For years, Hosanna Wong preached about identity. She traveled the country performing spoken word poetry in prisons, recovery ministries and churches, telling others who they were in God while quietly watering down who she was.
Had you found her ministry a decade ago, you wouldn’t have found it under her name. “Had people known my spoken word ministry 12 years ago, they wouldn’t have known me as Hosanna Wong,” she says. “They would have known me as Hosanna Poetry.”
She had been advised early on that her heritage — her last name, her background — might stand in the way of the ministry she felt called to. She believed it. She went by a pen name for years, trimmed her story to fit the rooms she was in and shaped herself around what she assumed people wanted.
“I found myself constantly trying to fit the mold of whatever group I was with in fear that I could not fully be accepted in these environments,” she says. “So I would water down parts of my story and parts of my background and parts of my real questions.”
That tension between who she was and who she was trying to be is at the center of her new book. “You Are More Than You’ve Been Told,” releasing this August, is Wong’s attempt to give readers what she spent years looking for — not just an understanding of who they are in God, but a practical framework for actually living that way.
“I wanted to tell them who they are, but I also wanted to tell them how,” she says. “Not just who you are, but how do I know who I am every single day? And how do I live as who I really am?”
It’s a question a lot of people in their 20s and 30s are sitting with, often for the first time. And Wong says the struggle is older than any of us.
“The enemy of our souls has been trying to convince us that we are less than we are,” she says. “So we live lives that are less than the lives we’ve been created to live. So you’re not crazy.”
The lies, she says, rarely announce themselves. They come from childhood, from a cruel comment that stuck, from a leader who meant well but got it wrong. Sometimes they come wrapped in a half-truth, which makes them harder to shake. Wong knows this from experience. Her own early wounds came from people who, by her own account, genuinely wanted to see her succeed.
“I think that we believe the lie that we are not enough and our background is not enough and our story is not enough,” she says. “And it has taken me years to understand and see the truth.”
The breakthrough, when it came, was agricultural.
Wong grew up on the streets of San Francisco, the daughter of a former heroin addict and gang member who became a pastor after encountering Jesus. Her father died when she was 18, and she set out on her own, eventually spending four and a half years traveling the country without a home base, living out of guest rooms and spare bedrooms — learning, she says, that the Church could be something different from what had hurt her.
In a season when she felt disconnected — from herself and from God — she called a friend who had spent years working in vineyards in New Zealand and up and down the West Coast. She wanted to understand John 15, where Jesus tells his followers, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” Her friend, who had no knowledge of the scripture, gave her a purely agricultural answer.
All a branch needs to survive is to be connected to the vine, the friend told her. But without a trellis — a structure — “they will live constantly weighed down. They will carry weights they weren’t meant to carry, and they will fight an uphill battle they don’t have to fight.”
Wong says the words stopped her. “I just thought, man, I am feeling weighed down today.”
She came to see the trellis as a metaphor for the rhythms and routines that keep us connected — not just knowing who we are in God, but structuring our lives in a way that keeps that connection alive. The structure, she’s careful to say, is not the source.
“There’s no salvation in the structure,” she says. “There’s only salvation and life in the source.”
But without it, she found, the branches eventually lose their footing — and their connection to the vine.
That realization sent her back to the life of Jesus. She began studying his private rhythms — how he sought solitude, how he engaged with scripture, how his public ministry grew out of what he did when no one was watching — and asking what it would look like to arrange her own life around the same kinds of practices.
“I realized that to reclaim my life and reclaim my identity, I needed to reclaim my schedule,” she says.
One of those practices was engaging with scripture differently — not as a ritual she had grown numb to, but in a way that felt alive. A new translation. A different time of day. Reading with other people and hearing their perspectives. The goal was simple: make God’s voice the loudest voice in her life.
“When people say things to us — you’re not good enough, you’re worthless, you’ll always be defined by your past — it doesn’t match up with what I know is true,” she says, “because I know what God says about me.”
She returned to spoken word poetry after six years away from it. She recorded a piece called “I Have a New Name” — and released it under Hosanna Wong.
“The enemy’s been lying to you because he doesn’t want you to know how important your life is and how powerful your choices are,” she says, “and what it would mean for you to be who you are and share your real story with the people around you.”
The question Wong leaves people with is the same one she had to face herself: not just whether you know who God says you are — but whether you’ve built a life that lets you actually live like it.
