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It happens more often than you might think.

I will be chatting to someone when the conversation drifts, as it often does, towards faith. They smile and say, almost as a throwaway remark, “Well, of course, we know so much more these days.” The implication being that we do not really need God anymore in our enlightened age.

Then they carry on talking, as though the matter had been settled.

I sometimes wonder what people expect at moments like that. Perhaps they imagine I’ll suddenly stop and say, “Science? I’d never thought of that. I suppose I should abandon everything I’ve believed.”

Over the years, I think I have heard almost every objection imaginable. Some people question whether Jesus really rose from the dead. Others ask who made God. Some point to suffering. Others insist the Bible contradicts itself or that Christians are simply hypocrites.

None of those questions are trivial. In fact, some of them are among the most important questions anyone can ask, and questions have shaped my own faith more than certainty ever has.

But many of them are not really questions at all. They are conclusions disguised as questions, offered not to explore but to close the conversation. I think that's why they can feel so frustrating. The words themselves are rarely the real issue. There is almost always a deeper conversation waiting beneath the surface.

In fact, if you are able to delve deeper, there are many more interesting questions that can be asked.

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Looking for truth... or trying to win?

There is a difference between someone who genuinely wants to understand and someone who wants to score a point.

We all have been on the receiving end of both. One asks because they are searching, the other asks because they have already decided what the answer must be.

At first, those two conversations can sound almost identical, but after a while you begin to notice the difference. A genuine question opens a door, whilst an argument often closes one.

When I was younger, I thought every objection deserved a full answer. If someone challenged Christianity, I felt responsible for defending it. I would replay conversations in my head on the drive home, think of the perfect response three hours too late and search for books, articles and clever arguments that might help next time.

Looking back, I don’t think my faith became stronger during those years.

In fact, it became more defensive.

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When faith becomes something to defend

There is nothing wrong with studying difficult questions. I have spent the past few decades doing exactly that.

Understanding history, theology and biblical scholarship has deepened my appreciation of Scripture far more than it has diminished it.

But something subtle can happen when every conversation becomes a debate. Faith slowly moves from being something we live to something we constantly defend. We become experts at answering objections while forgetting that the gospel was never primarily an argument to be won.

It was always an invitation to a different way of life.

Instead of asking how the gospel is changing us, we begin asking whether we can answer every objection. Instead of listening, we prepare our next response. Instead of wondering where God might already be at work in another person’s life, we start treating them as an opponent.

Without realising it, winning becomes more important than understanding.

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Jesus didn’t answer every question

One thing that has struck me while reading the Gospels is that Jesus never allows hostile questions to dictate the conversation.

When people genuinely wanted to understand, he gave them extraordinary patience. Nicodemus came in the darkness with honest questions. The Samaritan woman began with misunderstanding and ended by becoming a witness to her village. Thomas was invited to touch the wounds he could scarcely believe.

But other questions were different.

The religious leaders repeatedly tried to trap Jesus with carefully constructed debates. Questions like these,

'Should taxes be paid to Caesar?'

By what authority are you doing these things?

Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?

Again and again, Jesus refuses to play by their rules. Sometimes he answers with another question, other times he tells a story. Sometimes he simply remains silent.

Standing before Pilate, he offers remarkably little defence at all. It is as though Jesus understands something we often forget.

Not every question deserves the answer it demands.

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Some questions cannot be solved

Let's take on one of the most challenging questions of all: suffering.

If God is good, why is there so much pain?

Unlike many debates, this one is rarely theoretical. It is usually asked through tears and the experience of grief and pain.

The Bible never offers a neat formula that makes suffering disappear. If anything, the book of Job warns us against thinking we can explain every tragedy. Job's friends all believed they had the answer, yet it is Job, not his confident advisers, who is ultimately vindicated. Some questions are not resolved by explanation alone.

Sometimes the most faithful response is not an explanation.

It is simply being present.

We often imagine faith means having answers.

Scripture suggests it may sometimes mean having someone to cry out to when there aren’t any.

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What constant arguing slowly does to us

I have begun to notice something over the years.

People who spend all their time arguing about faith often become exhausted. Everything becomes a battle, and conversation feels like another hill to die on. As a result, curiosity slowly disappears and joy slowly follows.

It becomes increasingly difficult simply to read the Gospels and enjoy being with Jesus because every passage immediately becomes another debate waiting to happen.

Faith starts living almost entirely in the head, and the heart struggles to keep up.

I don’t think that is what Jesus intended.

Perhaps spiritual maturity isn’t having an answer to every objection. Perhaps it is learning to recognise which conversations are leading towards truth, and which are simply going round in circles.

Jesus seemed remarkably free from the need to win every argument. He never appeared anxious that the truth depended entirely upon him having the final word. He knew the difference between people who were searching and people who simply wanted to trap him. He loved both, but he didn’t engage them in the same way.

That takes wisdom and humility. Sometimes the most faithful thing we can say is, “That’s an important question,” or simply “I don’t know.”

And occasionally it is simply walking away.

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A different kind of faith

Having written countless arguments and been involved in many conversations, I am convinced that questions have never been the enemy of faith.

In fact, they have often been the doorway into a deeper one.

The danger comes when every conversation becomes a contest, and every relationship becomes another opportunity to prove we are right.

Not everything that can be argued is worth arguing, and not everything that matters can be reduced to something that can be proven on demand.

In recent years, I have found myself drawn to the way Jesus held those conversations.

Patient.

Curious.

Unhurried.

Unafraid of difficult questions.

Yet strangely uninterested in winning debates for their own sake.

Perhaps that is because his goal was never to win arguments; it was always to invite people into a different way of seeing the world.

Perhaps ours should be too.

There are some conversations that stay with you for decades.

You probably don’t realise it at the time because they seem like ordinary moments, one discussion among many. Yet years later, you can still remember where you were sitting and how you felt.

For me, one of those conversations happened when I was a teenager.

The church I attended was thriving. Looking back, I realise how fortunate we were. There were plenty of people my own age, youth groups most evenings of the week, Bible studies, camps and countless opportunities to grow in faith. The people leading us genuinely cared, and they wanted us to take God seriously.

One evening, a small group of us were sitting together with one of the leaders. The conversation drifted from ordinary teenage life towards something much deeper.

One of my friends asked a question that many people have wondered, even if they’ve never dared say it out loud.

“Why would God send people to hell?”

It felt like the elephant in the room.

The leader paused before answering. I still remember the seriousness in his voice. He told us, in no uncertain terms, that we needed to make sure we behaved because the prospect of spending eternity in hell was very real.

There was no discussion. No exploration. No acknowledgement that this was a difficult question Christians had wrestled with for centuries. Just certainty.

At the time, I accepted what he said. I didn’t know enough to question it.

But something changed inside me that day.

Looking back now, I think that conversation marked one of the turning points that eventually led me to drift away from church. It wasn’t because I suddenly stopped believing in God. It was because I couldn’t reconcile the God I was hearing about with the God I glimpsed in Jesus.

The question that lodged itself in my heart wasn’t really about hell at all.

It was much simpler than that.

How can a loving God do that?

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For years, I carried that question around without knowing what to do with it.

Like many people, I assumed the Bible spoke about hell with absolute clarity. I imagined there was one straightforward teaching that everyone had always believed, and that questioning it somehow meant questioning God himself.

Only much later did I discover that things weren’t nearly as simple as I had imagined.

The first surprise was that the Bible doesn’t actually present one neat, systematic description of hell. Jesus most often speaks about Gehenna, a real valley outside Jerusalem with a dark history that had become a powerful symbol of judgement. Elsewhere, the New Testament uses words like Hades and Tartarus, each carrying its own meaning and context.

That doesn’t automatically make the conversation easier, but it should make us pause.

Perhaps we’ve sometimes treated biblical imagery as though it were a detailed map of the afterlife, when the writers themselves were doing something rather different. But the more closely I read the Gospels, the more I noticed something else.

Jesus certainly warns about judgement. He doesn’t minimise it or explain it away. His language is often startling and deliberately challenging.

Yet he never stops to provide the kind of detailed doctrine that many Christians seem eager to construct. Instead, he speaks in vivid images, powerful metaphors and urgent invitations that call people to examine the direction of their lives.

Jesus seems far less interested in explaining hell than he is in calling people towards life.

His concern is whether we are becoming the kind of people who are learning to live in the Kingdom of God.

As I continued reading, I discovered that faithful Christians have understood these passages in different ways throughout history. Some have believed that hell involves eternal conscious punishment. Others have understood it as ultimate destruction rather than endless torment. Still others have hoped that God’s judgement is ultimately restorative, however difficult that process might be.

These aren’t modern inventions designed to make Christianity more palatable. They are longstanding attempts by thoughtful Christians to wrestle honestly with the same biblical texts.

That doesn’t mean every interpretation is equally convincing.

But it does mean the conversation has always been more complicated than I was led to believe.

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When I was younger, I thought faith meant having an answer for every difficult question. Now I think faith sometimes looks more like trusting God while admitting we don’t have all the answers.

That isn’t a retreat from Scripture; if anything, it’s the result of taking Scripture more seriously.

The Bible often refuses to flatten complex questions into simple slogans. Again and again, it invites us into tension rather than rushing us towards certainty. That can feel frustrating, but perhaps it is also deeply wise.

After all, our understanding of God is always smaller than God himself.

Today, I still take Jesus’ warnings seriously, perhaps more seriously than I did as a teenager. But I no longer hear them as threats shouted from a distance. I hear them as the words of someone desperately trying to stop people from walking towards destruction.

There is a profound difference between a threat and a warning. One seeks to control, the other seeks to rescue.

That distinction has changed the way I read these passages, and it has also changed the way I think about God.

I find myself asking a different question. What kind of God do we see when we look at Jesus?

Because if Jesus is the fullest revelation of God’s character, then whatever judgement ultimately looks like, it cannot be less loving, less just or less holy than the person we meet in him.

I don’t pretend that all my questions have been answered. Some probably never will be. But I’ve discovered that certainty isn’t always the opposite of doubt. Sometimes certainty can become the opposite of curiosity.

And curiosity, when it is rooted in humility, has a remarkable way of leading us back to Christ.

I’ve come to realise that my biggest question was never really about hell.

It was always about the character of God.

And the more closely I look at Jesus, the more I trust that whatever I don’t yet understand, I can trust the One who stands at the centre of the story.

Perhaps that’s where faith begins to mature.

Not when every mystery has been solved, but when we discover that even our hardest questions can draw us closer to the God we thought we already knew.

There are some passages in the Bible that I instinctively slow down for. Not because they’re difficult to understand, but because they make me really uncomfortable.

The story of Uzzah is one of them.

If you’ve read it before, you will no doubt remember the moment immediately. David is bringing the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem. Think of a carnival, there is music, celebration and joy. It feels like one of those great moments in Israel’s history.

You almost get into the party-like atmosphere with them, but then the oxen stumble.

The Ark begins to slip.

Uzzah reaches out to steady it.

And suddenly, he is dead.

Party vibes totally killed.

It is one of those stories that stops us in our tracks and leaves us with more questions than answers. After all, Uzzah appears to be doing exactly what any of us would have done. Surely he was trying to protect something holy, not dishonour it.

For years, I found myself asking the same question many people ask.

Why would God respond so severely to what looks like a perfectly understandable instinct?

Then I noticed something that comes long before Uzzah ever stretches out his hand.

And once I saw it, I realised the story had never really been about that moment at all.

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This is not the reflection I started writing this morning.

One of the frustrating things about writing for a living is that I can spend hours on a reflection, only to realise it isn't the one I'm meant to publish that day. Not because it is full of errors or mistakes, but because it just doesn't feel right for that moment.

That is what happened this morning. So I parked it as a draft and started the reflection you are reading now. The chances are this one made it to publication, or you would not be reading it now.

The thing is, nothing is wasted. Just because this morning’s reflection did not feel like the right thing to publish today does not mean I cannot revisit it later. I review lots of reflections regularly, just to test them again. Very often, what wasn’t a good fit in the moment will be just what was needed for a different day.

It made me think this morning about how often we reach conclusions before the story has really finished.

Sometimes we assume there is nothing left to discover. Sometimes we decide that a chapter has closed, only to realise later that we walked away just before something wonderful was about to emerge.

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There are moments in life when grief changes the way we see everything.

It doesn’t simply make us sad. It narrows our world, and it teaches us to expect more disappointment, more loss, more silence. Even good things can begin to look like reminders of what we’ve lost.

I have experienced this in my own life, and seen it while walking alongside others through illness, bereavement and disappointment. Grief has a remarkable way of changing not only how we feel, but how we interpret the world around us.

Perhaps you’ve experienced it yourself. A difficult diagnosis. A bereavement. The end of a relationship. A dream that slipped away. The world keeps turning, but you find yourself interpreting everything through the lens of sorrow.

Mary Magdalene knew exactly what that felt like.

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During my years in parish ministry, I collected all manner of things I thought might be useful one day.

Books, cables, bits of equipment, old photographs, forgotten gifts, resources for projects I fully intended to begin and various objects whose original purpose has now been lost to history.

Most of them went into the garage, and once they were there, I promptly forgot about them.

Parish ministry rarely left much time for sorting through boxes or finally beginning those vaguely imagined projects. There was always another meeting, service, phone call, funeral, school assembly or pastoral crisis demanding attention. The garage became a kind of holding area for good intentions.

Of course, when we eventually moved, all that stuff moved with us.

More recently, with a little more time and focus, I have begun going through some of those boxes and trying to work out what I actually have. I expected most of it to be rubbish, and, to be fair, some of it certainly was. There are only so many unidentified chargers and stick-on air fresheners a human needs.

But I have also been genuinely delighted by what I have found.

There are things that are not merely interesting but meaningfully useful in my everyday life. Objects I had forgotten I owned have suddenly found a purpose. Things that sat untouched for years are now bringing me pleasure, helping me with my writing or reminding me of people and moments I had forgotten.

I keep wondering how the former version of me could have let them sit in a garage for so long.

Yet I suppose that is the point. They were there all the time. Their value had not disappeared. I had simply stopped noticing them.

It has become a small reminder that the things capable of bringing us joy are often much closer than we imagine. We spend so much time searching for something new that we can overlook what is already under our noses.

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For ten years, I wanted very little to do with church.

It wasn’t that I had become hostile to Christianity. If anything, I was disappointed by it. The faith that had once fascinated me had become strangely predictable. Too many easy answers were being offered to questions that deserved much more careful thought.

One Sunday, I remember hearing a preacher confidently declare:

“Jesus fulfilled hundreds of Old Testament prophecies. That’s the proof he was the Messiah.”

In many respects, he wasn’t wrong.

The Gospels repeatedly tell us that events in Jesus’ life happened “to fulfil” what had been written centuries earlier. Read Matthew in particular, and you can hardly miss it. Again and again, he pauses the story to tell us that something happened “so that what was spoken by the prophet might be fulfilled.”

It all sounds wonderfully straightforward.

The prophets predicted, and Jesus fulfilled. Except for me, it wasn’t.

Instead, a question lodged itself in my mind that refused to go away.

Were the Gospel writers really describing events that fulfilled prophecy, or were they just shaping the story so that it looked that way?

At that point in my life, it genuinely mattered.

Because if the Gospel writers had massaged the facts to make Jesus appear to fit the Scriptures, the whole foundation began to wobble. I wasn’t looking for a clever explanation. I simply wanted to know whether I could trust what I was reading.

That question followed me for a long time.

Ironically, it was one of the questions that eventually brought me back.

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As a Vicar, I served in a church where, for reasons nobody could quite explain, a stuffed swift was mounted in a frame in the chancel.

For clarity, it was an actual swift. Deceased.

Preserved, framed, and placed in one of the most visible parts of the church, where it sat with the kind of significance usually reserved for something holier than a taxidermy bird.

When I first noticed it, I assumed there must be an explanation. Something historical, perhaps. Some local story everyone knew. So I asked around.

Nobody seemed entirely sure.

People spoke about it in hushed and slightly reverent tones, as if the bird had somehow become part of the church’s spiritual furniture. It belonged there, apparently. It mattered.

You did not move the swift.

Eventually, I discovered the reason from a local historian. Many years earlier, the church tower had been struck by lightning. The swift had also been struck and killed. Since no people were harmed, the dead bird was stuffed and preserved as a sign that God had watched over the congregation.

I remember thinking that this might be reassuring for the church, but rather less so for Swiftkind.

So I explained to the church folk why it had originally been placed there, which seemed the sensible thing to do. Not long afterwards, mysteriously, it disappeared and was never seen again.

— • —

Even now, I still think about that poor bird.

Not because it was especially important, but because it revealed something about religious life. Somewhere along the way, a framed swift had gathered a kind of meaning it was never meant to carry. It had become more than a story or an object and now had significance, making it an indispensable part of worship.

Faith can work like that, too.

Not all at once. Just slowly, almost imperceptibly. Things gain importance. Practices harden into principles. Assumptions sit in the room so long that nobody questions them anymore. Before long, people begin treating them with a reverence reserved for God alone.

That is part of the problem.

Not everything we attach to faith actually reflects its heart.

Some of those things are helpful. Most of them started for good reasons. But when they begin to get in the way of encountering God, something changes. Faith becomes heavier, harder, and stranger than it was ever meant to be.

Jesus spent a surprising amount of time confronting exactly this kind of confusion. To be clear: He was not irreligious. He was not against prayer, worship, Scripture, or holiness. But he consistently challenged the things people mistook for the centre, especially when those things began to obscure the character of God rather than reveal it.

Looking back over the Gospels, I find myself returning to the same patterns again and again. These are seven things we often place at the centre that Jesus quietly moves back to the edges.

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1. Rules

Rules are not the enemy. Every community needs shape, rhythm, and boundaries.

But too many rules can easily get in the way of actually encountering God.

One of the most consistent patterns in the Gospels is Jesus refusing to let rule-keeping become the measure of spiritual life. When challenged over the Sabbath, he does not dismiss the law. He reframes it. The sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the sabbath. In other words, the gift had become a burden.

That happens more easily than we like to admit.

What begins as guidance can become surveillance. People can become so busy asking whether they are doing everything correctly that they lose sight of the God they were trying to honour in the first place.

Jesus does not abolish the law. He draws out its heart. He insists that mercy, justice, and human flourishing are not distractions from obedience but part of what obedience was always for.

The problem is not the structure.

It is when structure starts demanding devotion.

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2. Guilt

Guilt often feels spiritual because it is intense.

It can feel serious, honest, even holy. Many people have been taught, consciously or not, that the more guilty they feel, the more genuine their faith must be. But the New Testament makes a clearer distinction than that.

Conviction and condemnation are not the same thing.

One leads a person toward truth and change. The other pushes them further down into shame. One opens the possibility of repentance. The other freezes the soul in place.

Jesus is remarkably consistent about this. When the woman caught in adultery is dragged before him, he does not deny the seriousness of sin. But neither does he join the theatre of condemnation. He refuses to let public failure become a public spectacle. He sends her away, not excused, but uncrushed.

That matters.

Because many people do not confuse God with obvious cruelty. They confuse him with a voice that constantly accuses. A presence that is always disappointed, always watching, always ready to remind them of where they fall short.

But Jesus does not seem interested in producing that kind of spiritual dynamic. He convicts, yes. He calls people to turn, yes. But he restores rather than humiliates.

That is a very different thing.

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3. Being a Good Person

This one is especially common because it sounds so reasonable.

For many people, faith merges with morality. The aim becomes being decent, kind, respectable, and basically harmless. God becomes little more than a divine extension of good citizenship.

The difficulty is that Jesus keeps challenging this idea.

The rich young ruler appears, by every visible measure, to be doing well. He is moral, serious, devout, and sincere. Yet Jesus exposes the gap between outward goodness and inward freedom. The man has kept the commandments, but something still holds him. His righteousness is real enough to impress others, but not deep enough to set him free.

The same reversal appears in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. One man arrives with an impressive spiritual résumé. The other arrives with nothing but a plea for mercy. Jesus says the second man goes home justified.

That is not because goodness does not matter. It is when goodness is treated as a self-contained project. It turns faith into a performance review.

God is not simply looking for polished people.

He is drawing human beings into life.

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4. Certainty

Certainty is comforting. It offers clean edges in a world full of ambiguity. It makes faith feel manageable.

That is precisely why it can become so seductive.

Many people have been taught to think that doubt is failure, confusion is weakness, and unanswered questions are signs of spiritual decline. Yet the Gospels paint a more patient picture.

The disciples misunderstand Jesus repeatedly. Thomas doubts. Peter speaks too quickly and understands too little. Even those closest to Jesus are often bewildered by him.

He does not cast them off.

He responds differently to cynical resistance than he does to genuine uncertainty. Hardened hearts receive rebuke. Honest confusion receives time, presence, and sometimes even evidence. Thomas is invited to touch the wounds. The disciples come to understanding slowly, often only in retrospect.

That should help us.

Faith is not the same thing as having every question tidied away. Sometimes people mistake confidence for trust, and certitude for maturity. But those are not always the same thing. Often, a brittle certainty hides a surprisingly fragile soul.

Faith is not weakened by honest questions. It is often deepened by them.

— • —

5. Church Experience

This is one of the hardest confusions to untangle, because it is also one of the most understandable.

People meet God through communities, leaders, friendships, worship, and shared life. That is often how faith is first mediated. But when those communities fail, as they sometimes do, it becomes painfully easy to collapse God into the behaviour of the people who claim to represent him.

Scripture is much less romantic about religious communities than we usually are. Peter denies Jesus. The early church argues, excludes, stumbles, and needs repeated correction. Even in Acts, that most energetic portrait of Christian beginnings, tensions and failures are never far away.

It is not an embarrassment to the biblical story. It is part of the point.

The people of God fail repeatedly, while God remains stubbornly faithful. The Church is not presented as proof of human goodness. It is presented as a community continually dependent on grace.

That does not make church wounds less serious. Nor does it excuse spiritual abuse, arrogance, or cruelty in religious settings. But it does make one distinction essential: God’s character and human representation are not identical.

Sometimes the Church gets in the way of the Christ it is supposed to proclaim.

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6. Control

Control often disguises itself as wisdom.

It promises safety, order, and clarity. It creates systems, expectations, and boundaries that make religious life feel secure. Yet Jesus regularly collides with precisely these structures, especially when they are used to exclude, burden, or diminish people.

In first-century Judaism, purity laws and social boundaries were bound up with identity and survival. They mattered. But Jesus keeps pushing them beyond the protective logic of control. He touches those considered unclean. He eats with the wrong people. He resists authority structures that use holiness to keep certain people in their place.

He relentlessly relocates the centre. Not around control, but around compassion.

Control is attractive because it feels strong.

But love is often braver.

— • —

7. Religious Identity

There is a difference between belonging to a religious organisation and being transformed by God.

Jesus makes that distinction painfully clear. Nicodemus has all the right credentials and still does not understand what Jesus is saying. The Samaritan woman, by contrast, is the least likely candidate and yet finds herself drawn into truth. Those on the edges often recognise something that the insiders miss.

The early Church faced the same question in Acts. Must Gentiles adopt the full visible identity markers of the old covenant in order to belong? Circumcision, food laws, inherited boundaries? The answer, after much struggle, is no. Belonging cannot be reduced to external badges. The leaders refuse to place additional burdens on those entering the community of faith.

That is a decisive moment.

It means that God’s people are no longer defined primarily by inherited markers, cultural codes, or visible belonging, but by grace and inward transformation. The old temptation, however, never fully disappears. We still confuse religious familiarity with spiritual depth. We still assume that looking the part is the same as becoming new.

It is not.

A person can be surrounded by religious language and remain untouched by the living God.

— • —

Which brings us back, in a strange way, to the stuffed swift.

It was only ever a bird, framed by a human story and slowly surrounded by unspoken significance. It may have meant something once. It may even have pointed, however awkwardly, to gratitude or memory. But it was never meant to carry reverence or become part of the sacred architecture of the church.

Neither are these other things.

This is not a rejection of religion. Rules, guilt, morality, certainty, church culture, control or religious identity. None of them are necessarily wrong; most of them are, in fact, needed. They just make terrible substitutes for God.

Perhaps that is why some people find themselves burnt out. Not because God is absent, but because too many other things have taken his place.

Sometimes, the most important step in faith is not learning something new.

It is seeing clearly what was never meant to sit in the centre.

Before I entered ministry, I worked in aviation.

It wasn’t the sort of job most people imagine when they hear that. Sadly, I wasn’t flying aeroplanes. My role was behind the scenes: helping rescue aircraft stranded around the world.

When an aircraft was grounded because it needed a part, every minute mattered. Airlines were losing money, passengers were delayed, crews were waiting, and the pressure to make the right decision was immense.

The budgets involved were eye-watering, the pace was relentless, and sometimes you had only a few minutes to decide how to solve a problem.

I loved it.

It was exciting, challenging and deeply satisfying. But it also taught me one lesson I’ve never forgotten.

The quickest solution to the immediate problem was rarely the best solution overall.

It was always tempting simply to move a desperately needed part from one aircraft to another. The stranded plane would fly again, and everyone would breathe a sigh of relief.

Except now that other aircraft risked becoming grounded for the same reason.

You had solved one crisis, but created another. The immediate problem disappeared, but the larger problem had simply moved somewhere else. In the moment, the decision always felt obvious and very tempting; only later could you see the bigger picture.

Life often works like that.

The solution that seems most obvious isn’t always the one that leads somewhere good. Sometimes what feels sensible or desirable in the moment is simply the easiest thing to understand.

And every time I think about that, I find myself returning to one extraordinary moment in the trial of Jesus.

Because I wonder if that’s exactly what happened there.

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A comment appears beneath almost every article I write about the resurrection of Jesus. Sometimes it’s phrased politely. Sometimes less so. But it almost always says the same thing.

“People don’t come back to life.”

I am fairly sure it’s meant to be a ‘mic drop moment’ with the expectation that I will suddenly realise the error of my ways and renounce my faith. In fact, the first few times I read it, I found myself wondering how best to respond. Should I point towards the historical evidence? Should I talk about the empty tomb, the eyewitnesses, or the extraordinary transformation of the disciples?

Then one day it dawned on me.

They’re absolutely right.

People don’t come back to life.

And crucially, perhaps that’s precisely the point.

The resurrection was never supposed to sound ordinary. If it did, Christians wouldn’t have spent two thousand years talking about it. It would simply have been another event recorded in history before everyone moved on.

Instead, the resurrection stands apart because it still refuses to fit into the categories we already have.

And that made me realise something else.

Maybe the resurrection isn’t the only part of life we struggle to understand until afterwards.

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There are places I would happily never visit again.

Not because there is anything particularly remarkable about them, but because of what happened there. Sometimes it is a particular hospital, a church building, or sometimes simply a stretch of road that carries memories I would rather not call to mind.

We all have places that become tangled up with moments of disappointment, grief, failure or regret. The geography itself remains unchanged, but our experience of it means we can never quite see it in the same way again.

That is one reason I have found myself thinking about Peter recently.

John tells us that, after the resurrection, Peter and several of the other disciples returned to fishing. It sounds almost ordinary, even a little anticlimactic after everything that had happened. Yet the more I have thought about the story, the more convinced I have become that something deeply personal is unfolding beneath the surface.

I no longer think this passage is primarily about fish. I think it is about what Jesus does with places, memories and stories that seem beyond repair.

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We often imagine that people reject truth because they do not recognise it.

If only they knew more. If only someone explained it more clearly. If only the evidence were stronger. We assume that misunderstanding is the greatest obstacle to belief.

It is an attractive way of looking at the world because it suggests that more information is usually the answer.

But the trial of Jesus makes me wonder whether something much deeper is going on.

When we read the Gospel accounts carefully, the religious leaders do not come across as people who simply failed to understand Jesus. They had listened to him for years. They had watched his miracles. They had questioned him publicly and privately. They knew the Scriptures better than anyone else. If anyone was equipped to recognise what was happening, it was them.

And yet they became the people who handed him over.

That has always been the most challenging aspect of the story to me.

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I thought I knew the story of Jacob’s ladder. After all, I’d heard it countless times growing up. Then I discovered one tiny detail that made me realise I may have been picturing the whole scene wrongly.

If someone had asked me to describe it in my younger years, I would have answered without hesitation. Jacob falls asleep in the wilderness. He dreams of a ladder stretching from earth to heaven. Angels climb up and down. God stands at the top. The message seems obvious enough: heaven is somewhere above us, and Jacob is being shown the way.

Or so I thought.

Then I stumbled across a detail I had never noticed before. It was one of those moments that makes you put the Bible down for a minute and simply stare into space.

Because it turns out the story may not be saying what I had always imagined.

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After more than twenty years of preaching, teaching, and now writing about Scripture almost every day, I discovered something I had never noticed before.

It wasn’t a hidden verse or a forgotten historical detail. It wasn’t even a difficult theological idea. It was a pattern.

Looking back, I am surprised I missed it for so long. Once I began to notice it, it seemed to be everywhere. Not in one particular book of the Bible, but running through the whole of Scripture like a thread woven through a large, beautiful tapestry.

The Bible keeps telling what feels like the same story.

At first, that can seem like repetition. But the more I read, the more I became convinced that something else was happening.

The Bible is not simply repeating itself.

It is teaching us how to see.

— • —

Our Instinct for Easy Answers

Human beings naturally look for patterns.

We want to understand why things happen, especially when life becomes difficult or confusing. When something goes wrong, we instinctively search for a wider narrative that makes sense of it all.

That instinct naturally carries over into how we read Scripture.

If a story is repeated, we often assume it must be reinforcing a straightforward lesson. We mentally build neat systems in which actions lead to predictable outcomes.

Be faithful, and life goes well.

Get it wrong, and everything falls apart.

There is some truth in those ideas, but the Bible stubbornly refuses to become that simple.

Again and again, it resists reducing life to a formula. It challenges the assumption that suffering always has an obvious moral cause or that blessing is simply the reward for good behaviour.

Instead of offering simple explanations, Scripture does something much more interesting.

It tells the same kinds of stories.

— • —

The Pattern You Begin to Notice

Once you begin reading across the whole Bible rather than one passage at a time, certain themes keep resurfacing.

Outsiders see what insiders miss.

Interruptions become the main event.

Apparent failures turn out not to be failures at all.

The overlooked become central.

These are not isolated moments. Together, they begin to form a much larger pattern.

A Samaritan, someone culturally and religiously dismissed, becomes the moral centre of a story that exposes the blindness of respected religious figures.

A woman who has spent twelve years excluded and unseen interrupts Jesus on his way to another miracle, and her story becomes every bit as important as the one everyone thought they had come to witness.

A disciple steps onto the water and, for a few extraordinary moments, does the impossible. Yet he is remembered primarily for sinking, as though the failure matters more than the courage.

Each story stands perfectly well on its own.

But when they are read together, something remarkable begins to emerge. These connections are not limited to a handful of familiar stories.

Across the Gospels, those closest to Jesus often struggle to understand him, while people on the margins repeatedly respond with surprising faith and insight.

The pattern appears often enough that it no longer feels accidental. It begins to feel intentional, almost as though the biblical writers expect us to notice. And once you do notice it, the question changes.

Instead of asking what one story means, you begin asking why this same kind of story keeps appearing.

— • —

More Than Moral Lessons

For much of my life, I approached these stories as moral lessons.

The obvious things like being more compassionate, having more faith, and trying not to doubt. That is how I was taught from Sunday school onwards, and there is certainly truth in those conclusions.

But over time, I have come to think they sometimes make the stories smaller than they really are by tidying them up too quickly.

The Bible is doing more than telling us how to behave. It is showing us what God is like. And rather than giving us abstract definitions, it does so through repeated patterns that unfold over centuries.

Each story adds another piece to the picture.

Eventually, those pieces begin forming something far larger than any one passage could reveal on its own.

— • —

Repetition as Revelation

Years ago, someone at Bible college told me to repeat the main point of a sermon three times if I wanted people to remember it. It sounds simplistic, but there is wisdom in it.

Biblical storytelling works in a surprisingly similar way.

The same types of events appear again and again, but always with subtle variations. Those differences matter because they invite us to compare, reflect, and gradually recognise what the writers are showing us.

This is one of Scripture’s great teaching methods. Not everything is stated outright. Instead, understanding grows slowly.

When outsiders consistently respond with faith while insiders remain confused, we begin to glimpse how God’s kingdom actually works.

When interruptions repeatedly become moments of revelation, we are challenged to stop seeing disruption as something to avoid.

When reversals constantly appear, where the last become first and the forgotten become central, it becomes increasingly difficult to hold on to our ordinary assumptions about success, status, and significance.

Repetition, in this sense, is not about saying the same thing twice.

It is about revealing the same truth from multiple angles until it slowly reshapes the way we see.

— • —

What These Patterns Reveal About God

This is where the repetition begins to matter.

If these patterns appear consistently across Scripture, they are not merely literary techniques; they are theological clues. They suggest that God’s attention is not drawn to the powerful, the visible, or the impressive in the way we often imagine.

Instead, God repeatedly meets people at the margins. Those who are overlooked, excluded, or dismissed.

They also reveal that God’s work is rarely interrupted. More often, it is revealed through the interruption.

And they remind us that faith is not secured by status or proximity.

Again and again, it appears in vulnerability, persistence, humility, and openness.

Perhaps most striking of all, these stories reveal a God who is wonderfully consistent and endlessly surprising.

Consistent in pattern.

Surprising in detail.

The more I think about this, the more astonishing it becomes.

The Bible is not the work of a single author sitting down to write one carefully planned book. It is a library written over many centuries by different people in different places, for different audiences, and facing very different circumstances.

Yet the same patterns continue to emerge. This kind of coherence suggests something deeper is holding these diverse writings together.

Not by making every story identical, but by weaving them into a single vision of the God who continually overturns human expectations.

— • —

Scripture Forms How We See

Perhaps this is why the Bible continues to speak so powerfully across generations.

Its purpose is not simply to give us information. It is to form us.

Stories shape the imagination. They train us to notice certain things and overlook others. Over time, they influence not only what we believe but how we perceive the world itself.

As these patterns repeat, they slowly begin carving new grooves into our instincts. We become more attentive to people on the margins.

More open to interruptions.

Less certain that we already know what is happening.

Without even realising it, our way of seeing begins to change.

— • —

The Questions I Carry Now

These days, I find myself reading Scripture rather differently than I once did.

The stories no longer feel like isolated episodes. In fact, they echo one another and, increasingly, they echo into ordinary life.

So the questions I ask have changed.

It is no longer simply, What does this passage mean?

Instead, I find myself asking,

Where is this happening again?

Where is the outsider seeing what everyone else has missed?

Where is the interruption I am tempted to dismiss?

Where is the apparent failure that might not really be a failure at all?

Those have become some of the questions I carry into each new day.

They have changed how I read Scripture, but perhaps even more importantly, they have changed how I try to read my own life.

I find myself wondering whether the interruption I am resisting might actually become the place where God is at work. Whether the overlooked person may have something I need to hear. Whether certainty is sometimes less important than attentiveness.

Perhaps that is why the Bible keeps telling what feels like the same story. Because let’s face it. We are the sort of people who need reminding.

Not once.

But again and again.

If you’ve found yourself noticing similar patterns, I’d love to hear which stories have most shaped the way you read Scripture. These are the kinds of conversations I hope this community continues to have together.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned about faith didn’t come from a theology book.

It came from becoming an adoptive parent.

Our two youngest children came into our family as babies. We had already become parents to our eldest child, so we knew something of what it meant to raise a child. Even so, adoption was completely different.

When a child is born, there is a gradual journey into parenthood. There are months of preparation, appointments, conversations, and time to imagine the life that lies ahead. Adoption has its own long process too, but when the day finally arrives, everything changes almost at once. Suddenly, you are taking home a fully formed little person who already has their own personality, preferences, and history. Overnight, you are Mum or Dad.

Of course, we had read books. We had spoken to our social workers, listened to experienced adopters, and attended training. All of that mattered. But none of it could fully prepare us for the moment we drove home together.

At some point, preparation gives way to reality.

You simply have to begin.

You learn what it means to be that child’s parent by becoming their parent. There isn't another way.

You make decisions without complete confidence, and have to discover your strengths and your weaknesses along the way. You love, you stumble, you adjust, and little by little you grow into the role.

Looking back, I’m not sure anyone ever feels completely ready for something as life-changing as becoming a parent. There comes a moment when you have enough to take the next step, but not enough to remove every uncertainty.

The more I think about it, the more I realise that this isn’t just true of parenthood. It may be true of almost everything that matters.

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There have been moments in my life when I wondered whether something had gone wrong with my faith.

The things that had once nourished me no longer seemed to have the same effect. Worship that had once lifted me now felt strangely familiar. Sermons that would once have filled pages of notes no longer resonated with me in the same way. Even the rhythms of church life that had shaped me for years began to feel as though they belonged to someone I used to be.

For a long time, when I felt like that, I assumed the problem was me.

Perhaps I wasn’t praying enough. Perhaps I needed to try harder. Perhaps I had somehow drifted further from God than I realised. That felt like the obvious explanation. After all, if something that once brought life no longer did, surely the fault had to lie with the person experiencing it.

Looking back, I don’t think that was true at all.

I don’t think I had outgrown God. I think I had simply outgrown one of the containers that had held my faith for a season.

That feels like an uncomfortable thing to admit because many of us have been taught to think in much simpler categories. We tend to divide our spiritual lives into success or failure, faithfulness or compromise, staying or leaving.

When something changes, we instinctively assume someone must be right, and someone must be wrong.

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My wife Rachel came home from work recently looking unusually serious.

“I nearly crashed the car on the way home.”

Before I even realised what I was doing, I laughed.

Not because I thought it was funny. If anything, quite the opposite. The danger had already passed, and thankfully, she was completely unharmed. But for some reason, laughter was simply the first place my mind went while it tried to catch up with what I’d just heard.

It’s something my family have learned about me over the years. When life throws something unexpected, difficult, or overwhelming in my direction, I often laugh first and process it afterwards.

It can seem insensitive, as though I’m making light of something serious, when in reality it’s simply the way my brain buys itself a few precious moments to absorb the news before it knows how to respond.

Our first reactions are often not the way we actually feel about things. Laughter doesn’t always mean amusement. It can be surprise, uncertainty, or simply another way of saying, I don’t quite know what to do with this yet.

That made me wonder whether we sometimes judge ourselves far too harshly for our instinctive reactions.

More importantly, I wonder whether we imagine God does too.

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I sometimes wonder how some of the most important things in our lives go unnoticed for so long.

I see this in my own life. For example, writing is now one of the most important rhythms of my life. It is no longer simply what I do professionally; it has become a daily ritual and a way of making sense of the world. It also connects me with thousands of people like you, who keep wondering about the biggest questions in life.

Most mornings, I sit down with a blank screen, a cup of coffee, Hank snoring beside me, and open a passage of Scripture. By the time I stand up again, I feel as though I have spent time with God as much as I have spent time writing. Many of the articles you read begin with your comments and questions. In a strange way, writing has become a conversation, even though most of us have never met.

The strange thing is that, for years, I never saw any of this coming.

When I was a parish priest, writing was simply one small part of the job. There were sermons to prepare, magazine articles to finish, newsletters to produce, reports to write, and endless emails to answer. I enjoyed parts of it, but it always felt like something that sat alongside the real work of ministry rather than being part of it.

It was necessary. Sometimes even enjoyable, but rarely something I gave much thought.

If someone had told me then that writing would one day become my vocation, not simply something I did but the thing through which I experienced God most consistently, I would probably have smiled politely before carrying on with the next parish meeting.

— • —

It makes me wonder how often that happens to all of us.

How often are we standing beside something that will eventually take on far greater importance, shaping our lives, whilst we dismiss it because it doesn’t yet look significant?

The fact is that many of life’s turning points are already in front of us. We might expect them to announce themselves with certainty, as though we’ll instinctively recognise them when they appear. But when we look back, life rarely works like that.

The moments that change us most often arrive disguised as ordinary routines, unnoticed conversations, or responsibilities we barely appreciate at the time.

That thought came back to me recently while rereading the story of Naaman.

You may know this ancient Bible story. Naaman is a highly successful military commander who travels to Israel in the hope of being healed of leprosy. He expects a big encounter with the prophet Elisha, but instead, he is simply told to go and wash seven times in the River Jordan.

He almost turns around and goes home.

That is the sentence I couldn't get out of my mind. Naaman had travelled all that way carrying the hope of healing, only to come within moments of walking away from it.

The healing was never the problem. His expectations were.

He had already decided what healing should look like. It should be impressive. It should involve an important prophet, a dramatic gesture, and a solution worthy of someone of his status.

Instead, healing arrived in the form of an ordinary river and a simple instruction.

For a few moments, that was enough for him to reject it.

— • —

I wonder how often we do something similar.

Not because we reject God’s gifts outright, but because they arrive in ways we weren’t expecting, or maybe because they have always been around.

Perhaps we overlook the friendship that slowly changes us while we wait for a dramatic answer to prayer. Perhaps we dismiss an opportunity because we feel like something better will come along. Perhaps we fail to notice a calling because it first appears as an ordinary responsibility.

Or perhaps, like me, we spend years treating something as little more than a task before discovering that it has actually become one of the places where God has been meeting us all along.

Naaman eventually listened to his servants. He laid aside the story he had written in his own mind and stepped into the Jordan as instructed. Only then did he discover that the miracle had been waiting for him all along.

I wonder what I would have missed if life had continued exactly as I expected.

If early retirement had never happened, and writing had remained just another weekly obligation. What if I had never discovered that the thing I once regarded as an inconvenience had become one of the greatest gifts God has ever given me?

Perhaps that’s why this story still speaks so powerfully today. Not because most of us are standing beside a river waiting for healing. But because all of us are capable of overlooking the very thing that may one day change our lives.

Sometimes the greatest gifts don’t arrive wrapped in excitement.

Sometimes they arrive disguised as ordinary life.

And only years later do we realise that they were gifts all along.

What if the thing that will one day change your life is already part of your ordinary routine?