The Child Who Held the Room
How God turned pressure into presence through The Garden Project
By Josh Singleton | Vision and Lead Cultivator, The Neighborhood Garden Project
I was born on the altar, figuratively speaking, and that was the beginning of pressure. Before I ever spoke, the air around me carried expectation. It was the atmosphere I inhaled before I even knew what faith or freedom were supposed to feel like. I was born into a world where spirituality was already performance, where holiness was measured, and where belonging came through doing things right. By the time I was six, I had my first clear memory of it — the moment when that unseen pressure took shape and attached words to what had already been forming in me. I didn’t understand salvation or surrender. I didn’t understand heaven or hell. I didn’t understand Lord or Sonship. I didn’t even understand the words spoken to me.
It wasn’t inside a sanctuary. It was in the plaza outside the church at night, the building glowing behind us, voices soft in the distance, the air heavy with something I didn’t yet have words for. My mom knelt in front of me, her voice filled with urgency too heavy for my small body. She looked into my face and asked, “Do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?” I had no idea what the question meant. I only understood what the moment demanded. And I don’t blame her for it. She wasn’t trying to wound me. She was acting out of her own unhealed child formation, her own story shaped long before mine began, her own mixture of fear and sincerity, her own pressure that had never been resolved. She simply gave me what had been given to her.
Before I could comprehend spiritual reality, I could feel emotional expectation. Before faith had a chance to form, pressure shaped my response. So I said yes — not because of revelation, but because I sensed she needed me to. When the words left my mouth, everything softened. My mom relaxed. She smiled. It felt like I had relieved a burden. But I wasn’t choosing Christ. I was learning a role. I was learning to carry atmospheres that didn’t belong to me. I was learning that the peace of others rested on my compliance. That moment didn’t introduce me to Jesus. It introduced me to spiritual pressure.
By middle school, that pressure had grown roots. At a summer church camp, I rededicated my life to Christ after an emotional high that felt holy but left me empty days later. The environment was charged — lights, music, tears — moments fabricated to “experience” God and modify behavior at a more intense level. I remember the counselors’ words about commitment and purity, about giving everything to Jesus. I meant it with all I had, but I was still living from the same place of pressure, only dressed in worship songs and testimonies. Mandatory “quiet times” with God became reminders of the weight I’d always resented. Every journal entry felt graded. Every verse underlined felt like a test.
I knew once the week was over, and I was back in the pressure cooker at home, that the coping mechanisms would inflame again. The counselors’ good-intended words fell flat because they never intended to walk with you — only to name the version of relief as sin and assign you to manage it once camp was over. Even the church called it a “spiritual high,” yet we insisted on holding camps every year. There’s this twisted sincerity that re-energizes the very dysfunction leaders say they want to change. It’s still happening today — emotional moments mistaken for transformation, performance mistaken for presence.
What I didn’t see then was that the relief wasn’t just in the students. The leadership was relieved too. For one week, everyone was out of the routine of their lives — freed up to be more free in God’s presence — as if leaving the structures that kept them bound could temporarily substitute for transformation. The adults were admitting, without realizing it, that they had never been given room to breathe either. That atmosphere was both beautiful and broken — full of people gasping for the same air, mistaking the taste of freedom for fullness.
And then to top it off, there was always a video shared in the Sunday service afterward — a montage of hands raised, tears falling, laughter and worship. Those who didn’t or couldn’t be part of the week were now being dosed with the “fruit” of what happened at camp, bringing the whole church into agreement with a fabricated version of revival that was never obtainable or sustainable. It was the highlight reel of a longing we all shared — to feel alive, to feel close to God — but no one knew how to live it past the mountaintop. I remember thinking, Why couldn’t I live in God’s presence every day? Why did it fade the moment I got home?
Then there were the long-expected metrics — how many prayed the prayer, how many rededicated their lives, how many were baptized or re-baptized. As if the video wasn’t enough, the numbers confirmed the “move of God.” It all felt like spiritual bookkeeping — a way to justify the emotion, to validate the cost, to turn moments of vulnerability into measurable success. But numbers can’t quantify formation. They can’t capture surrender. They can only count compliance.
And my parents, feeling proud for sending us off to be trained by the church, unknowingly off-loaded the responsibility of household cultivation to a cheaper, easier version. Through it all, God was still wooing me back. Even in the mix of pressure and sincerity, He was weaving something deeper. That rededication didn’t feel like pure pressure; it was mixed — striving and longing, fear and faith, confusion and calling. Beneath it all, He was already drawing me home.
That same pattern followed me into adulthood. I learned to cope, to stabilize others, to make sure no one around me ever fell apart — even if it meant quietly falling apart myself. Lust and gluttony became outlets, not rebellion. They were my secret ways of breathing when I felt I wasn’t allowed to. My external obedience and my internal ache moved together, keeping up the appearance of stability while hiding the exhaustion of performance. I didn’t know it then, but I wasn’t rebelling against God. I was resisting the systems that had misrepresented Him.
All of this created the perfect mixture — religion without revelation, obedience without identity, behavior without belonging. I knew about God, but I didn’t know the Father. I understood doctrine, but not Sonship. I could articulate the Gospel, but not live free inside it. The message “Jesus died for you” didn’t land as love. It landed as debt. If He died for me, I must behave for Him. If He sacrificed everything, I must not fail. His death became a pressure I had to honor, a standard I had to live up to. Jesus wasn’t someone who carried me. He was someone I had to keep pleased. His gaze felt like surveillance, not affection. Instead of producing joy, it produced vigilance. Instead of revealing grace, it magnified self-evaluation. Faith became a cycle of managing purity, monitoring obedience, and fearing that God’s approval could be lost at any moment.
This is why any system built on measurement, evaluation, production, or performance always felt suffocating. It felt like a return to the spiritual environment of my childhood — watched, weighed, tested, compared. My resistance wasn’t laziness. It was discernment. My spirit refused to return to the place that stole my breath. I didn’t want to be measured. I didn’t want to justify my worth. I didn’t want to prove fruit through reports. I wanted to breathe.
The Garden Project became the first place I ever breathed freely. It was the first environment where nothing was measured, yet everything grew. The soil didn’t evaluate me. The plants didn’t need my performance. Creation didn’t require my control. The Garden Project did what I had never learned to do — rest. It revealed that growth isn’t produced through pressure but through alignment. It showed that fruit emerges from presence, not striving. It whispered what religion never taught me: nothing in the Kingdom grows by being watched. Everything grows by being rooted. And in the quiet rhythm of the soil, God untangled decades of false formation.
The Garden Project dismantled the belief that peace depends on my performance. It unraveled the identity I built through compliance. It exposed the lie that I had to hold everything together. It revealed the truth that God never asked me to carry atmospheres — He asked me to walk in identity. And as the pressure fell away, identity finally began to emerge. Identity doesn’t grow under surveillance. It grows in freedom. It grows where the soul is allowed to unclench. Identity isn’t something you achieve. It’s something you remember. I wasn’t becoming a new person. I was returning to who I was always meant to be.
As identity took root, assignment stopped being something I had to chase or manufacture. It revealed itself naturally. Assignment is never discovered through strategy. It emerges through surrender. The Garden Project wasn’t a clever idea or a new career. It was the external expression of the internal healing God had done. It was the overflow of identity restored. It was the rhythm of creation meeting the rhythm of my soul.
Too often, nonprofit work is mistaken for good work — as if the highest aim is to be helpful, charitable, or productive. But good work is a weak desire compared to union. I don’t cultivate The Garden Project for the community, and my life is not in service to the world. It moves at the rhythm God has already established, and within that rhythm, the overflow of His life determines who is blessed. This is not my service to Him; this is His life through me. The Garden Project isn’t something I do for anyone. It is something I live with Him. It is the place where His breath moves through soil, through people, through me — not for the sake of doing good, but for the sake of being whole and reflecting Him fully.
It became the place where others could breathe the way I finally could — slowly, fully, without pressure.
Leadership transformed too. I no longer lead from responsibility. I lead from rest. I no longer carry people. I walk with them. I no longer manage their peace. I trust God to hold it. I no longer accelerate their growth. I honor their timing. Leading from identity is gentle, patient, surrendered. It doesn’t chase fruit. It cultivates environments where fruit naturally appears. It doesn’t cling to control. It trusts the Spirit who leads each person at the pace they are willing to walk.
I didn’t step into the nonprofit world to challenge it. I stepped into it out of obedience. I came to serve the vision God gave me, not realizing that the very atmosphere He called me into would start to expose what was still unhealed in me — the same pressure I grew up under, now dressed in new language.
At first, I thought it was just me, feeling out of rhythm. But as I walked deeper into this space, I began to see the same patterns that once shaped my faith: performance, measurement, production, validation. I saw how quickly people turned purpose into proof, how easily they replaced presence with metrics, and how familiar it all felt. I didn’t enter this world to confront it, but to witness what happens when the same old systems of pressure are repackaged as mission, strategy, and accountability.
I’m learning that even here, The Garden Project is doing what it always does — exposing the difference between growth that’s measured and growth that’s alive. One kind needs validation. The other simply is. One can be counted and reported. The other can only be experienced. The Garden Project keeps revealing that what’s truly alive never needs to prove its worth — it just bears fruit in season.
In the nonprofit space, I see good people working hard to do good things, but the rhythm feels familiar — like a new language for the same old pressure. Impact reports have replaced altar calls. Strategic plans have replaced faith. The fruit is still being counted, the stories still being captured and sold, the outcomes still being measured, but the breath is missing. It’s the same system that taught me to perform for peace, now dressed in mission statements and funding cycles.
And yet, The Garden Project keeps whispering that life doesn’t need to be proven. Life just needs room. I didn’t come here to build a better system or start another movement. I came here to witness what happens when presence replaces pressure, when growth is no longer tracked but tended.
The Garden Project has become the translator. It stands quietly between heaven and earth, between what’s fabricated and what’s free, showing me — and anyone willing to see — that what God plants cannot be managed, only stewarded. That’s the difference between growth that’s measured and growth that’s alive.
Today, I no longer live split between who I am and who others need me to be. I no longer hide the parts of me shaped by shame. I no longer cope in secret. I no longer stabilize rooms. I no longer perform to earn love. I no longer live under the gaze of a Jesus who feels like a taskmaster. I know the Father now. I walk with Him. I hear Him. I rest in Him. And for the first time, I know who I am.
The boy who once carried the room is gone. The man who finally breathes has taken his place. And now, on the other side of everything, I can see the truth with clarity I never had before. I am not walking with a distant God. I am walking with the Spirit who hovered over the deep in the beginning. I am walking in step with the Father through The Garden Project — the living rhythm of soil and Spirit, formation and freedom. I am seeing my wholeness in God as something older than my pain, older than my coping, older than my body. I am living from life to life, from Spirit to spirit, from identity to assignment. I am home. Not in a place, but in a Person. I am here. Not as a performer, but as a son. I am present. Not as a stabilizer, but as one who is held. I am fully participating in the continuation of God’s magnificent plan, not as someone striving for approval, but as someone who already belongs.
This is the restoration of what God has been doing all along.
This is the heartbeat of The Garden Project.
This is the freedom I now live from.
This is the life I was always meant to live.
The most beautiful thing about it all is that God was aware — and allowing — of the pressure. The same pressure that once destroyed was also refining. The love that led me to choose Him for myself was the truest form of love. That pressure wasn’t my trauma; it was part of my design. Some seeds only germinate under pressure, fire, or cold seasons. I am one of those seeds. And The Garden Project is the fruit of that design — a living witness that what once felt like breaking was actually becoming.
I would gladly receive the childhood pressure again if it meant being seen by God as fully as I am now — because even what hurt was never wasted. It became the ground from which compassion now grows. Out of that overflow, I cultivate spaces through The Garden Project where others are finally able to breathe too, maybe for the first time.
