People kept telling me that keeping a Sabbath would change my life.

I couldn’t see how.

As someone who spent most of his life believing that a day off was simply a chance to catch up on everything I hadn’t managed to do during the other six, the idea that deliberately setting twenty-four hours aside for God could somehow transform me sounded suspiciously like one of those life-changing habits the internet falls in love with every few months. Buy this planner. Wake up at 5 a.m. Put butter in your coffee and apparently you’ll emerge six weeks later speaking fluent French and running a Fortune 500 company

Even after becoming a Christian, I still couldn’t quite work out why God seemed to make such a big deal out of it. Then enough people whose opinions I genuinely respected kept saying the same thing.

Sabbath changes you.

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I’ll admit there was probably a selfish motive mixed in with the curiosity. If everyone else seemed to be discovering a kind of peace I couldn’t quite grasp, I wanted to know what I was missing. As I began reading what Scripture actually says about Sabbath, it became obvious that this wasn’t God’s version of an internet wellness trend, but rather an intention to deliberately give a day back to the One who gave us all the others.

So I stopped reading about it and decided to get involved - which for something that mainly involved stopping doing things, feels like a slightly odd phrase now I type it.

Going into the weekend, I thought social media would be the hardest thing to give up. Surprisingly, it wasn’t. My bigger concern was the practical uses of my phone itself. Jack is still recovering from chemotherapy and there is always that background awareness that something could happen where I am needed. My children contact me through it. My family contact me through it. Life, these days has sneakily evolved to assume you’re carrying a smartphone every waking minute.

I even disappeared down the inevitable rabbit hole of researching dumb phones as a compromise. For a glorious half an hour, I was convinced I’d solved the problem, right up until I remembered that almost nobody actually calls anyone anymore. Everything happens through WhatsApp, apps and digital wallets. The simple life was already turning out to be surprisingly complicated.

In the end, I bought a dumb phone anyway, reasoning to myself that if there really was an emergency, someone would actually call me.

The strange thing was…

Almost nothing turned out to be an emergency.

Removing myself from the constant stream of messages exposed something I hadn’t expected. Most of what demands our immediate attention isn’t actually urgent at all. It’s just convenient.

The habit I struggled with most wasn’t messaging, though. It was refreshing my Amazon book sales. I must have reached for my phone half a dozen times purely out of instinct. Go on. Just have a quick look. As though my refreshing the page might somehow persuade another person to buy the book. Eventually, after the first few urges had come and gone, something shifted. It actually became quite liberating not knowing. Whatever the numbers were at that precise moment, they would still be there tomorrow. Amazon, rather surprisingly, seemed perfectly capable of counting without my supervision.

Once I’d stopped automatically reaching for my phone, I began noticing just how many tiny moments of my day it had quietly occupied. Waiting for the kettle. Drinking a coffee. Standing in a queue. Sitting beside my wife while she’s watching EastEnders, whilst quietly wondering how a tiny square in London with about thirty residents has somehow managed to host a murder, a hit-and-run, a pub fight and a cancer diagnosis in what appears to be the same afternoon.

Every little pause in life came with an almost unconscious urge to fill it - and when I didn’t, I felt oddly empty. It wasn’t unpleasant exactly. Just unfamiliar. Almost as though I’d removed something that had been constantly humming away in the background without me ever really noticing it.

That’s when I found myself reaching for a beautifully illustrated Psalms book I’d bought. Every psalm sits over photographs of the Irish countryside and I’d deliberately placed it on display as part of my little Sabbath space. Again and again, whenever that strange emptiness appeared, I found myself picking it up.

It left me wondering what my life would look like if, every time I felt that little internal pull towards distraction, my first instinct became reaching for God’s Word.

I am nowhere near being that person.

In fact, my first Sabbath probably proved how far I still have to go.

But perhaps noticing the habit is where changing it begins.

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One thing that did catch me off guard was my family’s reaction. They questioned the whole idea far more than I expected and I realised I didn’t have a proper explanation ready to confidently fire at them. After fumbling around for a bit, I eventually landed on something very simple.

“I’m trying to focus on God for a day… and on you.”

The more I’ve reflected on it since, the more I think that probably was sort of the right explanation.

My children aren’t Christians, and I pray constantly that one day they will know Jesus for themselves. Whether my first Sabbath sparked any curiosity in them, I honestly don’t know. I hope it did. Sometimes living differently says more than explaining differently ever could.

Of course, real life (especially 2026 real life) has a habit of refusing to fit neatly inside our nice little spiritual experiments. Halfway through the weekend, I suddenly realised my fishing licence and a couple of payment methods were trapped inside the very smartphone I’d ceremonially put away for 24 hours. For a brief moment, I found myself wondering whether opening the box would somehow meant I’d failed.

Thankfully common sense intervened before legalism did.

I took the phone out, got what I needed, put it straight back and carried on. Simple.

That tiny episode probably taught me more than I’d expected. Sabbath isn’t an exam where God waits behind a hedge with a clipboard, hoping to catch you out on a technicality and deduct points. I am pretty sure the heart behind it matters far more than the mechanics.

The following day, I took Jack fishing, exactly as we’d already planned to. His immune system is still recovering from chemotherapy, so somewhere quiet by the water remains one of the safest ways for us to spend time together.

Nothing about the fishing itself changed. The line drifted in the water as fishing lines always do, occasionally keeping things interesting by getting tangled in a tree. The fish remained gloriously indifferent to my spiritual development.

What changed was me. For once, I wasn’t mentally somewhere else, wondering whether somebody had bought my book, planning my next article or checking whether the world had survived the previous fifteen minutes without me.

I was simply sitting beside my son.

Church on Sunday morning felt much the same as it always does, which, now I think about it, is probably exactly the point. Ever since becoming a Christian I’ve loved the way church shuts out the noise of the rest of life and quietly redirects my attention towards God.

What struck me afterwards was that, over the previous twenty-four hours, I’d been trying to carry that same posture into ordinary life. Into making coffee. Conversations. Fishing. Sitting Quietly. Into all the unremarkable moments that usually disappear beneath whatever happens to be demanding my attention next.

When 8:30 arrived on Sunday evening, I blew out the frankincense stick that had been burning throughout the Sabbath and just sat there for a while looking at the little display I’d put together.

The biggest surprise wasn’t that I’d had some overwhelming spiritual experience.

It was that I didn’t feel relieved it was over.

People told me Sabbath would change my life.

After one attempt, I don’t think I’d go that far.

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My problems didn’t disappear. Jack is still recovering. Work was still waiting. My inbox hadn’t mysteriously repented.

But something did change.

For twenty-four hours I stopped trying to live tomorrow while checking yesterday and worrying about what everyone else was doing today.

I became more aware of God.

More present with my family.

More attentive to the life that was already happening in front of me.

Will I keep doing it?

Without hesitation.

Because if this was only the first Sabbath, I have a feeling I’ve only just begun to discover what it’s really for.

Enter my bizarre conversion story

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Assign me a Bible character

This week’s submission from began with a compliment, moved briefly into a discussion about the Substack algorithm and then delivered enough human experience to fill several Old Testament books.

First of all, you should have a lot more subscribers and followers.

Second, your posts and articles get about as much traffic as mine. I guess we’re not in the algorithm yet.

So, thirdly, here’s my situation in two sentences: I was forced to resign a 25-year teaching career this past January, my wife and I adopted a six-year-old who was literally dropped off at our house about three years ago after having five biological children of our own, and my identical twin brother was murdered almost five years ago. In the meantime, I have no steady source of income, earned a master’s degree in art history where I learned I love to research art and the Bible, and my wife and kids still love me and I love them.

Assign me a Bible character.

First of all, thank you. I agree that I should have more subscribers and followers, although I also believe I should have better knees, a larger house and considerably more money than I currently possess. Unfortunately, the universe has yet to consult me on any of these matters.

As for the algorithm, I have concluded that it is either completely random or has developed a personal dislike of us both. There are people online filming themselves pointing at words while music plays in the background who appear to have mastered it, so perhaps the problem is that we are trying to communicate actual thoughts.

Your third point, however, markedly changed the atmosphere.

There is so much contained in those two sentences that assigning you a single Bible character feels slightly ridiculous. You have lost a career that occupied a quarter of a century, endured the murder of your identical twin, opened your home to a child who had been abandoned, raised a family of seven children, completed a master’s degree, discovered a love for the relationship between art and Scripture and now find yourself trying to work out how to support the people you love without any reliable income.

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You then finished by saying that your wife and children still love you, and that you still love them. That last sentence stayed with me longer than anything else you wrote.

I am aware that this is the most obvious possible answer. Someone mentions grief, upheaval and uncertainty and the Christian immediately reaches for Job, rather like a doctor taking one look and saying ‘viral infection - NEXT!’ before you’ve had chance to tell him your symptoms. There is always a danger that Job becomes biblical shorthand for “a bloke who had a terrible time,” which does neither him nor the suffering person - in this case you - much justice.

Your resemblance to Job runs deeper than the fact that you have both suffered however. It lies in the way a settled life can suddenly become unfamiliar, leaving you surrounded by the remains of things you once assumed were permanent.

For twenty-five years, you were a teacher. That was presumably more than a source of income; after that length of time, it would have formed part of your identity, your daily rhythm and your understanding of your place in the world. People asked what you did and you had an answer. Your weeks had shape, your experience had value and your future probably extended naturally from what had gone before.

Then, in January, you were forced to resign.

I do not know the circumstances surrounding that resignation and I will not pretend that a Bible verse can make it feel fair. Losing a career after twenty-five years is a form of grief in its own right, because the loss extends beyond the job itself. It takes away routine, purpose, status, financial security and the version of the future you expected to inhabit.

Job would recognise that sudden collapse of certainty. At the beginning of his story, his life appears secure and established; shortly afterwards, almost every structure upon which that security rested has been removed. What makes the book so powerful is that Job does not react like the religious hero we might prefer him to be. He grieves noisily, speaks bitterly, questions God and repeatedly asks why his life has been allowed to become what it has become. This unfiltered grit and realness is what I am personally coming to appreciate about the Bible recently.

People often describe Job as patient, although anyone who reads the whole book may wonder whether they have confused him with somebody else. Job is faithful, for sure, but his faithfulness includes anger, bewilderment and the refusal to offer God a tidy version of his pain. He does not pretend that suffering makes sense merely because he believes in God.

That may be the first reason I would place you beside him.

You have lived through the murder of your identical twin brother, a loss whose depth I would not insult by trying to explain. A twin is not simply a sibling who happens to share a birthday. The bond begins before memory, language or conscious choice, which means the absence must carry a particular strangeness. You have lost someone who was connected to your own identity in a way most of us will never fully understand.

The Book of Job gives people permission to speak honestly from that kind of grief. It does not rush the bereaved person towards acceptance, gratitude or a lesson. Job’s friends (who I am irrationally irritated by every time I read that book) attempt to make his suffering manageable by explaining it; their explanations become increasingly confident as they become increasingly wrong. They assume pain must have a clear cause, that God must be operating according to a formula (at least one that the perspective of mere mortals would comprehend) and that Job would understand his situation if only he became more reasonable.

God’s response makes clear that their certainty was misplaced.

That feels worth remembering because Christians can become uncomfortable when pain refuses to resolve itself neatly. We sometimes reach for explanations because another person’s suffering frightens us and an explanation gives us the illusion of control. Job reminds us that sitting beside somebody in the ashes may be more faithful than attempting to tell them why the fire happened in the first place.

Your story also contains something Job would understand from another angle: the strange coexistence of devastation and love.

Around two years after your brother was murdered, a six-year-old child was literally dropped off at your house. I do not know the full story behind that sentence, although the few words you used suggest an entire world of rejection, confusion and vulnerability. You and your wife already had five biological children, yet somehow your family expanded again, apparently without the sort of preparation people usually expect before becoming parents.

There is something deeply biblical in that. Scripture is filled with people whose families are formed through disruption, obligation, adoption, loss and unexpected responsibility. The clean, orderly family tree is largely a modern invention; biblical families tend to be complicated enough to require complex diagrams - and lots of head scratching and repeated finger tracing to understand them.

You opened the door and allowed a child’s crisis to become part of your life. That decision will not have removed the damage already done to him and I imagine love has not made every aspect of the journey easy, but it gave abandonment a different ending. He was dropped off at a house and discovered that the house could become a home.

That does not cancel the things you have lost. The arrival of one person never replaces another and the love of a child does not explain the murder of a brother or the end of a career. Life is rarely arranged so neatly. Joy and grief often occupy the same room, occasionally sitting so close together that it becomes impossible to speak about one without disturbing the other.

Job’s story contains that tension. His suffering is real, his questions are real, and so is the continued possibility of life beyond the worst chapter. The ending of Job is sometimes presented as though God simply gave him replacement children and therefore everything was fine, which is an appalling way to read it in my humble opinion. New love does not erase old love and restoration does not make bereavement retroactively painless.

The point is that loss did not have the final word over Job’s capacity to live, love and encounter God.

That is where the closing line of your submission becomes important.

My wife and kids still love me and I love them.

You had every reason to end your message with the uncertainty. You currently have no steady income, your career has ended and you are trying to imagine what comes next after several experiences that would have overwhelmed most people individually, let alone in the cruel and heady cocktail in which you experienced them together.

Yet your final statement was about love.

I do not want to romanticise that or turn it into a slogan. Love does not pay the mortgage, replace your salary or guarantee that the future will become easier. It does, however, reveal that your life cannot be measured solely by the things that have been taken from you.

You remain a husband. You remain a father. You remain a brother, even in bereavement. You remain a teacher in the deeper sense of the word, whether or not a school or college currently employs you. Twenty-five years of knowledge, patience, mistakes, relationships and accumulated wisdom did not vanish when your career ended.

You have also discovered that you love researching art and the Bible, which may appear like a minor detail beside everything else, although I suspect it is not minor at all. Sometimes a new calling arrives without introducing itself as one. It begins as an interest, a curiosity or the only subject that continues to hold your attention while the rest of life feels unstable.

I am not going to announce that God ended your teaching career so you could become a biblical art historian. I have no authority to say that and it would make God sound like an unnecessarily brutal and bullish careers adviser.

I would, however, pay attention to the fact that something in you is still reaching towards beauty, meaning and Scripture.

Job spends much of his story demanding an answer from God, but when God finally speaks, He does not provide the explanation Job requested. Instead, He points towards creation: the foundations of the earth, the morning stars, the sea, the animals and the mysteries Job cannot control. God responds to Job’s suffering with a vision of reality larger than Job’s pain, while never claiming that the pain itself was insignificant.

Perhaps someone who loves art and the Bible may understand that better than most. Art does not always explain suffering, but it can give suffering a shape. It can place grief, beauty, violence, faith and hope within the same frame without pretending they are easily reconciled. Scripture often does the same.

By the end of the book, Job says:

“My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.” — Job 42:5

That verse is sometimes treated as though Job has finally learned to stop complaining. I read it differently. Job has moved from inherited knowledge about God towards an encounter with God that has passed through protest, grief and confusion. He has not received a satisfying account of everything that happened, but his relationship with God has become more direct and more honest.

I wonder whether your own research into Scripture and art is part of that movement. Perhaps you are no longer interested in easy answers because your life has become too complicated for them. Perhaps you are searching for the places where faith can survive contact with reality, including realities as severe as murder, abandonment, unemployment and grief.

Job would be useful company there.

He would not tell you to cheer up. He would not explain your brother’s death or pretend that losing your career was secretly wonderful. In fact, I reckon he would probably be suspicious of anyone who claimed to understand God’s precise plan for your finances or your life.

He would probably recognise the bewilderment of becoming a stranger to your own life and he would understand that faith sometimes consists of continuing the argument because walking away would mean losing the only relationship important enough to argue about.

Most of all, I think Job would notice the same thing I noticed.

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After telling me everything that had been taken from you, you told me what remained.

Your wife and children love you. You love them. A little boy who was once dropped at your door now belongs to your family. Your mind is still alive with curiosity, your heart remains capable of responding to beauty and your story has reached a chapter you did not choose without reaching its conclusion.

So, I am assigning you Job, although perhaps not the Job people usually imagine.

You are not being assigned the silent, patient man from the children’s Bible who sits politely on the ground while waiting for God to improve his circumstances. You are being assigned the more accurate Job who refuses to lie about his pain, challenges bad theology, continues speaking to God and gradually discovers that a ruined plan is not the same thing as a ruined life.

I cannot tell you what happens next.

I can tell you that the man who wrote your submission is still loving, learning, researching, raising children and looking for God.

That sounds like somebody whose story is still moving.

God bless you, mate.

Enter my bizarre conversion story

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I can’t remember the last time I let myself be bored.

Like, properly bored… nothing to do, nowhere to look, nobody to message.

Even standing in a thirty-second queue now feels like an invitation to check my phone. Waiting for the kettle to boil, standing in a lift, sitting on the loo. I’ve even caught my brain telling me to reach for my phone while YouTube adverts are playing, before realising I’m already holding it. It’s the digital equivalent of wandering round the house looking for your glasses while they’re on your head.

I used to think being bored - with all its panic-inducing restlessness - was something to avoid; I’m now starting to wonder whether it’s something of a lost art.

I’m about to start observing a weekly Sabbath. Part of the plan is putting my phone in a box for a day - and if I’m honest, I already know the first hour is going to feel uncomfortable. My hand will instinctively reach for a device that isn’t there. I’ll probably feel oddly restless, even though nothing is actually wrong.

That’s what made me think: what if boredom is an alarm bell? The kind of alarm that goes off because you’ve been ignoring something important. I can’t help wondering whether our instinctive urge to drown it out is more than just habit. If there really is a spiritual battle for our attention, then perhaps every distraction is another press of the snooze button, delaying the moment we finally stop long enough to hear God calling.

Maybe boredom is life’s way of saying, “Slow down for a minute.”

Think.

Pray.

Reflect.

Notice.

Sit with your own thoughts for long enough to hear them… and maybe hear God as well.

The Bible is full of people meeting God away from the noise. In deserts, on mountains, during long walks, on fishing boats, in places where there wasn’t much else competing for their attention.

I’m not saying God only speaks in silence, but I am starting to become convinced that silence gives us a better chance of listening. Maybe we’ve become so good at filling every empty moment that we’ve stopped asking whether those empty moments might actually have a purpose.

As an experiment, maybe the next time boredom turns up, resist the urge to dismiss it straight away. Leave your phone where it is for a minute and just sit with it. See where your mind goes. It might lead nowhere. Or it might lead to a conversation, a memory, a prayer, or a question you’ve been too busy to hear.

Either way, I’m beginning to wonder whether boredom has been knocking on the door for years and we’ve just become very good at pretending nobody’s home.

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For years, I couldn’t understand Christianity.

People voluntarily giving up their Sunday mornings. Singing songs to someone they couldn’t see. Speaking into silence with the confidence they were being heard. Eating bread and drinking wine because of events that happened long before they were born. Ordering their marriages, careers, finances and friendships around an ancient collection of writings because they believed God had spoken through them.

I’d look at all of it and think, This is a bit strange.

Then, while reading about world religions recently, I stumbled across one I’d somehow never heard of.

Its followers revere an idol known simply as the Lumen.

Unlike most sacred objects, the Lumen isn’t kept inside a temple or brought out only for religious festivals. Devotees carry it with them at almost all times, believing that prolonged separation causes unease and vulnerability. Many sleep with it within arm’s reach. Some become visibly distressed if they discover they’ve left it behind, abandoning journeys and important appointments to retrieve it.

The rituals surrounding the Lumen are extraordinary.

Traditional religions might ask for prayer once, twice or five times a day. Followers of the Lumen perform acts of devotion hundreds of times, often without conscious thought. The slightest prompting from the idol is enough to interrupt meals, conversations, celebrations and moments of quiet reflection. It is considered perfectly acceptable to stop listening to another human being if the Lumen calls.

Its influence over the emotional life of its followers is remarkable.

Small symbols appearing upon its illuminated surface are interpreted almost as omens. Certain signs produce delight. Others provoke anxiety, envy, anger or despair. Entire days can be transformed by a handful of marks delivered by the idol. If its inner light begins to weaken, worshippers immediately begin searching for places where its strength can be restored. Watching them, you’d be forgiven for thinking their own life depended on it.

The Lumen also has a priesthood of sorts. Countless voices interpret its messages, instructing followers what deserves admiration, outrage, fear and desire. Most accept these directions without question, returning to the idol again and again throughout the day lest they miss the latest revelation.

Anthropologists often point out that the easiest religion to overlook is your own.

That’s been rattling around my head for a while.

I spent years thinking Christians were the peculiar ones because they prayed before meals, sang hymns and tried to place God at the centre of their lives.

Then I walked through a city centre.

Thousands of people, heads bowed in quiet reverence. Eyes fixed on a glowing object cradled carefully in their hands. Joy, anger, comfort and identity flowing from whatever the Lumen chose to reveal next.

It suddenly occurred to me that I’d seen this congregation countless times before.

The Lumen isn’t real.

At least, the name isn’t.

The worship is.

Case submitted by: Doomscroller67

We’ve assigned your case to: Peter (John 21:20–22).

Peter was one of Jesus’ closest disciples. Brave one minute, an absolute liability the next, which is probably why I like him. I can relate to that level of unfathomable inconsistency. One minute, you’re in church, belting out ‘How Great Thou Art’ with every last fibre of your being, the next, you’re biting a hole in your bottom lip because you let someone out at a junction and they didn’t say thank you.

Near the end of John’s Gospel, Jesus tells Peter that following Him will eventually cost him everything. It’s a serious, personal moment. The kind where you’d expect Peter to stand quietly, nod solemnly and adopt some sort of pensive facial expression.

Instead, Peter spots John nearby and basically says:

“What about him?”

Brilliant!

Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them… Peter asked, “Lord, what about him?” Jesus answered, “If I want him to remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me.” (John 21:20–22)

That’s what makes it so painfully human. Peter has just been given a glimpse of his own road, and within seconds, he’s looking sideways at someone else’s.

Jesus doesn’t hand him a comparison chart.

He doesn’t say, “Good question, Peter. Here’s John’s full five-year discipleship forecast.”

He simply says:

“You follow me.”

That must’ve been infuriating.

I’d much rather know what everyone else has been allocated. Am I behind? Am I doing alright? Have I accidentally picked Hard Mode while everyone else seems to be cruising through on Easy?

Jesus refuses to play that game.

Apparently discipleship isn’t a league table.

It’s one person following one Saviour.

Social media has turned Peter’s question into an entire industry. We spend hours wondering, “What about him?” What about her? Their holiday. Their marriage. Their career. Their church. Their subscriber count.

Meanwhile, Jesus keeps giving the same answer.

You follow me.

Annoying, really.

I was hoping for a spreadsheet.

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Back to home 🏡

One phone call ended the world as I knew it.

What came next was a pizza place, a QR code, a church I swore I’d never enter — and a voice. Not a metaphor. An actual presence, with a nasty sense of humour and an unsettling knack for showing up right when things started to make sense. It heckled. It mocked. It didn’t want me getting wherever I was being led to.

Grief, faith, or losing my mind? I’m still not sure. I’m writing it down anyway.

The full story is in my book, 📕🍕The Pizza Place Providence.

This is what happened next.

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For years, I assumed sin was one of those old church words reserved for murderers, dictators and people who put milk in before the tea bag.

It sounded dramatic. Sin. Proper capital-S stuff.

I wasn’t out robbing pensioners or pushing old ladies into canals. I went to work, loved my family, paid my bills and occasionally pressed ‘yes’ when the card machine asked if I wanted to donate 25p to charity.

By my own standards, I was doing alright.

Then I started reading what the Bible actually says, and apparently, merely avoiding prison isn’t the complete moral benchmark.

Because as well as the massive crimes, He seems just as interested in why I’m still annoyed three days later that somebody spoke to me like I was thick. Why I’ll happily help somebody out, right up until it means changing my own plans. Why I can say “No, honestly, it’s fine” while mentally adding a person’s name to a list of people who’ve let me down. Why I’m pleased for somebody’s good news for the first seven seconds, before wondering why it never happens to me. Why I’ll do something kind, then quietly hope somebody notices. Why I can spend an entire day being perfectly polite while internally finding fault with nearly everyone I meet.

That feels unfairly detailed, to be honest.

I preferred my old version of morality: avoid prison, don’t be horrible to animals, put your trolley back. Job done.

Christianity, however, seems less interested in whether I can pass as a decent bloke from a distance. It wants to know what’s going on when nobody’s clapping, nobody’s watching and I’ve got absolutely nothing to gain.

“People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”
1 Samuel 16:7

Which is where it becomes a bit less like a list of rules and more like somebody has been given access to the group chat going on in my head.

Turns out, sin isn’t just a word for the sort of person who ends up on Crimewatch. It’s why ordinary people — people who love their families, pay the gas bill and return the odd trolley — can still say cruel things, keep score, dodge apologies and make a mess of the people closest to them.

It’s why “I’ll never do that again” seems to have the structural integrity of a Lidl gazebo in an October gale.

Which is not ideal news for someone who had built quite a lot of his identity around being a decent geezer.

Still, I suppose it’s useful to know the diagnosis.

Especially if somebody has already offered the cure.

Enter my bizarre conversion story

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I don’t know what I thought the Bible would be like before I started reading it properly. Probably a very long book of people behaving themselves, being sensible and occasionally saying something vaguely inspiring whilst wearing sandals and one of those white, floaty robe things.

It isn’t that.

It’s a book full of absolute nutcases!

Well, parts of it are anyway.

Abraham is basically the father of the whole faith story — the bloke God tells to leave everything behind and trust Him — yet he develops some weird penchant for repeatedly passing his wife of as his sister, despite various warnings to the contrary.

Moses is the man God chooses to lead an entire nation out of slavery, but when God gives him the job, he argues back like he’s been asked to cover someone else’s shift at work on the night all his mates are going out on a mad one.

David is the underdog who kills Goliath and becomes Israel’s greatest king, then unfathomably turns his own life into some bizarre mishmash of Love Island, Eastenders and Saving Private Ryan.

Elijah calls down fire from heaven in front of everyone, wins one of the biggest “my God is realer than your god” moments in the Bible, then immediately hides under a tree and tells God he’s had enough and would rather die.

Even the disciples, who had Jesus physically stood in front of them, regularly seem one bad afternoon away from sacking the whole thing off and going back to the much more peaceful and less demon-infested life of hauling fish out of a lake.

Oh, and get this one… I’ve literally just read Genesis 38, where a man is sent to sleep with his dead brother’s widow to get her pregnant, but after having his way with her, he pulls out, spills his semen on the ground and then God kills him. Fair enough!

I’m beginning to understand why the school performances stuck to three nice wise men following a star carrying presents for Jesus.

But somehow, all this has genuinely helped me.

Because I used to assume faith meant becoming calmer, wiser and more put together than your average Joe. The kind of person who always knows what to say when somebody is grieving, never loses their temper and has a Bible verse ready for every minor inconvenience.

But the Bible doesn’t really flatter people like that, which sort of makes it a bit easier to get on board with.

It keeps showing you frightened people, grieving people, jealous people, people who doubt, panic, leg it, say exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time, ignore God’s persistent warnings and generally behave in ways that would make you think God might have been better off pressing shift-delete and starting again.

And yet He doesn’t.

Well, ok…. he kind of does towards the start of Genesis, where he wipes everyone but Noah and his family out in the flood (I still chuckle to myself that we used to sing happy-clappy songs as 6-year-olds at school about Noah’s ark and all the animals - oblivious to the fact that we were essentially singing about a divinely ordered mass genocide).

But all in all, God doesn’t seem particularly shocked by human mess. He doesn’t wait until everyone has sorted themselves out before He gets involved. Most of the time, He seems to meet people right in the middle of their worst moment.

There’s something comforting in that — and, weirdly, something that makes it all feel more believable to me.

If the Bible was religious propaganda (think His Highness Kim Jong Un reporting to his jubilant people that North Korea won the World Cup yet again with a stunning 32-0 victory over France in the final), you’d think they’d have cleaned the heroes up a bit. You’d leave out Abraham bottling it, David arranging for a loyal soldier to die because he’d messed up and the disciples repeatedly reacting to Jesus doing miracles by somehow becoming even more confused.

You’d surely give everyone better press if you were making it up.

Instead, it reads like God’s PR department were all made redundant somewhere around the part where Adam and Eve got caught hiding behind a bush, incredulous that their plan to eat the one thing they were told would kill them wasn’t going too well.

But the cast of tainted heroes is very palatable to me, because I’ve had plenty of days where I’ve felt like I’m not doing this Christian thing very well. I still overthink. I still get angry. I still have prayers that sound less like ancient wisdom and more like a strongly worded complaint to a broadband provider.

But apparently, the Bible tells me I’m in decent company.

That’s probably why I’m starting to understand it more.

Enter my bizarre conversion story

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This verse is at the end of the caravan chapter because I couldn’t think of a more honest or fitting place to put it.

The night before, Mom had been up late watching Lee Evans on her iPad; a few hours later she was gone. That is the bit I still can’t get my head around: somebody can be laughing at Lee Evans until two in the morning, get into bed and by breakfast, the family are standing around a caravan trying to understand a world that has shattered beyond recognition.

There were phones going off, people arriving, Dad outside in pieces and all these practical questions floating about that seemed completely detached from what had actually happened. My Mom had died! Shouldn’t the sky split open, the world collectively pause for a bit or some siren play across the country to warn everyone to tiptoe with respect? At one point, I saw a bloke dragging his fishing gear across the grass towards the lake. I vividly remember thinking it was almost rude that he could just carry on with his day, while our world had been smashed apart.

Of course, he didn’t know Mom. He didn’t know any of us. To him, it was just another morning by the water.

That somehow made it worse.

“Blessed are those who mourn” I didn’t have the pleasure of knowing the Gospel that tragic morning, so it’s not exactly a verse I would have wanted somebody to wheel out in some woeful attempt to comfort me, as my kids shattered before my eyes as their Nan was carried away to some unknown morgue. I would probably have thought, lovely, cheers mate! My mom has just died and now I’m apparently blessed. Have a word with yourself!

Yet I keep coming back to it.

Jesus doen’t try to talk grief out of being grief. He doesn’t offer some neat little answer that turns death into a lesson. The comfort He promises has taken longer than I would have liked to reach me and it hasn’t not arrived in a way that suddenly makes any of what happened that day acceptable.

The sudden and brutal grief that obliterated our world that morning did real damage. Trying to make that sound holy would feel dishonest and disrespectful to my Mom. Her death was disgustingly unexpected; it tore through the life I understood and left parts of me exposed that I’d spent years covering over.

Eventually, cracks appeared in the wreckage. The jokes, distractions and certainty that I’d got life broadly figured out suddenly had very little to say for themselves. Questions I’d kept locked away for years started forcing their way in.

Somehow, God worked through those cracks and found his initially reluctant disciple.

I still can’t tell you why Mom died in that caravan after laughing at Lee Evans until two in the morning. I can’t make that day fit into a tidy Christian explanation - no matter how much Bible I read - and I still picture the fishing bloke by the lake as though he’d wandered into the wrong scene. I’m nowhere near as irrationally angry at him these days though.

Matthew 5:4 has become true for me anyway. Comfort took its time. It came gradually, through the damage grief had caused, until I realised God had found me in the middle of it. He’s been working through those broken places ever since.

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There’s a line in the story of Babel that’s been bothering me lately.

The people don’t just decide to build a tower because they fancy a big project. They say, “Let us make a name for ourselves.” That feels uncomfortably familiar when you’re trying to write about faith online.

I tell myself I’m sharing the Gospel. I want people to read something honest about grief, doubt, Jesus, all of it. And that’s true. I do want it to reach people. It’d be a strange thing to put a post on Substack, share it on Instagram, then hope nobody opens it.

But then there’s the other bit.

Checking the open rate. Refreshing the Notes. Wondering why that one got shared and this one didn’t. Thinking about who might repost it. Trying to work out whether a better title would get more clicks. Seeing somebody else’s numbers and feeling that little pinch in your stomach.

At what point am I trying to point people towards God, and at what point am I just trying to make a name for myself with a Bible verse stuck on top?

I’m not writing this because I’ve worked it out. I’m writing it because I can feel both things in me at once.

I want the writing to help somebody. I also like being told it helped. I want people to find my book. I also want that feeling of being noticed. Those aren’t identical motives and I don’t think it helps to pretend they are.

I don’t think the answer is to stop trying, either. Paul wrote letters that were meant to be read. Jesus told people to go and tell. You can’t share the Gospel while secretly hoping it goes nowhere.

Maybe the danger is making the interaction the proof that God was in it.

Because sometimes a post might quietly reach the one person who needed it, and you’ll never know. No comment. No new subscriber. No lovely message in your inbox.

Would I still write it then?

That’s the question I’m trying to keep near me.

I don’t want to build God a tower and secretly carve my own name into the bricks.

Read the weird story that got me here

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For a long time, prayer felt a bit like ringing customer services after being charged twice for something.

You only really did it when things had gone wrong. You were already annoyed before anyone answered. You had a list in your head, some fairly reasonable points to make, and the faint hope that whoever picked up might finally explain why your life had become so needlessly difficult.

That was probably closer to my relationship with God than I realised.

When illness and death tore a savage and relentless path through my nearest and dearest, I prayed because I had nowhere else to put the anger. I did not arrive peaceful or holy. I arrived exhausted, confused and increasingly convinced that somebody needed to answer for all this.

There were plenty of prayers that were basically: God! What is going on here, mate?

And fair enough, really.

The strange part is that prayer did not become meaningful because I suddenly started getting what I wanted. There were no neat answers. No heavenly customer-service representative explaining the delays and assuring me that my complaint had been escalated.

It became meaningful because, slowly, I stopped treating God like someone who owed me a solution and started speaking to Him like He was actually there, walking through it with me. I started seeing Him as a teammate.

Sometimes that still means asking for help. Sometimes it means asking the same thing repeatedly because I am tired, scared or angry. Sometimes it means sitting there with nothing clever to say at all.

But I am beginning to understand that prayer is less about submitting a case and more about refusing to carry the whole bloody thing alone.

And, considering the state of my case, that is probably a good job.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.