There’s a sentence people say to me quite a lot now.

“I’m glad the church is bringing you comfort.”

It’s kind. I know it is. I don’t think anyone is having a dig. Most people are just trying to be decent, which is fair enough, especially when grief is involved and nobody really knows what to say without sounding like they got their emotional training from the inside of a greetings card. Still, the line sits strangely with me, because I’m not sure comfort is the main thing that has happened.

Comfort is part of it, obviously. Church has brought me comfort. Prayer has. Scripture has. Sitting in a pew when my head has been all over the place has. I’m not going to pretend otherwise just to sound more theologically impressive (which would be a doomed mission anyway). The bigger problem is this:

I think the Gospel is true and if I’m right, it should be the most important thing to any of us.

And that’s where everything gets more awkward.

After my Mom died, people started talking about signs. Robins. Songs. Coincidences. Little moments that seemed too well timed. There’s also the psychic night in the book, which quite a few people seemed willing to treat as something supernatural and real.

I understand that instinct completely.

When someone you love dies, you want some evidence that they haven’t just vanished. You want a crack of light somewhere. A hint. A nudge. Something that says love hasn’t been wiped off the face of the earth by one horrible phone call.

I didn’t have a carefully worked-out view of the afterlife before all this. I hadn’t rejected it after years of deep philosophical study. I just hadn’t given it much thought, which is probably how a lot of us live. Death sits somewhere in the background, like a bill you know exists but keep refusing to open.

Then it opens itself.

Suddenly everyone has language for what comes next.

“She’s still with you.”

“She’ll be watching over you.”

“She’ll send signs.”

“She’ll be up there with your Nan.”

Again, I’m not sneering at that. Some of it helped. Some of it still does. A few things happened after my Mom died that I still don’t know what to do with, and I’m not about to flatten all of it down just so I can sound neat and sensible.

The bit I can’t shake is this.

Why are signs from the dead easier to accept than the Gospel?

A robin can be meaningful. A dream can be loaded. A strange coincidence can make everyone go quiet and awestruck for a second. A psychic can say something and people will hang on their every word.

Then you mention Jesus rising from the dead and everyone starts acting like you’ve brought a tambourine to a business meeting.

I find that strange.

Because the issue clearly can’t be the supernatural. Plenty of people are open to “something more” when it’s convenient. What seems harder to accept is a God who has actually revealed Himself; a God with a name, a claim, a cross, an empty tomb, and something to say about how we live.

That asks more of us.

A vague afterlife can comfort you without interrupting you too much. It lets you imagine reunion, love carrying on, maybe the odd sign here and there, while leaving your normal life mostly untouched. Nobody has to repent because a song came on at the right moment. Nobody has to forgive their enemy because a robin landed on the fence.

Christianity doesn’t leave it there.

That is probably why people keep it at arm’s length. I get it. Honestly, I do. If Christianity is true, it isn’t just a nice emotional crutch for grieving people. It changes the whole picture. Death, love, sin, mercy, judgement, forgiveness, worship, eternity - all of it comes into view properly, and most people would rather politely pretend it wasn’t a thing.

Me included, for most of my life.

I wasn’t walking around thinking deeply about God every day. I was busy, distracted, tired, anxious, trying to be a decent dad and husband, going to work, watching football, making jokes, scrolling my phone, and generally avoiding the massive question waiting at the end of everything.

Then my Mom died.

And after that, death stopped being an idea.

So when people say they’re glad church is helping me, I do appreciate it. I really do. There’s love in that sentence. Part of me still wants to ask, though: what do you think is actually happening here?

If my Mom is still alive in some sense, where is she?

If signs are real, who allows them?

If love survives death, what is it rooted in?

If there is an eternity, why would God be the least interesting part of it?

That last question has been bothering me.

An afterlife without God sounds comforting for about ten seconds. Then it starts to feel strangely thin. Who holds it together? Who decides what happens there? What happens to evil? Is everyone just floating around vaguely fine forever? Does forgiveness matter? Does truth matter? Does anything get judged, healed, restored, answered?

I know these are big questions. I also know they are exactly the sort of questions people avoid because they make normal conversation weird. Nobody wants to be standing near the kettle at work while someone starts weighing up eternal judgement between spoonfuls of instant coffee, which is fair enough.

Still, I don’t think we can keep borrowing Christian hope while treating Christianity itself as a bit embarrassing.

That is what I feel like we do sometimes. We want heaven at funerals, signs in grief, reunion after death, love stronger than the grave, and the comforting thought that the person we lost is somehow safe.

Then God becomes the awkward part.

Surely that’s backwards.

If my Mom is safe, I want to know who she is safe with.

That isn’t me trying to win an argument. It’s the thing I can’t stop coming back to. The Gospel doesn’t just give me a softer way to think about death. It gives me Christ. And Christ doesn’t feel like a vague coping mechanism. He feels like someone I kept trying to avoid, only to find Him standing at the centre of the question when I canned my ego enough to look properly.

That sounds dramatic. I know.

It also sounds true.

Maybe that is why the “comfort” line catches in me. It makes faith sound private and optional, like something useful for the grieving bloke who has had a rough year.

But if Christ is risen, then eternity isn’t just a nice thought for when someone dies.

It’s the reality of how existence works.

And if it’s reality, then none of us can afford to treat it like someone else’s coping strategy.

The devil turns up a lot in my book, which is awkward because there’s no way of saying that without sounding at least slightly unwell.

I don’t mean horror-film devil. No spinning heads, no Latin being callously cackled, no furniture launching itself across the room. If anything, that would have made him easier to deal with. At least then you could point at the airborne dining chair and say, “Right, something’s clearly gone wrong here.”

The version I wrote is harder to pin down.

He sounds familiar.

That is the uncomfortable part. The devil in the book - and in the real story behind the book - doesn’t arrive as some obvious stranger. He comes in using my own voice, or something close enough to it that I don’t immediately object. He knows the rhythm of my fears. He knows where I’m embarrassed and exactly which little buttons to press so that shame starts passing itself off as common sense.

Subscribe now

Writing him felt strangely natural because there was already a voice running alongside everything. Grief had its own soundtrack. Faith did too. So did panic, pride, self-protection, and that awful moment when you suddenly become aware of yourself from the outside and think, “Oh, wow, I look ridiculous!”

The voice would say things like, “Careful, mate. People are noticing.”

Or, “This is just grief messing with your head, pal.”

Or, “This church thing isn’t for people like you.”

I didn’t need to invent much. Most of his best material was already lying around in me.

So the obvious question is whether the devil in the book is actually the devil, or whether he is just me at my worst.

I’m careful with that. I don’t want to become the bloke who blames Satan every time he acts like an idiot, loses his temper, checks his phone too much, or spends twenty minutes deciding whether a Substack sentence makes him sound like a complete weapon. Personal responsibility still exists. Sometimes I’m not under spiritual attack. Sometimes I’m just being a tit.

At the same time, I’m less smug about evil than I used to be.

A few years ago, I would probably have dismissed the whole thing as psychological. Trauma, insecurity, anxiety, ego - all that lovely modern vocabulary that lets you sound very sensible while avoiding the older, uglier words like sin, temptation and pride.

Some of that language is useful. I’ve needed plenty of it myself. But Christianity has made me take the unseen more seriously.

Not in a demons under the bed sort of way. More in the sense that I’m less confident the world is as harmless as I once wanted it to be. There are forces at work in people. In families. In grief. In shame. In pride. Sometimes you can feel something being pulled away from the light.

The clearer question, for me, became less “Where does the voice come from?” and more “Where is it trying to take me?” because whatever that voice is, it never leads anywhere good. It never makes me more honest. It never opens me up. It never pushes me towards love, courage, humility, forgiveness, confession, or peace. Its whole game is to make me smaller without me noticing.

And it does all this while sounding incredibly sensible.

Don’t say that.

Keep that hidden.

Don’t pray out loud.

Don’t let anyone know this means something.

Don’t get emotional.

Don’t be the bloke who gets weird about God.

None of that sounds especially evil at first. It sounds measured. Adult. British, basically. Keep yourself together. Don’t make a scene. Laugh it off. Have a cup of tea. Quietly go mad and be quiet about it like a respectable member of society.

But the fruit gives it away.

That voice always leaves me ashamed. Guarded. Cynical. Cut off from people. Suspicious of tenderness. It makes sincerity feel dangerous and vulnerability feel like walking into the pub with your trousers round your ankles.

Faith, for me, has never been a clean little aesthetic. I didn’t glide towards Christianity with a linen shirt, a calm face and a bookmark already placed in Ephesians. I came in awkwardly, suspiciously, half-moved and half-mortified, still trying to keep hold of the old parts of myself that felt safe.

I wanted Christ, but I also wanted everyone to please act normal about it.

The devil, or whatever name I gave that voice, lived right in that gap. He didn’t need to persuade me that God was fake. By that stage, annoyingly for everyone involved, God had started to seem very real.

The better tactic was embarrassment.

What will people think?

That one got to me for than it should have at the start.

It still does a bit. I care how I sound. I care whether people think grief has tipped me over the edge. I care whether old mates, family members, colleagues, or random blokes who once saw me hammered somewhere deeply unholy read my writing and think, “Oh no, he’s gone full God squad.”

There’s nothing impressive about admitting that, but it’s true. A lot of my spiritual struggle has been less “Do I believe?” and more “Am I willing to look and act like someone who believes?”

That is a nastier battle than I expected.

The devil in the book understands pride better than I do. He knows I can dress it up as humour, intelligence, caution, class, background, personality, anything really. He knows I can make fear sound like self-awareness. He knows I can turn cowardice into a joke before anyone clocks what I’m doing.

Christ has a completely different effect.

He doesn’t flatter me. I’d quite like a Jesus who gently pats me on the back and says, “Honestly mate, you’re basically sound.” Sadly, the real one seems much less interested in keeping my ego comfortable.

He calls me out without crushing me.

The accusing voice makes me want to hide. Christ makes me want to come clean. The accusing voice tightens everything. Christ exposes the wound, then somehow makes exposure feel like mercy rather than humiliation.

So yes, I still wonder what I created when I wrote the devil into the book. A literary device, probably. A version of my shame with better dialogue. A spiritual reality wearing the clothes of my own insecurity. Maybe some grim little mixture of all three.

I’m not going to pretend I’ve mapped it all neatly. That would be dishonest, and also a bit unbearable.

What I do know is that the voice wanted the same thing every time. It wanted me embarrassed by grace. It wanted me ashamed of hope. It wanted me to treat faith like a phase, vulnerability like a threat, and grief like something that had made me unreliable.

For a long time, I listened.

The devil doesn’t need to sound monstrous if he can sound like your own best thinking on a bad day. He doesn’t need to drag you into darkness when he can persuade you to dim the lights yourself and call it being rational.

I still hear that voice.

Less dramatically now, thankfully. These days he doesn’t stride through the scene with a perfect line and a smug little bow. He is more like background noise. A mutter from the cheap seats. Some old cynic in the corner, trying to make holiness sound cringe before I get too close to it.

I’m learning to recognise him.

Or myself.

Or whatever ugly little partnership is going on there.

The test is becoming simpler.

Where does this voice lead?

If it leads me into shame, hiding, pride, fear, silence, and distance from Christ, I don’t need a PhD in demonology to know it’s rotten.

If it leads me towards truth, repentance, love, courage, and the strange relief of being known by God without having to perform, then I know something else is speaking.

The devil in my book sounds like me.

That’s why I believed him.

Christ doesn’t.

That’s why I’m trying to follow Him.

Subscribe now

The bit I’m trying to work out is this: can Christ change me without turning me into someone my own people don’t recognise?

That is the real question for me.

I’m not writing this from the edge of belief, peering in like someone outside a pub trying to decide whether the atmosphere looks friendly. That part, strangely enough, feels more settled than I expected. Books helped. The Gospels did more. Somewhere along the way, Christianity stopped being an interesting argument and became a reality I couldn’t honestly dodge anymore. I’m a believer!

So the question has changed.

It is no longer, “Do I believe this?”

It is, “What is this going to do to me?”

That is a much more uncomfortable question, because belief can stay in your head for a while and behave itself. It can sit there looking clever, nodding along to C. S. Lewis, enjoying the odd podcast, getting mildly emotional during a hymn. But if Christ is real, He does not stay politely in the “interesting thoughts” section of your life. He starts walking around the house.

Opening doors.

Pointing at things.

Asking why you’ve kept that in your life.

This is where I get a tad nervous.

I come from a world where faith was not part of life. My family were never religious. There were no Bible verses on the wall, no prayers before meals, no church calendar quietly shaping the year in the background. God, if He came up at all, was more likely to appear in a throwaway comment of exasperation than a serious conversation. My roots are ordinary, working-class, council-estate-adjacent, football-on-the-telly, family-first, take-the-mick-before-you-say-anything-too-sincere roots.

That world made me.

I don’t want to lose the stuff that feels like home. The humour, mainly - that banter rhythm where affection comes wrapped in abuse, and somehow everyone in the room understands the difference. Football matters too, because I come from a life where having a few choice words to shout towards a referee about his substandard level of officiating is seen as a perfectly normal let-your-hair-down activity. Then there’s the music - that clever indie stuff with grit in it, the songs that manage to say what you feel without making you sound like you’ve been journalling in a candlelit yurt. All of that feels woven into me, and I’m trying to work out what Christ wants to clean up rather than what He wants to erase.

I don’t want to lose all that.

There, I’ve said it.

Part of me is loath to give any of it up if iI’m brutally honest. I want to follow Christ properly, and I mean that seriously, yet there is still a part of me quietly hoping He doesn’t ask me to become the sort of bloke I would previously have avoided at weddings.

It frightens me more than I’d like to admit.

The fear is not really that Christianity will make me good. It’s that it might make me false. Or, more accurately, that I might make myself false while trying to look good at Christianity.

There’s a difference.

Jesus trumps all of it. I know that. If He is Lord, then He is not Lord of the tidy, church-friendly bits while the rest of me gets kept in a drawer marked “personality.” He gets the lot. The humour, the pride, the temper, the football-mouth, the family loyalties, the old instincts, the bits I’m fond of and the bits I’ve spent years pretending are just harmless quirks.

Still, is it wrong to hope - just a little - that He leaves some of it untouched?

Maybe untouched is the wrong word. Maybe what I really mean is unharmed. Redeemed rather than erased. Cleaned up without being turned into something bland. I don’t want to cling to sin and call it character, because that would be a coward’s trick. But I also don’t want to mistake becoming holy for becoming dull, distant, or weirdly polished in a way that would make my own family wonder who had walked into the room wearing my face.

But some of what I call “me” probably does need to die. Pride has often dressed itself up as principle. Sarcasm can pretend to be humour when really it is just a way of staying untouchable. Loyalty, which is beautiful when it protects people, can become ugly when it refuses to admit fault. Even banter has a line, and I know full well I’ve crossed it before while pretending everyone else should just lighten up.

Faith has started making those excuses harder to keep.

Christ doesn’t seem interested in being added to my existing personality as a tasteful accessory. He is not a little cross on the dashboard while I carry on driving wherever I fancy. He wants to take the wheel and drive us places, which sounds lovely in a worship song and slightly alarming when it starts affecting your actual reactions, habits, grudges, ambitions and mouth.

That’s where the identity crisis starts to get real. Saying “I’m a Christian now” is easy enough when the sentence sits safely on a page. Living it around people who knew you before is different, because family have receipts. Your tone, your history, your little tells when you’re tired or defensive, the generous bits and the selfish bits, the moments when you’re loving and the moments when you’re being a complete idiot - none of it is hidden from them. You cannot rebrand yourself in front of family; they’ve still got the old packaging.

Maybe that is a mercy.

It stops you getting carried away with your own conversion. Maybe it’s meant to be a slow and steady thing.

The strange thing is that my inward conviction is stronger than my outward confidence. Inside, I know. Outside, I am still learning how to say it without sounding like I’ve borrowed someone else’s coat. Faith sits deeply in me now, yet expressing it can still feel awkward, as if my old self is watching from across the room with a pint, going, “Listen to you, mate.”

That split-personality turmoil is probably the honest place to write from.

I believe, and yet I am still learning how to inhabit belief.

The question, then, is whether Christ makes me less myself or more truly myself. I don’t mean that in a cheesy fridge-magnet way. I mean it in the hard sense. If grace strips away the pride, the defensiveness, the need to win, the fear of looking soft, the habit of hiding behind jokes, what will actually be left?

Hopefully not some bland religious hologram.

Hopefully me, finally less full of rubbish.

That is what I’m clinging to. Christ does not seem to flatten people into one approved personality type. The Gospels are full of distinct people: hot-headed, thoughtful, dramatic, practical, doubtful, loyal, cowardly, brave, slow, impulsive. They are changed, absolutely, but they do not become identical little beige saints with matching sandals and customer-service voices.

Peter remains Peter, even after grace has done serious work on him.

That gives me hope.

Perhaps the aim is not to stop being the indie football lad from a council estate. Perhaps the aim is to stop using that identity as cover for sin, fear or laziness. Maybe Christ does not despise my roots; maybe He wants them reordered. Humour without cruelty. Loyalty without tribal blindness. Confidence without arrogance. Banter without cowardice. Family love without control. Football, music, ordinary life, all of it kept in its proper place instead of being asked to carry the weight only God can carry.

That sounds right to me.

Still, I’m suspicious of saying it too neatly, because I’m living this in real time and I don’t want to pretend I’ve already completed the course. The truth is that I am mid-process. Some days I can see clearly what Christ is asking of me; other days I’m just trying not to be a religious hypocrite before lunchtime.

There is a particular awkwardness in being firm in faith while still obviously unfinished.

People seem to know what to do with confidence, and they know what to do with doubt. The middle is harder to explain. I am not wobbling on whether Christ is real, which might be easier for some people to understand. My wobble is more personal, more exposing. I am convinced He is real, and now I have to face what that means for the man I’ve been, the man I am, and the man He is making of me.

That is a different kind of fear.

A better one, probably.

Because the old fear was that none of this meant anything. This fear is the opposite. It is the fear that it does mean something, that Christ really is who He says He is, and that I can no longer keep myself safely untouched behind personality, humour, family history or a few familiar excuses.

So maybe this is where I am for now.

Not lost. Not sorted.

Convinced, but still being converted.

And if that sounds untidy, good! It is.

I’d rather tell the truth from the middle than pretend I’ve reached the finish line just because I’ve finally started walking in the right direction.

Subscribe now

Share

There is a version of grief people seem prepared for. The quiet version. The respectful version. The one where someone looks out of a window while rain runs down the glass, holding a mug in both hands, with sad piano music playing somewhere in the background.

That version does exist sometimes, I suppose. There are moments when grief really is still and solemn and almost cinematic. But most of the time, in my experience, grief is far stranger than that. It is uglier, sometimes more boring, more physical, more ridiculous and far more confusing than I ever expected. It’s tears in one room and someone trying to find the Wi-Fi password in another. It is discussing funeral flowers, while someone asks if anyone has put the bins out. It is being absolutely broken and still somehow needing to keep a dentist appointment.

Before it happened to me, I thought grief just meant sadness. Heavy sadness, obviously, but sadness all the same. That was naive. Grief is sadness with a load of other stuff welded to it: shock, guilt, anger, exhaustion, love, memory, numbness, admin, and a strange sense that ordinary life has suddenly become offensive.

Nobody hands you the proper guidebook for it. So here are five things I wish someone had told me.

Subscribe now

1. Your brain will still forget they are gone sometimes

This is one of the cruellest things, because it doesn’t usually happen during the grand emotional moments when you are braced for it. It happens in the stupidly normal moments, when your guard is down and life is briefly behaving like life again.

Even now, there are times when something happens with one of the kids and my brain instinctively goes to tell Mom. Some little update. Something funny. Something she would have wanted to know. Something she would have reacted to in that exact way only she could. It is rarely some huge, profound thing. Most of the time it is just ordinary family news, the sort of thing that would have kept a conversation going for ten minutes and probably ended with her telling me about something completely unrelated.

The curry thing is the one that still gets me, which sounds ridiculous until you understand that Mom and I were massive curry fans. Properly invested. We would send each other pictures, recipes, tips, little improvements, warnings about which ingredient brands were a disgrace to the art of BIR, and the occasional proud photo of a curry that looked like it belonged in a Balti house rather than on someone’s hob. It was one of our little things.

So now, I can cook a decent curry and, for half a second, my first instinct is still to take a picture and send it to her. Look at this, Mom. Not bad, ay? I might even have that tiny flicker of excitement you get when you know exactly who will appreciate something. Then the truth lands again, and it does not land gently. It hits like a train.

That is what people do not tell you. You do not only lose the person once. You lose them again in hundreds of tiny moments when your old life reaches for them before your new life can stop it. Your brain hasn’t caught up. Your love hasn’t caught up. The habits of having someone do not disappear just because the person has.

There is a particular cruelty in that split second before remembering. For a tiny moment, they are still alive in the wiring of your mind. Then reality corrects itself rather brutally.

2. Ordinary life can feel obscene

After someone dies, the world carries on with a level of confidence that feels almost rude.

The traffic lights still change. People still moan about parking. The self-checkout still accuses you of having an unexpected item in the bagging area, even though, frankly, the unexpected item is now your entire life. Someone still wants to talk about a wind-damaged fence. Someone still asks what you are having for tea. And you know, rationally, that this is how it works. The world can’t just stop because your family has been smashed open, but, still, there is a part of you that almost resents it for not stopping anyway.

That was one of the loneliest parts for me. It was not just that Mom had died. It was that everything else had the absolute nerve to continue. You walk around with this private catastrophe inside you, and other people are still doing normal Tuesday things. They are buying milk, checking football scores, choosing meal deals, arguing with customer service, wondering whether it is going to rain. Meanwhile, you are standing there thinking, how can this be the same world?

Grief makes ordinary life feel badly staged. Everyone else seems to know their lines, while you are stood in the middle of the set with no idea what scene you are supposed to be in or whether you ever signed up to be in this rubbish performance in the first place. You can perform normal for a while, because you have to, but underneath it there is this quiet disbelief that the world has absorbed nothing. Your life has been rearranged completely, yet the kettle still boils in exactly the same way.

3. You grieve the future as much as the past

I expected to miss the old stuff. That part made sense. I expected old photographs to hurt. I expected certain songs, places and dates to come with a sting. What I did not expect was how much grief would project itself forwards too.

You don’t only miss what already happened; you miss everything that will now happen without them. The birthdays they will not be at. The updates they will not hear. The family moments where that someone should have made a daft comment from the corner. The Christmases where the room is technically full but still has a gaping hole in it somehow. You even miss the version of yourself who did not yet know what this felt like.

It isn’t so much that you are stuck in the past, but more like the pain keeps running ahead and waiting in bushes for you on the road ahead.

4. Grief makes you guilty about things that make no sense

Nobody warned me how much self-judgement would come with grief. You would think death would be enough by itself, but apparently the human brain likes to add a courtroom drama on top.

You feel guilty for crying and then guilty for not crying. You feel guilty if you laugh too soon, as if one normal human reaction has somehow betrayed the person you loved. You feel guilty if you feel numb, because numbness looks suspiciously like not caring, even when it is probably your brain putting sandbags around itself before the flood comes in. You feel guilty for being angry, guilty for being tired, guilty for needing people, guilty for wanting everyone to leave you alone.

The worst thing is that most of this trial is happening inside your own head. Nobody else is keeping score in the way you imagine they are. Nobody has a grief spreadsheet where they mark down whether you cried the correct amount at the correct time. But grief does not argue fairly. It takes love and twists it into evidence against you.

I think part of the problem is that we imagine grief should look consistent. If you loved someone, surely you should feel one clear, appropriate thing. But grief is not consistent because people are not consistent. One minute you are devastated, the next you are laughing at something stupid, then suddenly you feel guilty for laughing, then you feel guilty for feeling guilty, and before you know it, your mind has turned into one of those group chats where everyone is talking over each other.

It’s exhausting; I’m also learning it’s quite normal.

5. Grief shows you who can actually sit with pain

One of the hardest things about grief is that it does not only reveal your own heart. It reveals other people’s capacity, too.

Some people surprise you in the best way. They do not arrive with a speech or a big dramatic gesture. They just keep turning up. They message. They remember dates. They check in without needing you to perform gratitude. They do not panic when you are sad, and they do not try to rush you back into being easier to deal with. There is a quiet holiness in people who can simply sit with you in the mess.

Other people disappoint you, and that can be a grief of its own. Some vanish because death makes them awkward. Some say things that are probably meant kindly but land like a brick. Some try to tidy your grief up because your pain is inconvenient to them. Some make you feel as though you now have to manage their discomfort as well as your own loss, which is a brilliant arrangement if the aim is to make a devastated person even more tired.

I have tried to be more generous about this as time has gone on, because not everyone has the emotional equipment. Some people are not cruel; they are limited. But limitation still hurts when you are the one bleeding. Grief makes you remember who made the weight lighter and who somehow added a few bricks to the bag.

The people who can sit in it with you are rare. Keep those people close. Often they are the ones doing the small, quiet, unshowy things that actually help.

The part I am still learning

I do not think grief ends in the way people sometimes suggest. It changes, thank God, because nobody could survive the first version forever. The first version is too heavy. It takes over your body. It sits in your chest, your sleep, your appetite, your patience and your ability to think clearly. It makes normal tasks feel like you are trying to complete them underwater.

Over time, though, it becomes less constant. You can breathe again. You can laugh without feeling quite as guilty. You can talk about them without every sentence collapsing. You can have days where life feels almost normal, and then a curry, a child’s update, a photograph or some stupid little family phrase can bring the whole thing back into the room.

That doesn’t mean you are back at the beginning. It means love is still looking for somewhere to go.

Maybe that is what grief is, in the end: love that still has its coat on, standing at the door, waiting to be sent somewhere. It goes into stories, prayers, habits, jokes, recipes, photographs, family updates, and all the tiny instincts that remain after someone has gone. It goes into the things you still want to tell them.

And if the cost feels unbearable at times, maybe that is because the love was real enough to leave a proper wound.

I still reach for my phone sometimes.

That says more than any polished explanation ever could.

Subscribe now

Share

Subscribe now

Did I really find God, or did grief just break my brain? That is probably one of the fairest questions anyone could ask about my story. It is also one of the questions I have had to ask myself, because if a man with no real interest in religion suddenly loses his mom, starts walking into church, begins reading the Bible, and then writes a book about faith, grief and providence, claiming he found God along the way, there is an obvious cynical response available.

“Of course you did, mate. Grief’ll do that to you.”

That response is not even close to stupid. Grief does strange things to a person; it messes with time, memory, judgement, appetite, sleep, patience and your general ability to function like a normal member of society. It can turn completely ordinary things into emotional traps. A song. A smell. A photo. A message. A bit of furniture. You can be doing all right, or at least doing a decent impression of someone doing all right, then suddenly something tiny catches you sideways and you are gone. I specifically remember being relatively strong throughout Mom’s funeral, yet spiralling badly a fews later when I was in a petrol station and saw a bag of jalapeño pretzel bites we once shared and agreed were amazing. There is no rhyme or reason to it.

So yes, grief changes the way you see the world. I would be lying if I pretended otherwise. The real question is whether grief only bends reality out of shape, or whether it can also break through the noise and force you to look at something you had been avoiding. In my case, that “something” was Christianity. Not vague spirituality. Not a comforting blur. Christianity - with its claims, its questions, its cross, its resurrection, and its insistence that death doesn’t get the final word.

Before all this, I did not have a thoughtful, quietly spiritual background. I was not hovering around the edges of Christianity, waiting for the right moment to commit. Religion was not a major interest of mine. I did not spend evenings weighing up the resurrection evidence, comparing denominations, or wondering whether the Psalms might one day explain my life. I barely thought about it at all.

God, church, faith, prayer, Scripture - all of it belonged in a category I had not seriously opened. I knew religion existed, obviously. I knew bits from school, weddings, funerals, Christmas services and the general cultural fog of growing up in England. That was about it. It was background noise. Something other people seemed to care about. Something I could acknowledge from a distance without ever having to let it ask anything of me.

Then grief came along and made the distance collapse. I wasn’t wandering gently towards faith with a curious little expression on my face. I was shoved into it sideways - ambushed in a direction I would never have imagined myself going. Some people might call that the work of the Holy Spirit. Others might roll their eyes and call it grief doing what grief does. Either way, I couldn’t unsee what had started opening up in front of me.

Suddenly the questions were not abstract anymore. What happens when someone dies? Where do they go? Why does love feel too real to be reduced to biology and memory? Why does the absence of one person make the whole world feel morally wrong? Why do we ache for meaning if there is none? Why, in the middle of all that pain, did I feel as though something had moved closer rather than further away?

That last question is the one I find hardest to dismiss.

I did’t go looking for a religious rebrand. I wasn’t trying to become a walking testimony or reinvent myself as the kind of bloke who suddenly has a favourite minor prophet and uses “fellowship” as part of his daily lexicon. I was still me: overthinking, awkward, emotionally chaotic, sometimes loving, sometimes useless, often trying to treat practical jobs and unsolicited research into Christianity as a substitute for actually feeling anything.

And what started as a distraction quickly became a rabbit hole; and somewhere down that rabbit hole I found a lot more truth than I bargained for. So much so, that I quickly realised that rather than escaping from reality, I was being dragged towards it.

That did not happen because everything suddenly made perfect sense. If anything, faith made the whole thing more serious. It did not take the grief away. It gave the grief somewhere to go. It gave the questions a direction. It gave the ache a language. The world did not become less painful, but it did become less empty.

That distinction is important.

People sometimes talk as if belief is just a comfort blanket for people who cannot cope with reality. I understand the accusation. I really do. From the outside, my story could look like that. Grief happens, religion appears, man concludes God is real. Case closed. Brain has clearly gone for a walk.

Except that is too easy.

In my case, grief did not make me float away from reality. It made me pay attention to it. It made some of my old assumptions look flimsier than I had realised. The version of life where everything is ultimately accidental, love is just chemistry, death is just the end, and meaning is something we politely invent to get through the day suddenly felt nowhere near big enough for what I was experiencing.

Love felt too real.

Loss felt too wrong.

The longing felt too deep.

The pull towards God felt less like panic and more like recognition.

That is the best word I have for it: recognition. Not proof in the courtroom sense - although I have unearthed plenty of stuff along the way that comes close to that (there’s a ‘receipts’ chapter at the end of my upcoming book that details this). It’s sort of like hearing a tune you somehow already knew before it started playing.

So did I find God, or did grief break my brain?

I think grief broke something, but I don’t think it was my brain. I think it broke the distance that had allowed me to keep Christ safely vague. Before all this, I could leave God in the background, because I had never really been forced to deal with Him properly. Faith was something other people messed around with. Jesus was a name I knew from teachers at school. Death was a sad fact I sort of understood in theory.

Then actual grief made theory useless.

Suddenly, Christ was standing right in front of the wound: death, love, loss, meaning, hope, resurrection. All the things I had managed to keep abstract became painfully specific. Grief did not invent God for me. It made it much harder to keep pretending the claims of Christianity had nothing to do with my actual life.

Through that break, faith eventually began to feel less like an idea I was considering and more like a reality I was being invited into.

That is part of why I wrote The Pizza Place Providence.

The story is not just that grief happened.

The story is what grief opened.

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”

Psalm 34:18

This is the Bible verse at the end of Chapter 1.

I chose it because Chapter 1 needed a verse that could sit beside grief without trying to explain it too quickly. Some verses feel like they are trying to put a hand on your shoulder. This is one of them. It sits there quietly, saying something that sounds simple until your own life has been split down the middle.

The context of Psalm 34 matters, because David is writing from a proper mess. He is in danger. He is on the run. He has been humiliated. At one point, he has to pretend to be mad in front of Abimelek just to escape.

That is easy to skim over because Bible stories can sound cleaner than they actually are. You read them in that slightly churchy rhythm and forget how ridiculous and frightening the scene would have been in real life. David - future king, chosen by God, writer of psalms - reduced to acting insane because his life has gone so badly sideways that this has somehow become the best available plan.

Now, obviously, I am not David. I had not been anointed by Samuel, I was not hiding from Saul, and I have never had to dribble down my beard to get out of a tight spot. My problems were more Sutton Coldfield than ancient Israel. More family phone call than Philistine court. More standing in a normal room with my brain refusing to accept a sentence I had just heard.

But that is the point.

The circumstances are wildly different. The human bit is not.

Fear is fear. Grief is grief. Humiliation is humiliation. Survival mode is survival mode, whether you are fleeing a king or standing there after a phone call, trying to work out what normal human beings are supposed to do next.

And from that place, David writes:

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”

That word “close” gets me.

Because when grief hits, part of you wants God to become instantly obvious. You want the sort of explanation that would satisfy a tired, suspicious, emotionally battered bloke who suddenly has a full courtroom operating inside his head. Something clear. Something undeniable. Something that makes sense of the room, the phone, the news, the silence afterwards, and the sickening little moment when your body seems to understand what has happened before your mind has caught up.

But Psalm 34 gives you something quieter than that.

Close.

And close is not the same as clear.

That is probably the hardest thing about it. At the time, I doubt I would have recognised closeness as closeness. I was shocked. I was guilty. I was sad. I was trying to be practical in that very male way where you convince yourself that doing admin is basically the same thing as emotional processing. Send the message. Make the call. Check on people. Move something from one side of the room to the other. Look busy enough and maybe nobody will ask the question that makes your face cave in.

Chapter 1 begins in that kind of territory.

A normal night, ordinary surroundings, and the sort of setting that looks completely wrong for the news about to enter it. Then the phone call comes, and suddenly life is divided into before and after.

What struck me afterwards was how insulting ordinary things can look when terrible news arrives. The room does not change for you. The carpet stays the same. The furniture carries on being furniture. Someone probably puts the kettle on, because in this country we seem to believe the correct response to emotional devastation is hot water and a teabag.

And yet something has happened that cannot be undone.

That is where this verse belongs.

Psalm 34:18 comes from a man who knows fear, pressure, humiliation and survival. David is not speaking about pain like it is a topic on a worksheet. He is speaking from inside a life that has become strange, frightening and undignified.

That gives the verse weight.

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted” sounds gentle, but it is not weak. There is steel in it. It says that the crushed places are not abandoned places. It says God is present where dignity has gone, where explanations have failed, where you are standing in a room that looks too normal for the news you have just received.

At the start of the book, I did not fully understand that. I was still very much me: overthinking, emotionally chaotic, capable of deep feeling and spectacularly poor coping strategies, sometimes within the same hour. I was not calmly interpreting my life through Scripture like a man with a tidy soul and a sensible filing system. I was just trying to get through the next hour without making everything worse.

But looking back, this verse feels like the right marker for the beginning.

A line placed beside the first crack in the story.

A reminder that when a person is brokenhearted, God is not waiting somewhere clean and distant for them to become presentable again. He is close in the room where the news lands. Close in the silence after the phone call. Close when your spirit is crushed and you have no impressive words left.

Before grief, that verse sounded comforting. After grief, it sounded necessary.

And that is where the book begins.

Purchase paperback or Kindle copy

The Pizza Place Providence is a true story about the year my ordinary life cracked open - and what came through the gap.

It begins in the kind of normal world most of us recognise: family, work, old habits, private doubts, unfinished conversations, things left unsaid. Then grief arrives, and with it a question I could not laugh off, explain away, or drink quiet.

What do you do when the worst thing happens - and instead of life becoming emptier, it starts feeling strangely charged?

This is a story for anyone who has lost someone, doubted everything, argued with faith, loved their family badly and fiercely, or wondered whether their own life has been trying to tell them something.

The full book is coming soon.

And honestly, I still can’t quite believe this is the story I ended up writing.

Subscribe now

There is a photo of me from the night before my mom died.

I am sitting on my father-in-law’s sofa, drunk, ordinary, completely unaware that I am living inside the last few hours of my old life.

That is the strange thing about photographs. They know more than the person in them. They sit there quietly, holding the truth in advance. Everyone looking at the picture afterwards knows what is coming, but the idiot in the photo does not. He is just there, slightly gone, probably thinking about nothing profound whatsoever, while history is already walking up the drive.

I have looked at that photo a lot since.

Part of me wants to warn him. Part of me wants to shake him. Part of me feels sorry for him, because he has no idea that the next morning a phone call will come and split his life into before and after. He does not know that one sentence is about to rearrange his family, his memory, his marriage, his sense of God, and whatever lazy little assumptions he had been making about time.

He just looks like me.

That might be the most unsettling part.

I used to think the big moments in life would announce themselves more clearly. Death, faith, disaster, love, revelation; the serious things should at least have the manners to arrive with some atmosphere. Instead, they turn up in the middle of normal life while you are wearing whatever you happened to put on that day.

My mom died suddenly the next morning.

I keep typing that sentence and feeling as if it should do more than it does. It is factual, but it is too efficient. It gets the information across and leaves out nearly everything that matters. It leaves out the cracked voice on the phone, the way your mind becomes practical because practical is safer, the way family members suddenly sound like frightened children, and the way your own body keeps moving through the day as though it has been given instructions you were not copied into.

For a while, I did what most people do. I functioned. That is such a cold little word, but it is accurate. I answered, moved, worried, remembered, forgot, repeated myself, stared at things, said the same facts out loud until they began to sound like someone else’s story, then felt guilty for the tiny betrayal of getting used to the words.

The writing started because I did not trust memory to do the job properly.

Grief edits things if you leave it alone. It sharpens some moments until they become almost unbearable and blurs others until you begin to wonder whether you invented them. I started writing bits down because I wanted to catch the texture of what had happened before it became a family anecdote with all the awkward edges rubbed smooth.

At first, I thought I was only writing about my mom dying.

That would have been enough.

Then the story began to widen.

It widened into my dad, who suddenly seemed breakable in a way he never had before. It widened into my own family, because grief does not politely stay in the room you put it in. It widened into the strange things people say when death makes them nervous. It widened into humour, because apparently even devastation is not enough to stop a family being ridiculous. It widened into questions I had never taken seriously enough because life had never forced me to.

Then there was Pizza Hut.

I know.

Believe me, I know.

Nobody wants the sentence “Then there was Pizza Hut” in the story of their spiritual life. It is hard to make that sound serious without looking like you have lost control of the tone. Still, that is how it happened. An ordinary place became attached to an ordinary moment, and that moment opened something I could not easily close again.

I am not going to explain it properly here. It would sound too small without the life around it, and too neat if I tried to turn it into a lesson. In the book, it has room to breathe. Here, all I need to say is that it became the crack where something started to grow.

That is the book I have written.

It is not a book about becoming impressive through grief. It is not a book about finding a tidy answer and walking serenely towards the light like a man in a Christian stock image. It is about a very ordinary life being interrupted by death, and then by something else. Something quieter, stranger, funnier and harder to explain without sounding slightly unhinged.

The manuscript is with beta readers now, which means other people are walking around inside a story that lived privately in me for months. That feels exciting and horrible in almost equal measure. There are real people in it. Real grief. Real mistakes. Real moments where I do not come out looking especially wise. That matters to me, because I do not want to turn pain into branding or faith into a polished little performance.

So this Substack starts here, with the photo.

The night before.

The sofa.

The drunk bloke who does not know what is coming.

Over the next few weeks, while the book is being read, I am going to write about the world around it: grief as it actually behaves, the oddness of trying to tell the truth about your own family, the way humour survives in awful places, and the strange business of feeling something open in your life before you have the language to explain it.

I am starting with that photo because it still bothers me.

It bothers me that I was so close to the edge of everything and had no idea.

It bothers me that life can change without giving you the courtesy of a warning.

It bothers me that the man in the picture looks exactly like me and also like someone I can never quite get back to.

And maybe that is why I wrote the book.

To stand beside him for a bit.

To tell him what happened next.

To find out whether the story that began with a phone call might have been held by something larger than the phone call itself.

Subscribe

Share

This is an adapted extract from the book I’m writing about grief, doubt, family, and my slightly reluctant and totally unplanned move towards faith. After losing my Mom suddenly, I’d found myself circling Christianity in a way I hadn’t expected: reading, questioning, resisting, half hoping, half mocking myself for even entertaining it. For weeks, I’d also been followed around by a voice in my head: part inner critic, part devil on the shoulder, part sarcastic survival mechanism. Whatever it was, it seemed to have an unwanted opinion on everything. This was the morning I finally stopped reading about church from a safe distance and took the plunge by walking into one.

When the morning finally arrived, I didn’t feel brave or steady. I felt undercooked and out of place. Jeans. Hoodie. Slightly bleary-eyed from one glass of wine that had become three, or possibly more, the night before. No plan. No idea whether I even needed a plan. I walked in expecting eyes on me, like I’d turned up to the wrong place and everyone would know about it before I did. A tramp crashing a party at the Ritz. Like I was treading the muddy mess of my life straight across their clean and holy house without having the decency to knock or wipe my feet.

Walking the leaflet-laden corridor and pulling open the heavy glass door, I was confronted by a breathtakingly unremarkable scene, which went some way to banishing the image of old ladies in knitted cardigans and quaint biscuits eaten with tea drunk from proper teacups. In reality, they were older and younger, suits and hoodies, polished shoes and scuffed trainers, neat hair and uncombed, families, loners, couples - the same ordinary mix you run into in you average McDonald’s, Primark or Sainsbury’s. Somehow all so familiar in their ordinariness.

To my pleasant surprise, nobody seemed to be taking my arrival with anywhere near the heady mix of tension and vomit-inducing nervousness that I was. I don’t think anyone even noticed I was there; if they did, they either hid it well or were too polite to bat an eyelid.

Then - uninvited - that voice cut in again. Sliding itself up next to me with a grin on its smug face that invited the unholiest of language in response. The same heckling inner critic that had followed me for weeks, dead set on turning this whole thing into a joke before I had the chance to take it seriously. Just more material for the next pub conversation.

“Oh no,” he muttered. “This is worse than expected! They’re actually normal looking! This is how they rope you in, pal. You know, like that Scientology thing you saw on Netflix. Proper catfish territory, this is, mate. Careful now.”

An elderly woman smiled and handed me a thin booklet. I took it automatically, smiled back and sat down. I flicked it open and immediately noticed sections marked “All.” I scanned for context and my heart sank. “All” as in: everyone joins in together. I picked out one such instance at random:

Call and response! Group participation! People saying things out loud together!

I wasn’t ready for this.

Didn’t they have a neutral section? Like the family stand at the football. Somewhere away from the singers and die-hards. No pressure to join in. No expectation to know the chants. Just somewhere to observe quietly with your arms folded and a sensible exit route.

My brain, entirely unhelpfully, transported me straight back to childhood pantomimes. The same call and response. The same cringey group participation.

“He’s behind you!”

“Oh no he isn’t!”

“Oh yes he is!”

My sarcastic inner devil voice, who I was starting to believe might actually be Satan himself residing in my jumbled head, was loving it. He chuckled quietly to himself, doing that thing they do in films where they hold their hand out and pretend to check their fingernails casually.

I was doing his work for him now.

To my pleasant surprise, nobody seemed to be taking my arrival with anywhere near the heady mix of tension and vomit-inducing nervousness that I was.

The opening of the service passed by in a blur, my self-consciousness consuming more of my attention than anything going on around me. Then the Bible reading started. Something about seeds being scattered and falling on different kinds of ground. Some landing on stony paths, others on fertile ground.

Abstract. Unfamiliar. Pointless!

Exactly like my first go at the Bible earlier that week. “In the beginning was the Word.”
What word? Whose word? Just say it in plain English, mate! It felt like nonsense dressed up as depth. Like I was supposed to nod along and pretend it meant something, when really I hadn’t got a clue what I was looking at, or in this case, listening to.

What was I even doing here?

Yet people sat engaged. And suddenly, the thought struck me that they had chosen to be here on a Sunday morning. I had too, I guess. But these guys…I assume they chose to do this most weeks. And there were millions more like them around the world doing the same thing. I briefly contemplated the magnitude of the whole thing. The Vatican, Christ the Redeemer, cathedrals carved into skylines, quiet little churches like this one tucked into corners of ordinary towns, people gathering, week after week, across centuries, all compelled by something that seemed - for now at least - way out of my reach. Surely this couldn’t be the sort of thing people nodded along to without really knowing what they were agreeing with. The grand buildings, the people, the history, the scale of it all. It couldn’t all be nonsense.

Could it?

I massaged my brow through the inner turmoil, as if doing so would somehow stir some form of comprehension and connection to the surface. The wrinkles in my forehead felt prevalent, maybe even multiplying under the stress.

Why was I stressed?

If I was stressed, I cared.

I cared enough to get myself into this state.

Then the sermon began. And slowly, so slowly I didn’t even clock it happening at first, the vicar took apart the neat little dismissal I’d arrived with and laid the pieces to the Bible reading out properly. He went back to the image in the passage: seeds scattered, not planted carefully, but thrown. Some landing on hard ground. Some among thorns. Some on shallow soil. Some, eventually, somewhere deep enough to take root. And instead of leaving it floating there like a religious metaphor you’re supposed to make understanding grunts to, whilst pretending it’s spiritually deep, he translated it into language I had at least a shot at understanding.

He spoke about how people hear the gospel at wildly different moments and in completely different conditions. How timing matters more than intelligence. My mind drifted back to my midweek Bible disaster once more. Maybe being clever enough to understand what that Romans and Galatians stuff was all about was never the requirement after all.

The speaker continued about how a person can be bright, curious, well-intentioned, and still not able to receive something true because their head is too full, their life too loud, their pain too raw, or their comfort too complete. He spoke about distraction, the kind that isn’t sinful or dramatic, just busy. The kind where you’re not hostile to truth, you’re just preoccupied. Better things to be getting on with and all that. And about cynicism, not as arrogance, but as a kind of self-protection you develop after being let down by life too many times.

Then he spoke about grief.

Not in a sentimental way. More like an acknowledgement that grief softens some people and hardens others, and sometimes both at the same time. That it can strip away the distractions and leave you raw, exposed, suddenly more open, but also more fragile.

I felt targeted.

Too close to home.

And I couldn’t for the life of me work out whether it felt like a divine cuddle or like my personal life and inner turmoil had just been put on loudspeaker for a room full of strangers to hear.

What really caught me was the suggestion that failure to believe doesn’t automatically mean the thing you’re being asked to believe is false. That sometimes ideas bounce off us not because they’re nonsense, but because the ground they land on is compacted by years of habit, or tangled up with other things: worry, ambitions, relationships, life. Simply not ready yet. Readiness wasn’t a moral achievement. It was a condition. You’re ready when you’re ready.

Had my years of cynicism, sarcasm and dismissal turned my heart into the stony ground I was hearing about? But here I found myself: in a church. Was I softening?

I felt something in me ease. Not relief exactly - more like permission. Permission to not feel stupid for entertaining it. Permission to admit that maybe I hadn’t rejected this stuff because I’d rigorously disproved it. Maybe I hadn’t scorned it or mocked it because it was obviously nonsense. Maybe it had simply arrived at me at the wrong time, in the wrong way, when I was too young, too distracted, or too smug to let it sit. The idea that truth could be patient - that it might wait, rather than force itself - unsettled me more than any argument would have. Because it suggested that what was happening now wasn’t a sudden conversion or an emotional wobble.It was a delayed encounter. The same seed. Different ground. But still the truth. The patient, unchanging truth.

Maybe.

Had my years of cynicism, sarcasm and dismissal turned my heart into the stony ground I was hearing about?

I still wasn’t ready to throw all my chips in just yet. Something was niggling in the background, stopping me from throwing myself towards it fully. Then he popped up uninvited again. I fought hard to keep the expletives from escaping my mouth, settling instead for an exasperated eye-roll. Did I just roll my eyes at myself? I was arguing with myself. I’d lost it! Grief had fried me. I had finally lost it!

“Whoa, steady on!” the devil gasped, with a panic I hadn’t heard until now. “This is how it happens. Bloke with a collar and mad robes talks the talk a bit, throws in a few gardening metaphors about seeds and soil, and suddenly you’re nodding along like it’s Countryfile. Don’t get seduced by compost and parables. You’re grieving, mate, not enlightened.”

I wanted to punch him by this point.

At first I didn’t register what was happening next. Just a subtle shift in the room. Chairs creaking. People standing. A low, coordinated movement that felt rehearsed, like everyone knew the next step except me. There was activity at the front - quiet preparation, deliberate hands. I watched a man step into the aisle and then another. Only when people began moving row by row did the penny start to drop.

Ohhhh. This was something you took part in.

My stomach tightened.

Bread and wine. That much I knew. Enough RE lessons over the years to recognise the outline, even if I’d never paid much attention to the detail.

This wasn’t observation territory anymore.

This was involvement!

The bread looked wrong when I finally focused properly on what the vicar was holding up, as he spoke about Jesus breaking bread and saying to the disciples, “Take. Eat. This is my body.” It was thin. Pale. Flimsy. More like something you’d snap than make a sandwich with.

A religious crisp.

That voice leapt on it gratefully, like a man spotting a fire exit.

“Oh, excellent. A poppadom. Very Jesus! Where’s the onion salad? Mint sauce? Bit of mango chutney? Grab yourself a beer, kid, and we’ll make a proper night of this.”

I was slowly learning not to react.

People kept moving. Nobody opted out. Nobody stayed seated pretending they hadn’t noticed. Even a woman in a wheelchair was served where she sat, the routine adjusting itself seamlessly around her. There were no loopholes in this thing. No polite observer’s badge you could flash. I started rehearsing exits in my head. Small refusals. A quiet shake of the head. A muttered apology. But each option felt louder, ruder even, than simply doing what everyone else was doing.

By the time the nod and smile came from a well-groomed man with lovely teeth and a good head of hair - gentle, expectant - my body had already decided.

I walked to the front and knelt.

Hands presented forward in a begging manner. I was copying what I saw around me. The devil tried to wedge a joke in about Oliver Twist or something.

“Please, sir. Can I have some more?”

I batted it away. I don’t know what zone I was in, but I was definitely in one of some description.

The wafer was placed into my palm. Light as paper. Tasteless. Dry. Words were spoken - something about the body of Christ - but they didn’t land. They slid past me like background noise, abstract and oddly ceremonial, as if I were overhearing a language I didn’t yet understand.

Romans. Galatians. In the beginning was the word.

Then came the cup. The wine was unexpectedly strong. Sharp. Real. It cut through the moment instead of blending into it. And this time the words said as it was passed to me didn’t drift.

“The blood of Christ, shed for you.”

Not whispered.

Not dramatised.

Just stated.

Plain.

Certain.

For you.

Shed for you.

The phrase lodged itself somewhere uncomfortable in me and wouldn’t move.

Without warning, I was back on a hard wooden floor, cross-legged in a primary school hall, legs numb, a teacher explaining to six-year-old me, far too casually, that Jesus had died for me. I remembered the irritation I felt back then. The injustice. What did I do? I don’t even know the bloke. I wasn’t even alive when all this madness happened. Back then, it had sounded unfair. Arbitrary. Like being blamed for something before you’d even entered the room. Sitting there now, decades later, with wine still sharp on my tongue, I realised the problem hadn’t been the idea itself.

It had been the lack of explanation.

The slogan without the substance.

The conclusion without the context.

As I walked back to my seat, the inner voice didn’t joke. Didn’t interrupt. It just hovered, attentive. Watching.

The service ended soon after. I left quickly. Probably too quickly. I didn’t want conversation. Or smiles. Or reassurance. I needed space to let whatever had just happened settle without anyone else touching it.

Sitting in the car, engine off, I tried to take stock. I didn’t suddenly understand what I’d just taken part in. It was still strange. Still abstract. Bread and wine that were apparently more than bread and wine, but not in a way I could explain without sounding ridiculous.

But the difference was this: I wasn’t analysing it from a distance anymore.

I had stepped into it.

Not reading about it.

Not mocking it.

Not standing safely outside with my arms folded.

Inside it.

And underneath the confusion, something else had started to form. Something that unsettled me far more than doubt ever had.

I realised I now wanted it to be true.

Not because it was comforting. Not because it neatly solved anything. But because the idea that this might actually be how reality worked, this abstract and loopy explanation for an abstract and loopy existence, no longer felt so absurd.

The questions were still there. I wasn’t converted. I hadn’t crossed some invisible line.

But I’d lost my neutrality.

And that worried me a little.

Because the moment you want something to be true, you stop being a detached observer. You listen differently. You read differently. You have to be more careful, not less.

A strange thirst had taken hold.

Not for certainty.

For understanding.

The inner voice stirred again. Not mocking now. Not relaxed either. Just there. Just alert.

And for the first time, its silence didn’t feel like confidence.

It felt like concern.

Share

Subscribe now