’s design is already perfect.
You need a field tech who knows how to bring that design into real, broken places — someone who can translate truth into human terms, the way Paul did when he became all things to all people.
That’s what Alverta was.
She didn’t change the message.
She carried it into rooms most of us overlook.
Holiness is practical long before it is mystical.
Duty, Not Destiny
I don’t speak because I’m special.
I speak because silence would be dishonest.
I’m not a prophet.
I’m not anointed.
I’m not elevated.
I’m simply awake enough to know what hiding does to a soul…
and honest enough not to pretend I’m beyond it.
I’m a reporter — nothing more.
I see things about the human heart because I’ve lived them, not because I outran them.
Confession didn’t make me a leader.
It made me responsible.
And responsibility has no glamour.
Just weight.
The Confession That Cracked My Life Open
For much of my life, I lived behind stories — embellished stories, borrowed stories, invented stories.
Not monstrous lies, just… fabrications to make myself seem more interesting, more impressive, more worth listening to.
As a kid, I stole people’s stories and made them mine.
As a salesman, I stole customers’ anecdotes and wore them like a costume.
I wasn’t malicious.
I was insecure.
And over time, the embellishing became habit,
and the habit became identity,
and the identity became a mask I didn’t know how to take off.
When I finally confessed it — truly confessed it — I was humiliated.
But the weight that confession lifted off my shoulders was indescribable.
It broke the spell of self-presentation.
It humbled me.
It freed me.
And you know what?
Being honest about my flaws didn’t repel people.
It attracted them.
Because sincerity is magnetic.
And people always know when you’re full of it.
Years later, I told an old friend about my awakening — that I’d realized I was a compulsive liar growing up — and he laughed and said:
“Oh, we always knew you were full of shit.”
He didn’t say it cruelly.
He said it matter-of-factly — like, you actually thought you were fooling us?
The mask was never fooling anyone but me.
Confession Became My Breakthrough
Here is what I finally understood:
Confession isn’t primarily about admitting wrongdoing.
It’s about exposing what secrecy allowed to rot.
Because you don’t confess isolated actions.
You confess the patterns behind them.
You confess the wounds beneath them.
And here’s the truth:
Confession is humiliating — it has to be. Humiliation isn’t the goal; it’s the blade. Hidden sin, hidden pain, hidden wounds… they all metastasize in secrecy. They spread until they touch everything. Confession is the surgical cut that opens the infection, tears away the façade, mortifies the flesh, and exposes the real self to the Light. Only what is exposed can be healed. Only what is named can die. That’s why confession feels like death — because in a very real sense, it is.
And that death — that tearing away of the false self — has been the beginning of every inch of freedom I’ve tasted.
Why I Keep Speaking (Even If No One Reads It)
Every time I write…
every time I speak…
every time I peel back another layer…
I go deeper.
This site isn’t just content creation.
It’s discipleship — mine.
Even if no one clicks.
Even if no one listens.
Even if no one understands.
It reaches me.
It keeps me honest.
It keeps me awake.
It keeps me from slipping back behind the masks that once felt like home.
If someone else sees themselves in what I say — good.
If not — the work still matters, because it’s changing me.
Holiness isn’t perfection.
Holiness is exposure.
And if exposure leads to freedom,
then I’ll keep speaking.
Not because I’m wise.
Not because I’m elevated.
Not because I’m special.
But because confession has become my path to freedom.
And I’m not going back to sleep.