My wife Rachel is currently researching our family history.

Like many people these days, she sent off one of those DNA kits for both of us and has spent the past few months uncovering stories about our ancestors. New names appear regularly. There are hints of people from places we have never visited and branches of the family stretching in unexpected directions.

Then my results came back.

Apparently, I am around 80 per cent East Anglian.

Which means that for generation after generation, my ancestors seem to have stayed exactly where they were. They worked the fields, raised families, attended local churches, and got on with things with little fuss.

No great adventures or dramatic migrations around the world. No long-lost aristocratic connections waiting to be discovered. Just ordinary people living ordinary lives in this little corner of England.

Part of me was slightly disappointed.

Another part rather liked it.

There is something comforting about the thought that countless people before me walked the same roads, worked the same land, and watched the same Suffolk skies.

Researching family history raises interesting questions. We naturally look for stories worth telling. We celebrate the ancestors who achieved something remarkable and enjoy discovering details that make our family narrative more interesting.

What we rarely do is search for the embarrassing relatives. Most families have stories that are deliberately forgotten. Some instinctively tidy their history for future generations.

Which is why I find one detail in the opening chapter of Matthew’s Gospel so fascinating.

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Most of us think addiction is a modern problem.

We picture crowded city centres on a Friday night, bottles hidden in kitchen cupboards, online gambling apps, social media feeds designed to keep us scrolling, or entire industries built around helping us forget how stressed, lonely, or exhausted we feel.

The modern world certainly offers more opportunities for escape than any previous generation could have imagined.

Yet the more I read Scripture, the more I realise that human beings have always been remarkably similar.

The technology changes, the methods change, and the substances change. But the ache underneath remains much the same.

One of the surprises waiting in the Bible is how often alcohol appears, not simply as a gift to be enjoyed, but as a way people attempt to cope with life itself.

Take Noah.

The first vineyard in Scripture appears shortly after one of the most traumatic events imaginable. Noah has survived the flood, watched the destruction of the world he once knew, and emerged into a landscape filled with loss and uncertainty.

The very next thing we hear is that he plants a vineyard, makes wine, becomes drunk, and ends up lying naked inside his tent.

The Bible offers remarkably little commentary on the event. It simply tells the story and allows us to draw our own conclusions. Yet it is difficult not to notice that one of humanity’s earliest post-flood actions involves intoxication.

Then there is Lot.

Having escaped the destruction of Sodom, Lot finds himself living in isolation with his daughters. Once again, alcohol enters the story. His daughters deliberately intoxicate him so completely that he loses awareness of what is happening around him.

The consequences ripple through generations.

— • —

The point is not that wine itself is evil. Scripture never says that. The point is that alcohol repeatedly appears at moments when people are vulnerable, frightened, traumatised, or desperate.

That pattern continues throughout the Bible.

The Book of Proverbs contains some of the most realistic observations ever written about drinking. One passage asks:

“Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has strife? Who has complaints?”

The answer comes quickly:

“Those who linger long over wine.”

The writer goes on to describe red eyes, confusion, poor decisions, and the strange determination to keep drinking despite the damage being done.

Reading it today feels surprisingly modern.

The details may have changed, but the psychology remains instantly recognisable. What is fascinating is that the Bible never seems particularly interested in alcohol alone.

It is interested in what lies beneath it.

After all, the ancient world was hardly sober. By the time we reach the New Testament, drinking cultures were deeply woven into everyday life. Wine was safer than much of the available water, served at meals, used in celebrations, and consumed at religious festivals.

— • —

Some of those festivals centred around Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, ecstasy, and intoxication.

The goal was not simply drinking.

It was pure escapism.

Participants sought release from ordinary life through any means possible. This included intoxication, music, dancing, and altered states; they pursued freedom from anxiety, responsibility, and pain.

Sound familiar?

We sometimes flatter ourselves into thinking modern society invented this struggle.

We did not.

We merely updated the technology.

The apostle Paul understood exactly what was happening around him. Writing to Christians living in cities saturated with these influences, he famously tells them:

“Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.”

For years, I read that as a simple moral instruction: drink less, pray more. Now I suspect Paul is making a deeper comparison.

Even the church at Corinth struggled with this. Paul has to rebuke believers who were becoming drunk during the Lord’s Supper itself. What was intended as a celebration of grace had become another opportunity for excess.

Human nature, it seems, has always been creative in its search for escape.

— • —

Modern psychology helps us understand something the biblical writers observed long before neuroscience existed.

Addiction is rarely about the substance alone. People become dependent for complicated reasons that can include pain, loneliness, trauma, anxiety, loss, and habits that gradually become necessities.

What begins as relief can slowly become captivity.

The Bible recognises this reality without using modern clinical language. Again and again, it points beneath the behaviour towards the deeper hunger driving it.

Many people drink because they are trying to cope with something painful. For some, that pain is emotional. For others, it may be loneliness, trauma, anxiety, grief, or circumstances that feel impossible to carry.

The method differs, but the longing remains.

It is important to say that recognising the spiritual dimension of addiction does not mean ignoring the medical one. Many people need counselling, treatment, support groups, medication, or professional help. There should be no shame in that. The church is at its best when it walks alongside people on that journey rather than judging them from a distance.

Christianity offers something remarkably radical.

Presence instead of escape.

Community instead of isolation.

Hope instead of numbness.

Meaning instead of distraction.

This does not make addiction simple. It remains a complex mixture of biology, psychology, environment, and circumstance. Anyone who has struggled with dependency, or loved someone who has, knows that willpower alone is rarely enough.

Compassion has to come first.

Yet the Bible continues to ask a challenging question that feels just as relevant today as it did three thousand years ago:

What are we really trying to escape?

Perhaps the ancient addiction problem hidden in Scripture is not ultimately about alcohol at all.

Perhaps it is about the human tendency to seek relief in things that can never fully heal the deeper wounds we carry.

The names change.

The substances change.

The centuries pass.

But the search remains the same.

Modern life is more connected than ever. So why do so many of us feel alone?

Loneliness is becoming one of the defining experiences of modern life.

The irony is that we live in an age of instant communication. We can send messages across the world in seconds, join communities built around the most obscure interests, and carry more information in our pockets than entire generations possessed.

Yet despite all of this connection, many people report feeling increasingly isolated. Something about modern life has made it easier to communicate while making it harder to belong.

I often find myself thinking about that when I look back on my childhood.

I grew up in a single-parent household, and the rhythms of life mattered. My mother was a member of our local church, and that created a sense of order and ritual in our daily lives. Visitors from the church would occasionally arrive at the house, including the Vicar. On those occasions, the best plates were dusted off, buffet food was carefully arranged, and everyone was expected to be on their best behaviour.

Sunday mornings meant church bells and familiar faces. Harvest festivals filled the church with flowers, fruit and vegetables. Lent involved a great deal of soup and a disappointing lack of cake. Christmas was the one time of year when everybody seemed to come to church, making services feel both joyful and slightly overcrowded.

At the time, I took much of it for granted.

Looking back, I can see that faith was not simply something we believed. It was something we practised together. Even those who were not particularly religious found themselves drawn into these patterns. They attended weddings, funerals and christenings. They stood for hymns, bowed their heads during prayers and participated in rituals that connected them to something larger than themselves.

Without always realising it, we shared a common language for life.

For centuries, religion did far more than shape belief. It helped shape community.

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On Sunday, I made a mistake.

My latest Substack reflection was accidentally set to publish onl…

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Most people only see the finished article.

They see the headline appear in their inbox, read the words, perhaps leave a comment, and then move on with their day. What they rarely see are all the small, ordinary moments that made that article possible.

They do not see the abandoned drafts, the ideas that went nowhere, or the mornings when the words arrived reluctantly and had to be coaxed onto the page one sentence at a time.

They certainly do not see the hundreds of days spent simply showing up.

Over the past year, Sacred & Secular has become part of the rhythm of my life. Every morning, I sit down and write. Some articles are widely read. Others disappear into the internet with little fanfare. Most begin in exactly the same way: a blank screen, a cup of tea, Hank curled up beside me and the decision to show up once again.

The visible part is the published article. The invisible part is everything that came before it.

Recently, that thought made me look at the story of David and Goliath in a different way.

It is one of the most familiar stories in the Bible. Even people who know very little about Scripture usually know the outline. A shepherd boy faces a giant warrior and wins. It is a story that has become shorthand for impossible odds and unexpected victories.

Perhaps that familiarity is precisely why we miss something important.

We focus on the battle because it is dramatic. Like a movie scene. It is the moment everyone remembers. Yet the closer I look at the story, the more convinced I become that the real lesson lies somewhere else.

It lies in the years before David ever stepped onto the battlefield.

— • —

The story actually begins with fear.

That is one detail I had never fully appreciated when I first encountered it. The Israelites are often portrayed as lacking courage, but the text itself paints a more nuanced picture. Goliath is not merely a large man. He is a professional soldier, heavily armed and battle-tested. Everything about him communicates power and superiority.

The fear of Israel is not irrational. It is entirely understandable.

For forty days, Goliath issues his challenge. Morning and evening, he appears before them, and morning and evening, nobody responds. The people stand frozen, not because they are foolish but because they recognise the reality before them. They know what they are facing.

For a long time, I assumed the lesson was that they should simply have had more faith. Yet the story itself neither mocks nor dismisses their fear. It simply presents it. The giant remains a giant. The threat remains real. Nothing about the situation changes.

Then David arrives.

What is striking is that David sees exactly the same thing everyone else sees. He hears the same challenge. He looks at the same warrior. He understands the same danger. The difference is not that he possesses information nobody else has.

The difference lies in what has shaped him.

When Saul questions him, David does something unexpected. Instead of talking about the giant, he talks about sheep. He recalls protecting his father’s flock from lions and bears, and at first glance, the detail feels almost irrelevant. We want to get to the battle. David keeps dragging the conversation back to the field.

Yet that field is the key to understanding everything.

— • —

Long before David became famous, he was simply a shepherd carrying out ordinary responsibilities. Day after day, he watched sheep. Day after day, he dealt with problems nobody else noticed. Day after day, he learned what it meant to be faithful in situations that attracted no applause and generated no recognition.

Nobody was celebrating those years.

Nobody was writing songs about them.

Most people probably never knew they happened.

Yet those hidden years mattered. In fact, they may have mattered more than the battle itself.

As I reflected on that, I realised how often Scripture follows this pattern. Moses spends years tending sheep before confronting Pharaoh. Joseph spends years forgotten in prison before becoming one of the most powerful men in Egypt. Even Jesus spends the vast majority of his earthly life away from public attention.

Again and again, God seems content to work slowly.

Formation often takes place in seasons that appear entirely ordinary. We tend to focus on the visible moments because they are easier to identify. We notice promotions, achievements, breakthroughs, and successes. Those are the moments that attract attention and become stories people tell.

The quieter seasons rarely receive the same treatment.

The years spent raising children.

The decades spent faithfully turning up to work.

The countless acts of kindness that are quickly forgotten by everyone except the person who received them.

The ordinary routines that feel repetitive and uneventful.

Yet perhaps those are the places where character is formed.

The longer I write, the more convinced I become that this is true. People occasionally ask how I manage to publish so frequently. The answer is disappointingly simple. I sit down and write. Then I do the same thing the following day, and the day after that.

There is no secret formula.

What readers eventually see is only the visible tip of something much larger. Every article rests upon countless hours of practice, mistakes, revisions, reading, reflection, and persistence. The published piece is not really the story. It is simply evidence that another story has been unfolding quietly in the background for a very long time.

I wonder whether David and Goliath works in much the same way.

Looking back, I can see this pattern in my own life. The articles people remember are rarely the result of a single burst of inspiration. They emerge from hundreds of ordinary mornings spent reading, praying, thinking, and writing. Most of that work is invisible, yet without it the visible part would never exist.

— • —

We often treat the battle as the defining moment, but perhaps it is better understood as the revealing moment. The battlefield did not suddenly create David’s courage. It revealed what years of faithfulness had already produced.

That shifts the story's emphasis quite dramatically.

Instead of asking whether we would have the courage to face a giant, perhaps we should be asking what is shaping us right now. What habits are taking root in our lives? What values are being formed? What kind of people are we becoming through the countless ordinary moments that make up our days?

Those questions are far less dramatic than a giant standing on a battlefield, but they are far more relevant to most of us.

Very few people will experience a moment that changes history. Most of us will spend our lives doing ordinary things. We will care for families, serve communities, help friends, fulfil responsibilities, and strive to be faithful with whatever has been placed before us.

David’s story suggests that those ordinary moments are not separate from God’s work.

They are God’s work.

The sheep field mattered. The lonely hours mattered. The unnoticed responsibilities mattered. They were shaping a person long before anyone realised what was happening.

Most of us are unlikely to stand before a giant tomorrow. Yet all of us will wake up to another ordinary day filled with seemingly small decisions and responsibilities. Scripture suggests that those moments are far more significant than they appear.

Because while we are busy living them, they are shaping the people we are becoming and those around us.

The question is not whether those ordinary moments matter.

The question is what they are making of us, long before anybody else notices the work taking place.

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I would not have been regarded as a successful school pupil.

At least, that was the conclusion most people reached.

Throughout my school years, I struggled with almost anything involving reading and writing. Words seemed to behave differently for me than they did for other children. I could read a paragraph, then find it had vanished from my memory moments later. Spelling tests were a disaster, and written assignments took me far longer than they appeared to take everyone else.

The reports that came home were often variations on the same theme: “Needs to try harder.” “Could do better if he applied himself.” “Further education may not be suitable.”

Looking back, I understand why those comments were written. Nobody was being cruel. The problem was that during my childhood, many schools simply did not recognise dyslexia in the way they do today. The assumption was that if a child struggled with reading and writing, they either lacked ability or lacked effort. The possibility that their brain might process information differently was rarely considered.

As a result, I spent much of my childhood believing I was failing at something everyone else found easy.

When I left school, I built a successful career in aviation. I learnt to work around my limitations. If a task involved reading, I would find another way. If something took me twice as long as it took everyone else, I simply accepted that I would have to work twice as hard. It was exhausting at times, but it worked.

Years later, something unexpected happened. With a lot of hard work, I completed not one but two degrees, and then trained to become a priest. Somewhere during that journey, I was formally diagnosed with profound dyslexia.

The diagnosis was a revelation for me. It was a relief to discover there was a reason things had always felt harder. It was not laziness. It was not a lack of intelligence.

My brain simply processed information differently.

What surprised me most, however, was what happened next. The thing I had spent much of my life seeing as a weakness slowly became one of my greatest strengths.

— • —

I discovered this most clearly during ministry. Reading publicly from the Bible was never easy. Words can appear differently to me. Sentences can shift around, and reading from a manuscript requires enormous concentration; otherwise, what would come out of my mouth would be very different from the text. Preaching from detailed notes was even harder. Most clergy can work from a carefully prepared script, but I found that almost impossible. If I looked down too often, I would lose my place. Words would come out differently.

As a result, I had to develop a different approach.

I learnt the passage. I lived within it. I walked around thinking about it, prayed through it, and carried it with me during the week until it became part of me. Rather than learning a sermon, I learnt the story. Rather than memorising sentences, I memorised the meaning.

Over time, I developed the ability to stand up and speak from the heart because I knew the passage so well that I no longer needed to read it. What began as a limitation became a strength, one that I refined over more than a decade and one that eventually led me somewhere I never expected to be: writing professionally.

If you had shown my school reports to my younger self and then told him that one day he would earn his living through writing, he would have laughed. Or perhaps cried. Quite possibly both.

— • —

Whenever I think about my journey, I find myself drawn to the story of Moses.

God calls Moses in a dramatic way from inside a burning bush.

His response? He immediately begins listing reasons why he is the wrong person. He questions his own worthiness, worries that people will not believe him, and doubts that anyone will listen. Then comes perhaps the most revealing objection of all. Moses tells God that he has never been eloquent.

He points directly to what he sees as his weakness. He is not a gifted speaker. He is not persuasive, and therefore, he is not the obvious choice. In other words, Moses does exactly what many of us do. He looks at his limitations and assumes they disqualify him.

God sees things differently.

The remarkable thing is that God does not spend much time arguing with Moses about his weakness. Instead, he reminds Moses that he will not be facing the task alone.

Moses focuses on what he lacks. God focuses on what he can become and who will be with him.

I suspect many of us spend our lives caught between those two perspectives. We become experts at noticing our deficiencies. We remember the subjects we failed, the opportunities we missed, the things we cannot do as well as other people, and the weaknesses we wish would disappear.

What we rarely consider is that some of those weaknesses may become the very places where our calling is formed.

— • —

I would never have chosen dyslexia. Given the option, I would gladly have accepted the ability to read effortlessly and remember most of what I encountered. Yet if I had been given that choice, I would never have developed the skills that dyslexia forced me to learn.

I might never have learnt how to absorb a biblical story so deeply that I could speak about it without notes. I might never have developed the discipline required to complete degrees despite the difficulties. I might never have become the writer I am today.

The weakness would have gone, but the gifts that emerged from wrestling with it might have gone as well.

Of course, that does not mean every struggle is good, nor does it mean every limitation has a hidden blessing waiting around the corner. Some difficulties remain painful, and some burdens never become strengths. But sometimes, when we look back over our lives, we discover that God has been working through the very things we wished he would remove.

Perhaps that is why I find so much comfort in the story of Moses.

God did not choose Moses because he was the obvious candidate. He chose him despite all the reasons Moses believed he should be ruled out.

I wonder how many of us carry around our own version of those school reports. Perhaps they do not exist on paper. Perhaps they are words spoken by a parent, a teacher, an employer, or even ourselves. Messages we have repeated so often that they feel like facts.

You are not clever enough.

You are not talented enough.

You are too old.

Too young.

Too broken.

Too ordinary.

Too late.

Yet the Bible is full of stories about people who believed those things about themselves, only to discover that God saw something different.

Perhaps the greatest mistake we make is assuming that our weaknesses tell us who we are.

Moses thought his lack of eloquence disqualified him. I thought dyslexia disqualified me. You may have your own reason for believing that God could never use you in a particular way.

But what if the thing you see as a limitation is not the end of the story?

What if it is the beginning?

The things we see as disqualifications may not be disqualifications at all.

They may simply be the place where God begins.

My earliest memory is strangely unremarkable.

I am sitting in a buggy.

I must have been about five years old. I remember where we were, roughly what period of my childhood it must have been, and the sensation of being pushed along. Absolutely nothing dramatic happened. There was no family celebration, accident, or great revelation. It seemed like an ordinary moment on an ordinary day.

Yet somehow, more than fifty years later, I still remember it.

At least, I think I do.

That is where things become interesting.

How do I know I am remembering it correctly?

I have become fascinated by memory. Some events disappear almost completely. I can barely remember entire years of my childhood. Faces blur. Conversations fade. Places that once seemed important now seem difficult to picture.

Yet tiny fragments remain, like a broken mirror.

A buggy.

A street.

A smell.

A hot day.

A particular shaft of sunlight through a window.

Sometimes I experience those memories through my younger eyes. At other times, I seem to be watching them from outside, as though a camera were following the scene. They feel vivid and real. I can almost step back inside them.

— • —

Modern psychology tells us that memory is not as straightforward as we like to imagine. We do not store our experiences like files in a cabinet. Every time we remember something, we reconstruct, fill in the gaps and connect fragments. We shape a story from pieces that remain.

Which raises an uncomfortable possibility.

What if some of the things I remember never happened exactly as I remember them?

The question may seem challenging, but it might not be as concerning as it appears.

After all, most of life depends upon memory.

Families are built upon remembered stories. Entire identities are shaped by things we have been told about ourselves. We remember holidays, friendships, losses and achievements. We tell those stories again and again, often refining them each time we do.

When families gather around a table, it is remarkable how often the same stories emerge.

Do you remember when…

Everyone laughs.

Someone corrects a detail.

Someone else remembers something different.

Gradually, a fuller picture appears.

No one has a transcript of the event, nor was anyone taking notes at the time. Yet together they preserve something that matters deeply to the whole family.

The story survives because it is shared.

I think this is why I am curious when people speak about memory as if it were useless unless it is perfect.

The truth is that none of us lives that way.

I cannot tell you the exact words spoken on my wedding day. I cannot reproduce conversations I had at school or quote my grandparents word for word.

Yet I have no doubt that those moments happened. More importantly, I have no doubt about what they meant. I remember the love. I remember the joy. I remember the sense of belonging. The precise words may have faded, but the significance remains.

There is a difference between remembering every detail and remembering the truth of an experience.

I think that distinction is important.

When my children were younger, there were countless ordinary moments that felt insignificant at the time. Family walks. Meals together. Sometimes stressful school runs. Random conversations in the car.

I suspect they remember some of those moments differently than I do. Perhaps they remember things I have forgotten entirely. That does not mean one of us is lying; it just means memory is a shared act of preservation.

We hold different pieces of the same story, and when we come together, we get a more complete picture.

— • —

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I am a follower of a mediocre football team in the second tier of English football.

For more than thirty years, I have followed them, and during that time, they have been masterful underachievers. Yet, I remain a paid-up member. I watch the matches, buy the merchandise, and consume far more club content than any sensible person probably should.

Why?

Perhaps it is because it feels good to belong. It feels good to be part of something bigger than the routines and responsibilities of everyday life.

Most of us follow something.

A football club. A political movement. A favourite author. A social cause. A particular way of seeing the world.

If my loyalty to a mediocre football team seems questionable, it is nothing compared to the commitment required to follow Jesus.

— • —

People followed Jesus seemingly without asking many questions. After all, consider the way he recruited his first disciples.

Jesus is walking beside the Sea of Galilee when he sees two brothers, Peter and Andrew, casting their nets into the water. They are fishermen, working in a trade that probably supported their families for generations. This is their livelihood, their routine, and the centre of their daily lives.

Jesus looks at them and says two words.

“Follow me.” (Matthew 4:19)

And they leave.

Yesterday, we explored the calling of Matthew and how following Jesus involved leaving behind an old identity. Peter and Andrew respond in a remarkably similar way. They abandon their nets almost immediately.

Just two words, and these men walk away from the security of everything they have ever known.

Walking away from everything they knew meant a complete change of identity. In Matthew's case, that may seem more obvious because he was a tax collector. Yet Peter, Andrew, James and John were fishermen, and fishing was all they had ever known.

The big question is, why would anyone leave their job because a travelling teacher asked them to come along?

To understand why this moment made sense to those first disciples, we need to understand what the phrase “follow me” meant in the world Jesus inhabited.

— • —

In the Jewish world of the first century, the relationship between a rabbi and his disciples sat at the heart of religious learning.

Children were taught the Torah from a young age and learned the foundational stories of Israel. Many memorised large sections of scripture. The most promising students sometimes continued their studies under a rabbi, learning how to interpret and apply God’s law to everyday life.

But becoming a disciple was not automatic.

Normally, the student approached the rabbi and requested permission to follow him. The rabbi might test the student’s knowledge, ask questions about scripture, and decide whether the applicant showed enough promise to continue. Many did not make the cut, so they returned home and took up the family trade.

Those who were accepted entered a demanding apprenticeship.

The goal was not simply to learn information. The goal was to become like the rabbi.

This idea was captured in a famous Jewish blessing:

“May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi.”

The image behind the phrase is vivid. A disciple walks so closely behind the teacher on dusty roads that the dust kicked up by the rabbi’s sandals settles on the disciple’s clothes.

To follow a rabbi meant living close enough to observe everything. How he interpreted scripture. How he prayed. How he treated difficult people. How he responded to everyday situations.

Discipleship was as much about imitation as it was about instruction.

— • —

Ancient Jewish traditions reveal just how seriously students took this calling.

Some stories describe disciples following their rabbis almost everywhere, carefully observing how they behaved in every situation. The aim was not merely to understand the rabbi’s teaching but to absorb the pattern of his life.

One well-known account tells of a student hiding beneath his rabbi’s bed in order to observe everything the teacher did. When discovered, he defended himself by explaining that he was simply trying to learn.

To modern ears, the story sounds slightly absurd. Yet it reveals something important about how discipleship was understood.

Every action mattered because the disciple’s goal was to become like the teacher.

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One of the strangest things about early retirement is discovering how much of your identity was tied to your work.

When people ask what I do now, I still hesitate before answering. It feels like a loaded question.

For more than a decade, I was a parish priest. It was not simply a job. It shaped my routines, my relationships, my sense of purpose, and my understanding of myself. If somebody asked who I was, being a priest would almost certainly have featured somewhere near the beginning of the answer.

Then chronic illness brought that chapter to an unexpected end.

My retirement arrived much earlier than I had ever imagined. Suddenly, a role that had occupied a huge part of my life was gone.

The practical challenges were significant enough, but what surprised me most was the deeper question that emerged underneath them all.

Who am I now?

I suspect most people encounter that question at some point.

Sometimes it arrives through retirement. Sometimes through redundancy, bereavement, illness, divorce, parenthood, or simply the passing of time. Sooner or later, many of us discover that the story we tell ourselves about who we are no longer fits quite as comfortably as it once did.

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Welcome to the Editor’s Letter for May, and to all subscribers of Sacred & Secular. A chance to pause and reflect on this community of ours.

The first thing I want to say is thank you.

May has been another record month, and our community here has grown by around a third. I genuinely appreciate the support, encouragement, and kindness that so many of you show through your subscriptions, comments, and messages.

One of the greatest joys of this month has been the increase in conversation. More and more readers are commenting on articles, sharing their own reflections, and engaging with one another. I love hearing your thoughts on the pieces I write and the ways they connect with your own lives and experiences. Writing can sometimes feel like a solitary activity, but these conversations remind me that it is anything but.

I never begin a month with a detailed plan of what I am going to write. I tend to follow the ideas that capture my attention and prayerfully see where they lead. What always surprises me is looking back at the end of the month and discovering that certain themes have appeared again and again.

May was no exception.

Looking back, it seems I have leaned toward the mystery side of faith, with articles exploring subjects such as angels, the Trinity, prayer, and some of the Bible's stranger stories. Again and again, I found myself resisting neat answers and choosing instead to sit with the mystery for a little longer.

There is something deeply valuable about acknowledging that not every question has an immediate solution and not every mystery needs to be solved.

On a personal level, it has also been a challenging month. We have experienced several periods of unusually warm weather here in the UK, and heat tends to have a significant impact on my illness. As a result, I have written more openly about Long Covid, chronic fatigue, and the realities of living with an unpredictable condition.

Despite that, I feel quite proud that I have managed to continue publishing daily reflections throughout the month. I have also managed to create a small shaded corner in the garden, which is already becoming a favourite place to sit and write. If the warm weather continues, I suspect I will be spending quite a lot of time there.

So what will June bring?

As usual, that remains something of a mystery. Some of my favourite articles have been the ones I never planned to write. I am certain, however, that I will continue exploring familiar Bible stories, looking for hidden details and forgotten perspectives, while connecting their themes with the ordinary lives we all share.

I will also continue publishing reflections on the Sunday lectionary readings on the Tuesday beforehand for those who attend churches that follow the lectionary. Those pieces have become a regular rhythm in the newsletter, and I greatly enjoy writing them.

If there is a topic, question, Bible passage, or article idea that you would like me to explore, please do get in touch. I love receiving your emails and messages, and I do my best to reply to every one.

Finally, if you are currently a free subscriber and have been considering supporting the newsletter, we would love to have you on board. Paid subscribers receive daily reflections designed to provide a brief moment of thoughtful reflection each day, preferably accompanied by a good cup of tea.

To everyone who has become a paid subscriber this month, thank you. Your support makes this work possible, and I am deeply grateful for it.

Thank you for reading, commenting, encouraging, and travelling alongside me. I am looking forward to sharing the journey with you as we head into June.

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People seem to be fascinated by angels.

Over the years, I have spent a surprising amount of time talking about them, debating them, and listening to people tell stories of what they perceive as angelic intervention.

Some of those stories are remarkable. A stranger appears at exactly the right moment. A warning arrives just in time. A chance encounter prevents a tragedy. The details vary, but the conclusion is usually the same.

“It felt like an angel was watching over me.”

I understand why such stories capture people’s imagination. They suggest that we are not alone. That there is more happening beneath the surface of reality than we can see.

Yet whenever I hear these accounts, another question follows.

Why don’t angels help all the time?

It is not a cynical question. It is an honest one.

Because there have been periods in my own life when angelic assistance would have been extremely useful. I suspect most people can say the same.

There have been seasons of illness that seemed to stretch endlessly ahead. Times when prayers appeared to vanish into silence. Moments spent with people facing grief, loss, or uncertainty where a dramatic intervention would have changed everything.

As a priest, I have sat beside hospital beds and listened to stories of suffering that no one would willingly choose. I have prayed with families facing devastating news and stood alongside people carrying grief that seemed impossible to bear. As someone living with chronic illness, I have asked my own questions about why help sometimes seems absent when it is needed most.

If angels exist, and if divine protection is real, why does help appear so inconsistent?

The question becomes even more difficult when we turn to the Bible.

— • —

Stories of angelic intervention appear throughout its pages. Angels rescue people from danger. They bring messages, offer guidance, and sometimes alter the course of events entirely. One disciple is freed from prison in the middle of the night. Chains fall away, and locked gates open before him.

It is exactly the kind of story that fuels belief in supernatural intervention.

Yet there is something curious about the biblical pattern.

The same disciple who is dramatically rescued does not spend the rest of his life protected from harm. In fact, tradition tells us he eventually dies for his faith. Another early Christian leader survives beatings, imprisonment, shipwrecks, and countless dangers before meeting a similar fate.

The Bible never presents divine help as a guarantee of permanent rescue.

That observation challenges one of our deepest assumptions.

Many of us instinctively equate protection with prevention. If God is protecting someone, we assume nothing bad should happen to them. If suffering occurs, we conclude that protection has somehow failed.

Yet Scripture repeatedly presents a more complicated picture.

One of the clearest examples comes from the life of Jesus himself.

During his temptation in the wilderness, he is challenged to throw himself from a great height. The reasoning is simple enough. If God truly cares for him, angels will surely catch him.

Jesus refuses.

He does not deny the existence of angels or God’s care. Instead, he rejects the idea that divine protection means immunity from danger.

Later in his story, angels do appear. They minister to him after the wilderness. They strengthen him in Gethsemane as he faces arrest and death.

They do not remove the suffering.

The betrayal still happens.

The cross still happens.

Help comes, but not in the form many of us would choose.

Perhaps that is where this question begins to change.

What if protection is not always the same thing as prevention?

What if divine help sometimes removes the danger, but at other times provides the strength needed to endure it?

— • —

When I look back on difficult periods of my own life, I cannot say that every prayer was answered the way I wanted. There were situations I desperately wished would change, and they did not. There were problems that remained stubbornly present.

Yet I can also see moments when unexpected strength arrived.

People appeared at the right time.

Encouragement came when it was needed most.

The capacity to keep going emerged long after I thought I had reached my limit.

None of those experiences would qualify as dramatic angel stories. They are unlikely to appear in books or documentaries. They are subtle, easily explained away, and impossible to prove.

Yet they matter.

Perhaps we notice rescue because it is spectacular. We often miss strengthening because it is subtle.

That may be why the Bible contains both kinds of stories. Sometimes prison doors open. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes danger is removed. Sometimes courage is given to face it.

That pattern is not neat enough to satisfy our desire for certainty. It is, however, honest enough to reflect real life.

The hardest questions remain.

Why wasn’t my loved one healed?

Why did help not come when it was needed most?

Why did suffering continue?

Scripture never fully resolves those questions, and neither can I. What it does offer is permission to ask them. The Bible is full of people wrestling with apparent silence, confusion, and disappointment. Their questions are not edited out. They are preserved as part of the story.

Perhaps that is significant.

Faith is not the absence of difficult questions. It is often the willingness to keep asking them.

So why don’t angels always help?

I suspect the answer is that intervention is only one form of help.

Sometimes help looks like rescue.

Sometimes it looks like endurance.

Sometimes it looks like strength arriving one day at a time.

And perhaps the deepest promise is not that every valley will be avoided, but that even in the darkest ones, we do not walk alone.

A reader left a comment on one of my recent articles that caught my attention immediately.

It was not a complicated theological question, just a simple observation from someone reading the Bible carefully.

“The Bible lists several people who lived longer than 500 years, with the longest being 969, I think. Was that actually true, or was it just examples of longer lives?”

I love questions like that.

Partly because they are honest, and I have asked them myself. Partly because they force us to stop skimming familiar passages. But most of all because they remind us that many of the things we take for granted in Scripture are actually quite strange when we stop and look at them.

After all, imagine reading Genesis for the first time.

Adam lives 930 years.

Seth reaches 912.

Jared lives 962.

Methuselah manages an astonishing 969 years.

By comparison, most of us would be delighted with eighty or ninety. So what are we supposed to do with numbers like these?

Did people really live for centuries? Or is something else happening in the text?

Read more

Chronic fatigue is unpredictable.

One minute I can be sitting at my desk writing a reflection or answering messages. The next, I wake up slumped over the keyboard, completely disoriented, wondering how long I have been asleep.

It is difficult to explain to people who have never experienced it. Fatigue is not the same as simply feeling tired. It arrives almost like hitting a wall. There are days when my body simply stops negotiating, and all my plans have to be thrown out.

Managing it becomes a constant juggling act. A balancing of expectations against what I can actually manage. Some people understand. Others quietly assume you are lazy, unmotivated, or exaggerating.

— • —

Modern life leaves little room for exhaustion. We admire productivity, energy, efficiency, and resilience. We praise people for pushing through. Slowing down feels almost shameful.

Perhaps that is why a strange little story in the book of Acts has resonated with me recently.

It is a story about someone falling asleep during a sermon.

Most people vaguely remember the story. A young man called Eutychus is listening to the apostle Paul speaking late into the evening. Paul keeps talking until midnight. Eutychus falls asleep in the window and tumbles from the third floor to the pavement below.

It sounds almost humorous when summarised quickly. Of course, I have never had anyone fall asleep in my sermons, probably …..

But the older I get, the more compassionate I become toward Eutychus.

Luke gives us several small details that completely change the atmosphere of the story if you slow down enough to notice them.

Read more

I have always been someone who dreams a lot.

Some dreams are easy to explain. They are the classic stress dreams where you wake up, realising your brain simply recycled whatever you were thinking about before bed.

Other dreams are completely bizarre. Familiar people appear in impossible places. Conversations make no sense. Entire situations unfold like a movie, with the kind of strange logic that only seems believable while you are asleep.

When I was younger, I had a recurring nightmare about some kind of monster under the bed. I cannot even remember exactly what it looked like now, but it was very real, and I was terrified. I would lie awake staring into the darkness, convinced something was there waiting for me. It lasted for years.

Then one day it simply stopped.

No explanation.

No dramatic moment of closure.

The dream just vanished from my life as suddenly as it had arrived.

Dreams are strange like that. Even as adults, long after we stop believing in monsters under the bed, dreams still have the ability to affect us. Sometimes they linger in the mind or heart for hours after waking. Occasionally for days. We know they are not “real” in the ordinary sense, and yet they still affect us emotionally as if they were.

— • —

Human beings have always been fascinated by dreams.

Ancient cultures often treated them as messages from the gods. Modern psychology usually approaches them as expressions of the subconscious mind. Most of us are somewhere in between, wondering if dreams mean anything at all.

The Bible has a surprisingly interesting answer to that question.

Not because scripture dismisses dreams, but because it treats them very differently from the way modern people often do.

One of the first things you notice when reading the Bible carefully is that dreams almost always appear at moments when something larger is changing.

Joseph dreams before the future of his family changes forever. Pharaoh dreams before famine transforms Egypt. Nebuchadnezzar dreams before empires rise and fall.

Even Joseph, the husband of Mary, receives dreams at the moment the story of Jesus enters the world.

Dreams in scripture are rarely about private self-discovery. They are usually connected to history, direction, warning, or change.

That feels very different from the way we talk about dreams now. Today, we often see dreams as windows into ourselves. The biblical writers tend to see them as windows into the wider story unfolding around us.

Yet what fascinates me most is that the Bible is also deeply cautious about dreams.

That surprised me when I first began noticing it.

Read more

Every time I go into the biggest town near where I live, it is the same.

I pass people sleeping in tunnels, sitting in shop doorways, or huddled beneath blankets in places that were never meant to be homes. Sometimes they hold a cardboard sign asking for help. Sometimes they simply sit and watch the crowds pass by.

I never quite know what to do.

Part of me wants to stop. Another part hesitates. I have heard all the arguments. Some people say the money will be spent on drugs or alcohol. Others insist that some people choose to remain on the streets. I have no way of knowing the full story of the person sitting in front of me.

What I do know is that they are human beings.

Yet it is surprisingly easy to keep walking. It is easy to tell myself that somebody else will help. Easy to throw a few coins into a cup and feel as though I have discharged my responsibility. Easy to conclude that their situation is not really my problem.

That thought has always challenged me.

Because it sounds remarkably close to one of the most famous questions in the Bible:

“Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The older I get, the more I realise that the hardest moral questions are not always the dramatic ones. Most of us are unlikely to face decisions involving life and death. What we face instead are countless smaller moments when another person’s need brushes briefly against our own lives.

Sometimes we stop. Sometimes we help. Sometimes we look away.

More often than we might like to admit, we simply carry on walking.

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It happened every year around this time.

The week before Trinity Sunday would arrive, and fellow clergy would begin desperately emailing one another in search of that killer illustration that could finally explain the Trinity.

Someone would suggest a three-leafed clover.

Someone else would mention water existing as liquid, ice, and steam.

I remember using Neapolitan ice cream at one point, complete with a visual representation that melted before the service started.

I even heard elephants brought into the conversation somewhere along the way.

The goal was always the same. We wanted to find an image that would make the Trinity relatable and understandable.

After all, the doctrine seems confusing on the surface. Christians believe in one God, yet speak of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Three persons, yet one God. It is hardly surprising, then, that preachers approach Trinity Sunday with a certain amount of nervousness.

The congregation would usually be kind enough to affirm whatever attempt I had made that year. Maybe apart from the ice cream.

Looking back, I am no longer convinced any of us were getting particularly close. We were sincere, of course. We genuinely wanted people to understand. I am just no longer sure understanding was ever the point.

Perhaps I am simply more comfortable with mystery now than I once was.

When I was younger, I often felt the need to have answers. I wanted things to fit neatly together. If somebody asked a difficult theological question, I assumed there ought to be a satisfactory explanation waiting somewhere, and I would be frustrated if I didn’t know it.

Life has gradually cured me of that assumption.

Not because I have become less interested in theology. If anything, I am more interested than ever. Rather, I have become increasingly aware of the limits of human understanding.

The Trinity sits precisely at that point, at the edge of what can be understood and the beginning of what can only be contemplated.

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A few years ago, we were out on a family walk that was proving rather less idyllic than I had imagined.

The children were tired. Somebody’s shoes were inappropriate. Somebody else wanted to know how much further we had to go. The conversation had settled into that familiar rhythm many parents will recognise: a mixture of negotiation, encouragement and mild exasperation.

We were focused on the next few steps, and I was beginning to wonder why we bothered.

Then we rounded a hill and everything changed.

Before us was a view so vast that conversation simply stopped. Villages sat scattered across the landscape. Fields stretched towards the horizon. Roads wound through the countryside like tiny threads. It felt as though God had unrolled a giant carpet across the earth.

For a few moments, nobody said anything.

The complaints vanished. The stress evaporated. Even our dog simply stood there looking.

Nothing about our circumstances had changed. The walk was still long, and the children were still tired. Yet somehow everything felt different.

Scale has a way of doing that.

Sometimes all it takes is a glimpse of something larger than ourselves to rearrange our perspective.

I often think about that moment when I read Isaiah’s extraordinary vision of God in the temple.

— • —

“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord...”

This vision begins in a year marked by uncertainty. A long-reigning king has died. The future feels fragile. National security, identity and direction are all in question.

It is precisely at this moment of instability that Isaiah is given a glimpse of something infinitely larger than the crisis before him.

“I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple.”

It is a remarkable detail. Not the throne or the full figure. Not even the glory in its entirety.

Just the hem of the robe fills the temple.

The proportions do not make sense. The temple, the very place where God’s presence was understood to dwell, cannot contain even the edge of what Isaiah sees.

Seraphim call to one another:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”

The thresholds shake. The temple fills with smoke. Sound, movement and obscurity combine into a scene that is anything but controlled.

This is not a comforting spiritual thought for the day.

It is sensory overload.

Isaiah encounters a reality that refuses to fit inside ordinary categories.

— • —

There are many points in my life when I preferred a smaller God.

Not because I rejected him, but because small things are easier for all of us to manage.

Modern life trains us to organise, categorise and optimise. We want things to make sense. We want problems that can be solved and questions that can be answered. We value clarity, efficiency and outcomes.

Faith can drift in the same direction.

We want God to reassure us, guide us and support our plans. We want a faith that integrates neatly into the rest of life without disrupting it too much.

Isaiah encounters something rather less convenient.

He does not see a projection of human preferences. He sees a reality so immense that language begins to strain. The word “holy” is repeated three times because once is not enough. In the Hebrew world, repetition intensified meaning. To say something three times was to push it to its absolute limit.

This is not merely goodness.

It is otherness.

A holiness so vast that it resists every attempt to reduce it.

I wonder how often we do exactly that. Faced with mystery, we quickly retreat into explanation. We tell ourselves that God is beyond understanding and then move on to something more manageable.

It sounds humble, but sometimes it is also avoidance.

We prefer mystery acknowledged rather than mystery inhabited.

Isaiah does not look away.

He stands within it.

— • —

Isaiah’s first response is to suddenly realise his place in the universe:

“Woe to me! I am ruined.”

Confronted with immensity, he becomes aware of his own smallness.

This is not self-hatred. It is a response.

The same thing happens when we stand beside an ocean, look up at a mountain range or stare into a sky full of stars. For a moment, we are reminded that we are not the centre of everything.

Strangely enough, that can be deeply liberating.

Much of life is spent focused on what is immediately in front of us. We worry about outcomes we cannot control and become absorbed in concerns that feel all-consuming. Our field of vision narrows until those concerns seem to be the whole story.

Suddenly, Isaiah sees himself differently. He discovers that the temple is not large enough to contain God’s glory.

The seraphim declare that the whole earth is full of it.

The whole earth.

Reality itself is saturated with the presence of God.

Yet most of us move through our days without noticing.

— • —

Only after the vision does the voice ask:

“Whom shall I send?”

Isaiah responds:

“Here am I. Send me.”

The commission comes after the encounter.

Awe precedes action.

We often reverse the order. We want purpose before wonder. We seek clarity about our calling before allowing ourselves to stand in mystery. We want answers before we have learned how to be astonished.

Perhaps that is one reason our faith can sometimes feel thin.

Our imagination narrows.

Our expectations shrink.

Our prayers become limited by what we can already foresee.

Isaiah’s vision refuses all of that. The robe fills the temple. The foundations shake. Smoke obscures the edges of sight. Nothing is easily contained.

The scene restores proportion.

It reminds Isaiah that God is not simply a larger version of ourselves. He is not an extension of our assumptions or a supporter of our existing plans.

He is infinitely more.

— • —

A God we can fully comprehend would be no larger than our own minds.

A God who fits neatly into our categories cannot reshape them.

When we encounter something that feels too large to understand, we stand at a threshold. The question is whether we retreat or remain.

Isaiah remains.

A burning coal touches his lips. There is cleansing, but there is also participation. The vastness does not paralyse him. Instead, it sends him.

Mystery becomes the foundation of mission.

That seems deeply relevant in a culture that prizes measurable achievement. Wonder can feel unproductive because it does not tick boxes or generate immediate results. It often appears inefficient.

I often think back to that family walk. The children still had to walk back down the hill. The journey was not suddenly easier. None of the practical realities had changed.

What changed was our perspective.

For a few moments, we had stopped looking at our feet and started looking at the horizon.

I suspect Isaiah experienced something similar, although on a far grander scale. His circumstances had not changed either. The political uncertainty remained. His future calling would not be easy. Yet after seeing God, those realities no longer occupied the centre of the picture.

Perhaps that is one reason we need moments of wonder.

Not because they solve our problems, but because they remind us that our problems are not the whole story.

Holy, holy, holy.

The words still echo through Isaiah’s vision. They invite us not to shrink God into something manageable, but to stand before the mystery and allow it to enlarge our vision of the world.

Sometimes faith begins there.

Not with explanation, but with wonder.