If there is one thing I want you to carry through life, one thing that will make everything else more navigable… it is this: have faith.
I know how that sounds. I was the person who would have rolled his eyes at that sentence. I spent a good part of my adult life convinced that faith was a comfort for people who could not face the data. So I am not asking you to take this on trust, or simply because your dad says so. I am asking you to take it seriously, to think about it properly, to question it rigorously, and to stay open to what you find.
Why faith, of all things?
Start with this: we live in a universe of staggering scale and precision. Science tells us the whole thing exploded into being from something smaller than a pinhead, and that life, your life, with all its complexity and consciousness, is the result of billions of finely calibrated events. The deeper I have gone into the data, both professionally and personally, the more I have come to believe it points somewhere beyond itself.
That is not a retreat from reason. It is where reason took me.
At its core, Christianity is straightforward: love God and love others. Jesus said so himself, in plain terms that a child can understand and a philosopher can spend a lifetime unpacking:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. The second is like it: love your neighbour as yourself.
— Matthew 22:37–39
From that simple foundation, a whole world of complexity unfolds. But the foundation itself is not complicated. You do not need a theology degree to begin.
What faith actually does
Faith, at its most practical, gives you a compass. Not rules that dictate every situation, more like an orientation, a direction of travel, a way of asking: what actually matters here? In a world where it is easy to get lost chasing status or money or the approval of people who will not remember your name in twenty years, having something that orients you toward what is genuinely good is a gift.
It also gives you identity that does not depend on how things are going. My sense of who I am is not tied to my job title, my income, my achievements, or my failures. It is anchored in something that does not shift with the market or the mood. That kind of stability is rarer than it sounds.
Then there is community. When we moved to West Wales, we knew nobody. Finding a church was the first thing I did. Within months, we had a network of people who would show up for us, and for whom we would show up. That is not accidental. It is the nature of a community built around something bigger than shared interests.
Faith as resilience
Life will knock you down. I can promise you that without knowing the specifics. When it does, faith is not a magic shield, it does not stop the hard things from happening. But it changes what you do with them.
When you were born, things became complicated. Emergency surgery. Two hours waiting with you in my arms while your mum was in theatre. For the first time in my adult life, I prayed. It was clumsy and transactional, if you help, maybe I will start believing… but it was real. And it was the beginning of something.
There have been other moments since: walking with my dad through Parkinson’s Disease; losing your godmother Emily far too young; sitting alone on a quayside in a storm in February 2020, utterly defeated by life. Faith did not remove those experiences. It meant I was not carrying them alone. Putting my worries into God’s hands does not erase them, it lightens the load. There is a peace available in the worst moments that I cannot logically explain, and I have experienced it enough times now to stop trying to explain it away.
Faith does not always make logical sense
I know. I used to argue this from the other side. How can you forgive people who do not deserve it? How can you love your enemies? How can you believe in something you cannot prove?
The honest answer is: faith does ask you to do things that go against conventional logic. Forgive anyway. Give without expectation. Love beyond reason. Trust that there is meaning in suffering even when you cannot see it.
But look at what this has produced. Corrie ten Boom, who survived a Nazi concentration camp and chose to forgive the guard who had been cruel to her and her sister, and who inspired countless others by doing so. Martin Luther King Jr., who drew on Jesus’ teaching to insist that love, not hate, was the only force that could break the cycle of violence. These are not weak people being sentimental. These are people operating with a power that logic alone cannot generate.
As Paul put it: when I am weak, then I am strong. That paradox is not a bug. It is the feature.
Faith grows, and it is allowed to grow slowly
I was a confident atheist for most of my adult life. I did not come to faith in a single moment of blinding certainty. It was gradual, a thread running through my life that I kept noticing and kept ignoring, until I could not ignore it any more.
Faith grows like a seed. It starts small, sometimes barely visible, and pushes its roots down over time. Your path may be gradual. You will almost certainly have doubts… that is not a sign you are doing it wrong, it is a sign you are thinking about it seriously. God, in my experience, is patient with the journey. He meets you where you are, not where you think you should be.
So: have faith. Not because I am telling you to. Because I have seen what it does, in my own life and in the lives of people I admire. Because it is the most stable foundation I have found for being a good person, making good decisions, and facing whatever comes with something other than despair.
It is the compass I wish I had found earlier.
Related: My Testimony | Letter 2: Be Nice… Love