I’ve been using an audio app lately, which allows me - amongst other things - to listen to a daily Gospel reading as I drive to work. The app in question allows you to choose anything between a 5 minute whistle-stop Gospel reading, all the way up to a half an hour Lectio Divina with plenty of silences for reflection in between repetitions of the passage.

My satnav advised 32 minutes - with traffic - to get to school. So with this in mind, I swung the app settings to the longer version of the day’s reading and settled in to my journey, consoled by the fact that my longer-than-normal, stop-start commute would at least be wrapped in a bubble of divine serenity.

The reading began and an air of familiarity swamped the car as the quickly recognisable words of Matthew 1 drifted from the speakers.

The key moment is when Joseph has decided to divorce Mary quietly and the angel appears to him in a dream:

Matthew 1:20–21 (ESV)
“Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife…”

The angel explains that the child conceived in Mary is from the Holy Spirit, tells Joseph to name him Jesus and says he will “save his people from their sins.”

Then Matthew 1:24 gives Joseph’s response: he wakes up and does exactly what the angel commanded, taking Mary as his wife.

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Then silence. A long silence.

I instinctively glanced at the in-car screen to see if my cellular signal had dropped.

It hadn’t.

Ohhhhhh! This is the part where I’m meant to reflect?

Meditate on what I’d just heard.

Connect with God.

Ok, well…

Erm… It was good of Joseph, I guess. Kind of noble, I suppose. Well done, Joseph!

That was literally all I had. My pathetic attempt at meditation on the word of the Lord in the five minutes of silence the app afforded me before the passage played a second time. Then a third. The same weird, pointless silence punctuating every repetition of the short reading. By the final round of silence, I was contemplating a pretty much wasted 32 minutes of unproductive car time. My mind drifted away from the Lord and back to work. School. The children I was about to teach. A new school year with a new cohort. Challenging inner-city kids, trying their luck with me all week. Testing my boundaries to see how much flex could be found in the rules and expectations I had stubbornly spelt out to them a couple of days earlier.

The membrane of my bubble of divine serenity had been violated by the harshest of pins. Reality. Work. Stress incoming.

I pulled on to the school car park and for reasons I can’t explain, I sat for a while and my mind wandered back to the Gospel.

Joseph had been entrusted with a child whose arrival had disrupted his plans completely. Whatever fear, embarrassment or confusion he felt, Matthew records his response with remarkable simplicity: “he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him.” He accepted the responsibility God had placed before him and became the earthly father of a child who belonged, in the most profound sense possible, to God.

A phrase entered my head that felt like it came from outside and somehow provided a bridge between Joseph’s situation and my upcoming battle with the inner-city youth.

“Steward my children.”

Of course, the comparison only stretches so far before becoming ridiculous. I was sitting in a Dacia Sandero preparing to teach Year 6, rather than contemplating the small matter of raising the Messiah. Still, there was something in Joseph’s response that I suddenly recognised as relevant to the job waiting for me beyond the school gates. I had spent the week wondering what sort of class I had been given, when perhaps the more useful question was what I was going to do with the children I had been entrusted with.

Because they were entrusted to me. For six hours a day, five days a week and the best part of a year, these children would spend an enormous portion of their waking lives in my classroom. Their parents would send them through the gates each morning and, for those hours, I would have an extraordinary amount of influence over the way they saw themselves, the things they believed they were capable of and, to some extent, the adults they would eventually become. Viewed like that, teaching began to feel less like managing a room full of difficult personalities and more like stewardship. Stewardship of something belonging to God.

The phrase stayed with me throughout the day. It was there when I was teaching, when I was correcting behaviour and when somebody inevitably did something I had specifically asked the entire class not to do approximately thirty seconds earlier. Each time I felt the familiar irritation rising, I found myself returning to the same thought: Steward my children.

That didn’t mean lowering expectations or smiling serenely while somebody dismantled a glue stick underneath the table. Stewardship, I realised, included boundaries, consequences and occasionally telling somebody for the fourth time that a ruler was neither a musical instrument nor a weapon. These children deserved all of those things because caring for something properly sometimes requires considerably more effort than simply being nice to it.

The phrase also began to alter the way I looked at them. The child testing every boundary was still one of God’s children. So was the one who struggled to sit still, the one whose bravado concealed insecurity, the one who arrived angry before I had even taken the register and the one whose behaviour could exhaust my patience before nine thirty in the morning. I knew very little about what some of them carried into that classroom each day (it was only my third full day with them) and yet here they were, placed in my care for this small but significant stretch of their lives.

By home time, the class itself hadn’t changed particularly dramatically. They were still noisy, funny, complicated, occasionally infuriating eleven-year-olds, and I suspect several of them are at home as I type this, quietly committed to thinking of new and inventive ways to uncover whether any undiscovered loopholes existed in my behaviour policy. What had changed was the way I understood my place among them.

Perhaps that was what Joseph had given me that morning. He had been presented with circumstances he could not possibly have chosen or fully understood, yet once he recognised that God had entrusted something to him, his response became one of faithful responsibility. I could hardly claim the same clarity of divine instruction from a thought in a car park, but the principle had lodged itself firmly enough in my mind to reshape the day ahead.

I had driven to work expecting half an hour of divine serenity before returning reluctantly to reality. Instead, the strange silences I had spent most of the journey resenting had allowed an ancient story to follow me all the way into my classroom.

Steward my children.

It stayed with me then, and it has stayed with me since.

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This stretch you have laid out with your righteous hand

An illusion to none but You

It feels like chains some days, enough rope to hang my soul upon

But you made it

So it works

It trundles on

Regardless

Tick

I miss the point of it.

This road you have spoken into being with your truthful Word

A journey to all but You

It feels like you’ve drawn a ring around your people

A shrinking ring

It squeezes

Things leave me behind

Regardless

Tick

You are the point of it.

Words and photography by Chris George

© 2026 Chris George

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My foolish flesh is failing, Lord

My careless heart resides

Amongst the lowest of sordid beasts

And many more besides

Raise up your hand, my God

The one that wove my being

Open your mouth, my Lord

Speak the truth I’m not seeing

Show me the steps that Jacob saw

Light fires to show my ways

For in You I trust, my bones are dust

My limp heart disobeys

I’m worthy not, oh Lord of hosts

Of mercy you impart

Your stars that decorate the sky

Cleanse my wretched heart

Poetry and photography by Chris George

I’ve searched and searched, my God

For answers

I’ve begged and begged, my Lord

For truth

I’ve tried to shoehorn understanding

My mind is but a mote compared to you

Do the birds see it clearer, Lord?

Their untroubled cruise devoid of mental toil

Or is my leap of faith

From turmoil into grace

The freedom that you didn’t want to spoil?

Words and photography by Chris George

© 2026 Chris George

Sitting in my tabernacle,
sheltered from the truth
Grief and strife, a way of life
Morally aloof

You stood outside my tabernacle,
there you’d always been
Kind, forbearing, patient, caring
Author of the scene

Repentance came at cost to me,
but how much more to you?
A wretch like me, to finally see
The promises were true

Oh God don’t let me wave away
your purchase from above
For through your flood, and by your blood
Come righteousness and love

To make them rest together, Lord
and conquer all decay
I see how, it’s clear now
This was the only way

Words and photography by Chris George

© 2026 Chris George

Help me Lord to choose you every time
Kill my idle whims at their stem
Don’t let me take my eyes off your love
To polish stones and disregard the gem

Shape me Lord and bathe me in your Word
Cast away my ego to the sand
Bind my will to yours forever more
Help my selfish heart to understand

Forgive me Lord, I let my head be turned
By bits of foil glistening in the sun
Don’t let my heart forget where I belong
And the priceless blood that says the work is done

Words and photography by Chris George

© 2026 Chris George

Lately, I’ve been opening the Bible with genuine excitement. I’m following a Bible in a Year programme and most mornings, I begin with the hopeful suspicion that something special and personal is waiting for me in the day’s readings; a verse I have never noticed or an image that suddenly makes sense. Perhaps even one of those grand revelations that leaves me staring into the middle distance, cradling my coffee with a pensive expression, briefly convinced that I’ve become the sort of Christian who actually understands Leviticus.

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That particular morning, the programme gave me Exodus 19–20, Leviticus 13 and Psalm 74.

In a spectacularly anticlimactic turn, Leviticus 13 presented me with an extended tour of skin complaints: swellings, rashes, white hairs, raw flesh, bald patches and priests carrying out what appeared to be tediously repetitive inspections. As if the dermatological incidents had not provided enough excitement, the chapter then broadened its horizons and treated me to a deep-dive into contaminated clothing and an almost forensic exploration of mould and mildew. I understood the broad point - protecting the community, recognising disease and maintaining Israel’s laws around cleanliness - although, by that point, my spiritual enthusiasm had started developing a slight rash of its own.

I laboured through, switched to Exodus and arrived at the Ten Commandments, where things felt reassuringly - if a little tediously - familiar. No murder, stealing or adultery; honour your parents; do not covet your neighbour’s possessions. Yada yada yada! All vitally important, of course, yet I had heard them often enough to become a little too comfortable with it all. I was reading the words in a semi-engaged manner, while privately congratulating myself for already knowing all this stuff inside out. The disappointment of a relatively underwhelming Bible reading morning began to settle reluctantly in my chest.

Then, near the end of the chapter, came an instruction about building an altar:

“If you make me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of hewn stones, for if you wield your tool on it you profane it.”

Exodus 20:25

Oh, lovely! Another weird and pointless ancient rule to round off a wholly uninspiring morning, I sarcastically pondered to myself. Why would God, who had just arrived on Sinai with thunder, fire, smoke and enough drama to terrify an entire nation, suddenly develop OCD about someone giving a rock a tidy little finish? Surely a neat altar would be preferable to a pile of jagged rocks anyway. Smooth the edges, level everything properly, perhaps add a tasteful feature wall; give the Lord something worthy of appearing on Grand Designs: Wilderness Edition. Nice! Respectful!

On the verge of writing the whole session off as one of those days when the Bible simply refuses to cooperate, I found myself looking up the word hewn.

The real meaning hit me like a train.

The previous day, I had posted on Substack about the pressure I had created for myself through projects intended to glorify God: a memoir, a poetry book, a podcast, photography, Bible projects. My enthusiasm had tipped into overload. I had written that I was building a shrine to productivity instead of an altar of worship; less than twenty-four hours later, the Bible handed me a warning about overworking the stones of an altar.

My stones of productivity were being hewn to within an inch of their lives.

I had been cutting, polishing and arranging every offering, desperate to make it beautiful enough, productive enough and worthy enough. Somewhere in all that craftsmanship, the marks of my own ambition had begun to cover the thing I claimed to be building for God.

That apparently pointless rule had reached out from the pages of Exodus and answered something that had been tormenting me just the previous day. I had opened the Bible that morning wondering whether anything would speak to me; somewhere between the rashes, the mildew and the oddly specific stonework guidelines, I realised that the Bible had been reading over my shoulder the whole time.

Praise God for His Word!

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I pray the Rosary regularly now, which is not a sentence I ever expected to write. I stumbled across it during one of my endless research spirals, probably while trying to answer some completely different theological question, and decided to give it a go. It worked for me almost immediately. My mind wanders badly in prayer; the Rosary gives it structure, keeps me focused and gives me something solid to return to when my thoughts start drifting towards emails, football, shopping lists or whatever else happens to wander through.

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The Mary aspect bothered me at first. I worried that I was taking attention away from Jesus, or crossing some line I did not properly understand. Then I started paying closer attention to the mysteries themselves and realised that, across the week, I was getting a broader and more consistent meditation on the life of Christ than I ever had before. The Annunciation, the Nativity, the Baptism, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection; whatever arguments surround the Rosary, it had become for me a structured walk through the Gospel.

Then I reached the communion of saints, and things became less comfortable. I know there are endless theological debates here, involving Scripture, tradition, intercession, worship and what exactly Catholics mean when they ask a saint to pray for them. I am not getting into those debates because I do not know enough, and a few books, podcasts and late-night searches do not qualify me to pronounce on questions Christians have argued over for centuries.

What I keep wondering, though, is whether it is acceptable to take the parts that appear harmless and helpful. Can I pray the Rosary, believe that Christians remain united in Christ beyond death, and still worship happily in an Anglican church? Perhaps some of these beliefs can sit together; perhaps others genuinely contradict each other, and I am simply not far enough along to see where the fault lines are.

That is the danger, of course. I could end up treating denominations like a buffet, taking the practices I enjoy, leaving behind the doctrines that challenge me and calling the result discernment. C. S. Lewis described Christianity as a hallway with different rooms leading from it; the hallway is useful while deciding where you belong, but nobody is meant to live there forever. I am still in the corridor, although I am beginning to suspect that, eventually, I may have to choose a room.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 coming soon!

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.