Hosanna Wong didn’t grow up in a typical church. Her earliest memories of faith come from the streets of San Francisco, where her father — a former heroin addict and gang member — found Jesus, turned his life around and started an outreach for people experiencing homelessness and addiction. Church services took place outdoors, among friends who carried both their struggles and their hope in plastic bags.
Today, Wong is a speaker and spoken word artist known for blending poetry, Scripture and honest storytelling. She has shared her message in churches, prisons and recovery centers across the country, often speaking to people who, like her younger self, have wrestled with questions of identity and belonging.
But before she stood on stages or shared her story publicly, Wong spent years wrestling privately with who she was and who she thought she needed to be to belong. She performed under a pen name, believing her real story — even her last name — might be too much or too different for some spaces.
“I have lived years of my life defined by the opinions of people and weighed down by their expectations, or my own perceived expectations,” she said. “I’ve tried to change who I am at times to fit into what I thought was the mold.”
Those molds came in many forms. Leaders suggested she change her last name to be more accepted. She agreed. She adjusted parts of her story and held back details she thought might keep her on the outside looking in.
“I believed them,” she said. “I thought that would be the best route for me. But that’s not the truth of who I am.”
Wong’s journey is a reminder of how easily lies can slip into our identities — lies we pick up from childhood, from harsh words online, from workplaces, from church hallways. Sometimes they’re obvious. Other times, they carry just enough truth to convince us they belong.
“We hear lies about ourselves, but they have a hint of truth, so it’s easy to accept them,” she said. “The enemy hopes we believe we’re not enough because he knows the truth: our background, our real story, our lens are exactly what God wants to use right now.”
Eventually, after years of shape-shifting and hiding, Wong started to realize she didn’t want to spend her life carrying weights she wasn’t meant to bear. She described feeling disconnected, worn out and constantly fighting an uphill battle.
That’s when she discovered a different kind of structure — not a set of rigid rules, but rhythms that help anchor a soul. She was drawn to Jesus’ words in John 15: “Abide in me.” But she needed to know what that actually meant in real life.
A conversation with a friend who worked in vineyards unlocked something. Her friend explained that while branches only need to be connected to the vine to live, they also need a trellis — a structure — to help them stay upright, get sunlight and avoid rot.
“Without a trellis, branches will live constantly weighed down,” Wong said. “They’ll carry weights they weren’t meant to carry and fight uphill battles they don’t have to fight. That was me.”
She realized she needed her own trellis: rhythms and routines that kept her connected to Jesus and to herself. She began studying how Jesus lived — not just what he preached, but how he structured his life, how he withdrew to pray, how he rested, how he stayed rooted.
“There’s no salvation in the structure,” she said. “The structure just helps you stay connected to the source of life, which is Jesus.”
That shift didn’t just change her ministry — it reshaped her entire life. It taught her how to move through the world without constantly performing or proving. It taught her to show up as her full self, no longer editing out her story to be accepted.
Her relationship with the church also began to heal. After years of cynicism and deep hurt, she encountered communities that embodied the love and openness she had longed for.
“I saw a different kind of church,” she said. “I saw that I could be part of creating the community I longed for.”
Still, she’s careful to say that staying in an unhealthy environment isn’t the answer. Healing can mean stepping away from specific places or relationships, but she believes in staying rooted in the broader body of Christ — the capital C Church.
“The people who hurt you were not representing the love of Christ,” she said. “You and I need to be the change. How will you heal so you can be who God has called you to be?”
The work of uncovering your true identity isn’t about arriving at a polished version of yourself. It’s about discovering the story God has already written and learning to walk in it with freedom.
Today, Wong uses her full name and her full story, choosing to stand in spaces as her complete self rather than a version edited for approval.
Her hope is that others will also discover they are more than what they’ve been told — more than the comments, the criticism or the roles they’ve felt pressured to play.
“Our lives depend on making God’s voice the loudest voice,” she said. “We need to find rhythms and ways to engage with God’s words so deeply that when lies come, they don’t match up with what we know is true.”
For Wong, this is not a one-time decision but an ongoing practice — a choice to show up fully, even when it feels risky, and to live in the freedom of being known.
