For a long time I was very good at being Christian.

I knew the language. I knew the posture. I knew what a man of faith was supposed to sound like in a room full of believers and I could deliver it without effort. Hands raised at the right moment. Amen at the right volume. Testimony polished and sequenced for maximum impact. I had been in church long enough to know the performance inside and out and I gave it faithfully.

The problem was that behind the performance there was a growing distance between who I was on Sunday and who I was on the days nobody was watching.

I was not living in open sin. I was not a hypocrite in the obvious ways. I was just performing. Doing the right things for the right-looking reasons without any of it actually going deep enough to change the parts of me that needed changing. I was managing my image before God the same way I managed it before people. Keeping the surface clean. Not looking too closely at what was underneath.

The performance worked until it did not.

There came a season where I was exhausted. Not physically — spiritually. The kind of tired that comes from maintaining an appearance for too long in too many rooms. I sat down one day and I did not have the energy to perform anymore. Not even for God. And in that moment something either had to be real or I had to admit it was not.

I chose real. And real was ugly.

I told God the truth. Not the rehearsed version. The actual version. That I was tired. That I had been running on spiritual fumes for years and calling it faithfulness. That I had been more concerned with looking like a man of God than with actually being one. That I was afraid if I stopped performing He might not want what was left.

What happened next changed everything.

He was not surprised. He was not disappointed. He was not waiting to confirm my worst suspicions about myself. He received it. All of it. The exhausted, unpolished, unperformed version of me that I had been keeping off the stage for years.

That was the day the relationship became real. Not the day I got saved. Not the day I joined a church or started tithing or learned to pray out loud. The day I stopped performing and started being honest.

I wrote about this in Still A Man because I know I am not the only man who has been maintaining a spiritual image while starving on the inside. The book is an honest conversation between a man who dropped the performance and found something true on the other side. If any part of this post sounds familiar it was written with you in mind.

Stephon Rudd