Religious Shame Followed David Hockman for 40 Years. Surgeon Unmasked Changed That
The Story
David Hockman has performed hundreds of surgeries, trained at one of the most demanding orthopedic programs in the country, and built a career as a hip and knee surgeon with Columbia Orthopedic Group in Columbia, Missouri. For years, he stood in operating rooms with other people’s lives in his hands.
What his patients never saw was the boy underneath — the one who couldn’t sleep at night in elementary school because he was convinced he had accidentally sinned and was going to hell.
“I always knew that if I died in a car wreck, even at a young age, I’m gonna go to hell no matter what because I’m gonna say a cuss word. And the last thing I wanna do is sin before I die.”
What came when he started writing was larger than he expected. The subtitle of the finished book — A Journey from Shame to Grace — is the most accurate summary he could give of what he lived. The shame he’s writing about is not the ordinary kind. He calls it toxic shame: the deep, bone-level belief that something is fundamentally and irredeemably wrong with you. His memoir, Surgeon Unmasked: A Journey from Shame to Grace, is the story of overcoming religious shame that had been quietly running his life for decades.
The Curiosity
David grew up in the Conservative Church of Christ, which is a small sect within an already small denomination. By the mainstream Church of Christ, it is known as “the antis” because of how many ideas they oppose. The rules are specific and plentiful. Fellowship meals in the building? A violation of scripture. Helping people outside the church with church funds? Not permitted. Instruments in worship? Absolutely not. C.S. Lewis? A poison well.
“I always felt like my mom and dad loved me more than God did. Because I could see them forgiving me and being patient with me. It was confusing to preach that God is love and just be so afraid of him.”
The anxiety started showing up in elementary school, obsessive, spiraling, relentless. The what-if to the what-if to the what-if running his life. Every sin, no matter how small, meant potential damnation. Forgiveness was always conditional, always dependent on what you did next. God was to be feared, not trusted.
The Effort
For years, David pushed the doubt of the church down until a FCA worship service cracked something open. In that moment, he felt closer to God in that room than he ever had inside the Conservative Church of Christ. Then, the teachings he had once taken as gospel began to unravel.
Eventually, the break finally came. David was scheduled to preach one Sunday and had prepared a sermon on the church as a family. The night before, the phone rang.
They said they didn’t trust him, and he wasn’t going to preach.
“I felt like I was at square one. If this is the one true church, and I’m not allowed to be a part of it, what does that say about me? I can’t be saved. I’m irredeemable. I’m condemned — unless they’re wrong. And if they’re wrong about this, well, are they wrong about other things?”
That question — are they wrong about other things? — became the thread he pulled on for years.
The Solution
David found ShareYourStory.com while beginning to think seriously about what this story could become. Like many authors, he needed a team that could hold the weight of a book this personal without flattening it into something safe and generic. What he found was a publishing company that understood what it meant to bring a real story into the world.
Working through Streamline Books, ShareYourStory’s publishing service, David was guided through the process of shaping and producing Surgeon Unmasked from manuscript to finished book. For a first-time author writing about something this close to the bone, having the right people in the room matters — and the relational approach the team brought made the difference.
The Journey
Writing Surgeon Unmasked meant turning around and walking straight into everything he had spent decades surviving — the boy who couldn’t sleep over a possible sin, the teenager who dreaded every mistake after baptism, the husband who had pulled the people he loved most into a system he would spend years undoing.
“I wanted to write my story so I can understand why I am the way I am.”
That understanding didn’t come all at once. It was counseling, a full year of sermons listened to on dog walks, and picking up writers he’d once been told were poison — R.C. Sproul, Tim Keller, John Piper — and finding in them everything the Conservative Church of Christ had withheld. He eventually landed at The Crossing, an Evangelical Presbyterian church in Columbia, Missouri, a place that felt less like a destination and more like somewhere he had always been trying to get to.
Listen to the full episode here.
The ROI
The responses to a book this honest tend to arrive before you expect them. Someone finishes it and realizes they have words, finally, for something they’ve been carrying. Someone passes it to a family member without saying much. The conversation starts on its own.
But for David, the impact of Surgeon Unmasked started before a single reader ever opened it. Writing the book meant doing the work — acknowledging what he had put people through during the years he spent defending a system he would later leave piece by piece. Putting it all down on paper wasn’t just an act of storytelling. It was an act of accountability and healing.
What’s Next for David Hockman?
David lives in Columbia, Missouri, with his wife Sherry— the one who sat with him through the Conservative Church of Christ years, the long unraveling, and the writing of this book. He dedicated Surgeon Unmasked to her.
His kids are grown now, living in different cities, each attending grace-centered churches of their own choosing. His mother lives a block and a half away and has told him she’s no longer worried about his salvation. For anyone who knows what that church believed, that sentence is its own kind of miracle.
Chronic physical problems have ended his time in the OR. But David is still showing up — on LinkedIn, on X, and now through Surgeon Unmasked — for anyone who grew up believing they were one mistake away from being beyond reach.
For anyone who grew up believing they were one mistake away from being beyond reach, David’s message is simple and, for a lot of people, long overdue: overcoming religious shame is possible, grace is real, and you can trust a God you were taught only to fear.
