Grace and peace to you, saints and sinners alike.

By God’s grace, I have completed Hilary Term. Now I find myself returning to the image of doors.

At the end of Michaelmas, I wrote about the doors God had opened, the moments of provision, arrival, and grace that brought me into this place. I was standing, as it were, in the corridor, looking at what had been set before me.

But there is something I still do not fully understand.

When a door first opens, it often feels like confirmation.

As though something has been settled. As though clarity has finally arrived.

But what I am learning is this:

A door does not end discernment. It deepens it.

Because once you step through, the questions change.

Not: Will this open?

But: What is God doing in me now that it has?

Hilary Term has not felt like an arrival. It has felt like formation.

Not the kind that is immediately visible or easily measured, but something quieter, more searching, and at times more exposing than I expected.

Because there is a particular kind of grace in being placed in a room you once prayed to enter. The very thing you longed for begins to reveal you.

Scripture reminds us that this kind of formation is not incidental.

As James 1:2–4 teaches, testing is not a detour, but a means through which perseverance and maturity are formed.

I am learning that what I once called “opportunity” is, in fact, something deeper. Formation.

And what I once understood as “progress” is often exposure.

Exposure of assumptions I did not know I carried.

Exposure of habits that cannot sustain what God is asking of me.

Exposure of motives that are more mixed than I would like to admit.

This has begun to shape something in my thinking that I am only just starting to find language for.

If the Gospel is true, if Christ is risen, then the Christian life is not simply about change in behaviour or belief.

It is about transformation.

As Paul writes to the Romans 12:2, “Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…”

Something deeper. More structural. More relational.

Not only what we do, but what we love, what we desire,

and who we are becoming.

As Augustine of Hippo so profoundly wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

It’s becoming clearer to see that much of what feels like restlessness in this season is not confusion, but formation, the slow re-ordering of desire toward its proper end.

More recently, following my confirmation, Graham Tomlin encouraged me to begin engaging more intentionally with Blaise Pascal, to read him not casually, but with learned attention.

And I am starting to see why.

Pascal writes, “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.”

And perhaps this is part of what I am encountering in this season.

Not a lack of understanding.

But a deeper kind of knowing, one that is being formed beneath the surface, before it can be fully articulated.

There have been moments this term where that sense of formation has taken on a more outward shape.

I was invited to attend the “Live Hope and Mercy” conference, where questions of justice, restoration, and the Church’s response to wounded lives were explored with both seriousness and compassion. Hosted by Rachel Treweek, with voices such as James Timpson contributing to the discussion, I left with a deep sense that the space I am being formed in is not accidental.

Sitting in that room, listening to those working at the sharp edge of human brokenness, something shifted.

Not clarity in a simple sense, but direction.

Alongside this, I have begun to think more seriously about the possibility of further study and research.

Not as a next “step up,” but as a deepening of what is already being formed.

Through conversations with tutors and those guiding me, there has been encouragement to consider moving toward a more demanding course of study, in light of the research trajectory that is beginning to emerge.

That in itself has been humbling. Not something I had planned.

But something I am learning to hold carefully before the Lord.

The questions that continue to return are not accidental.

They circle around transformation.

What does it mean for a human life to be remade?

What does grace actually do, not only in theory, but in practice?

How does the Gospel speak into cycles of harm, identity, and restoration?

I am beginning to see that what I am calling Transformation Theology is not simply an idea.

It is something I am living into, even as I try to understand it.

There is also a growing clarity, no longer uncertain, but steadily confirmed, that my vocation is taking shape.

This term has not introduced something new, but has affirmed what God has already been speaking.

Not two streams. One calling, held together in Christ.

And I am learning to trust that, as Philippians 1:6 reminds us, “He who began a good work… will carry it on to completion.”

And within it, the faint outline of a calling that feels both familiar and new.

I am also becoming more aware that I am, in many ways, living between two streams.

On the one hand, practical ministry, walking with people, serving, being present in the realities of life and brokenness.

On the other hand, practical theology, which seeks to think carefully, speak clearly, and articulate what the Gospel means within those realities.

And increasingly, though they appear as two streams, I do not see them as separate. But as deeply connected.

“Words, too, are being formed, not just written.”

Even my writing has begun to develop within this space, not simply as expression, but as a form of reflection and integration.

I am starting to give this more intentional shape through two platforms: Substack, for deeper theological reflection, and LinkedIn, for more public engagement around theology, leadership, and practice.

And I am beginning to see that this, too, is part of the calling.

I have also begun to notice a difference in the kinds of conversations I am having.

Not simply more conversations. But different ones.

There are moments now where I begin to speak about these questions, and something shifts.

There is a difference between being heard and being understood.

And I am only just beginning to recognise it.

There are also smaller moments that have come to carry more meaning than I expected.

At the beginning of the term, entering the libraries was a simple transaction.

A quick flash of my card at the gate. A quiet step through.

But over time, something has shifted.

The flashing of a badge has, in some places, become a smile.

A familiar nod. Access was given in a moment.

Reminding me that belonging is learned over time.

There is also a quiet sense, even now, of being drawn further into these spaces of listening for enjoyment, and listening to learn.

The Oxford Literary Festival has just begun, and I find myself wanting to sit and listen.

And yet, even here, there is a need for restraint.

Because there is a temptation to define too quickly what is still being formed.

But vocation is not something we construct.

It is something we discover, slowly, often quietly, as we remain attentive to Christ.

One of the more unexpected aspects of this term has been how this process of formation has begun to reshape how I am seen.

And here, the temptation is subtle.

As Paul asks in the letter to the Galatians 1:10, “Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God?”

Identity cannot be sustained by the perception of others.

Only by the presence of Christ.

And so I am learning a different posture.

To receive affirmation without building upon it.

To remain grounded, not in how I am perceived, but in who I am becoming in Christ.

Much of this term has been shaped not by extraordinary moments, but by ordinary faithfulness.

In the letter to the Corinthians, 3:18 reminds us, we are “being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory.”

Transformation rarely announces itself. It accumulates.

There is a passage that has stayed with me this term:

I used to hear that as assurance. Now I hear it as an invitation.

And so as this term comes to a close, I find myself asking a different question.

Not simply: What doors has God opened?

But: Who am I becoming as I walk through them?

I am deeply grateful to be upheld by the prayers and generosity of the Church. As Scripture encourages us to “pray in the Spirit at all times… and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people” (Ephesians 6:18), I would be deeply grateful if you would continue to hold me in your prayers. Please pray that I remain attentive to Christ, faithful in formation, and responsive to the Spirit as God continues to shape me for the service of His Church. Your prayers truly matter; they sustain this journey in ways that cannot always be seen but are deeply felt. By me, yet by God.

With every blessing in Christ,

Steven

Editor’s note: Reflections from daily life, find me on Instagram Stories @babytheologian

Dear friends in Christ,

Grace and peace to you, saints and sinners alike.

I was walking through Oxford early one morning.

Books under one arm. Coffee in hand.

The city was still quiet.

Heels drumming the pavement.

The towers were catching the light.

Oxford, like many modern cities, does height very well.

Spirals. Steeples. Stone rising confidently into the sky.

There is something in us that loves height. Height feels like clarity.

Recognition. Perspective. Being seen.

I found myself praying as I walked, thanking God for what He has done in my life, doors opened, invitations I never expected, the slow unfolding of discernment, and the next steps in ministry taking shape quietly. The doors opened, ones I could not have forced.

The chance to serve some of the most vulnerable through a charity close to my heart. Going back into prisons, not as a statistic, but as support, walking alongside young men still caught in cycles I once knew all too well.

Completing a business degree here in Oxford, something that once felt impossibly distant. The unexpected invitations to speak, including standing before five thousand people at the Leadership Conference in the Royal Albert Hall last year, a moment that still feels humbling to remember.

The privilege of studying theology at Wycliffe Hall, one of the world’s leading theological colleges, where doctrine is not merely studied but wrestled with. Conversations that still feel improbable, with individuals like NT Wright over coffee and cake, like it’s just a normal thing to do.

My book is nearing release, and having conversations about this with publishers and industry insiders. Coming runner-up in the Frederick Buechner Award for Excellence in Writing, a quiet affirmation that words forged through difficulty might serve others. Each of these feels like grace.

And then there are the smaller moments, the ones no one sees, the ones that do not make programmes or platforms. Climbing the spiralled stairway inside the Radcliffe Camera early in the morning, stone curling upward around itself, history pressed into every wall. It is just light enough for the day to begin forming.

There is always a quiet procession at that hour. Not ceremonial, but purposeful.

Mostly wide-eyed students moving in near-silence, each searching for a square of desk in the wide sea of concentration. A patch of wood. A slice of light.

A place to attempt honesty.

I sit, and then the real ascent begins, not vertical, but internal. Words resisting clarity. Arguments bending under scrutiny. Footnotes multiplying. Tutor feedback waiting in the margins, precise, surgical, kind but firm. Reshape this. Tighten that. Interrogate the assumption. Paragraphs I secretly loved fall under the knife, as I move now with precision like a surgeon, while listening to Khachaturian, Gayane Suites No. 1: III. Armen’s Solo.

The five-thousand-word limit closes in by the minute, unblinking.

And yet there is a strange, almost defiant joy in that discipline. When excess is trimmed. When the argument sharpens. When the count finally drops beneath the line, and I lean back, not victorious in spectacle, but quietly formed. Above me, the rotunda opens, curved stone holding the morning light like a bowl. Gold edging. Ordered symmetry. Everything deliberate. Splendid without shouting.

And yet beneath the gratitude, the question remained:

Why do you want to rise?

Is it obedience? Or hunger?

“It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels”, wrote St Augustine of Hippo.

The historical tradition of mankind here names one of the quietest dangers: gluttony.

Not merely of food. But of appetite. Gluttony is excess desire.

John of the Cross wrote, “To come to possess all, desire the possession of nothing.”

To come to be all, desire to be nothing.

Gluttony is excess desire.

It is wanting more, too quickly, too visibly, too assuredly. It is ascent without patience.

The more it consumes, the less it grows. It feels like strength, but it hollows depth. And this is not only a personal danger. We are watching, in real time, what happens when restraint collapses on a global scale. In recent weeks, the world has watched a sharp escalation in the long-standing tensions between Israel and Iran, a conflict now unfolding into what many are calling one of the most serious confrontations in decades, with coordinated military strikes, retaliatory missile barrages, and regional instability rippling outward.

This is not just politics; it reflects a deeper pattern in the human heart, the cycle of retaliation. When one side strikes, the other responds; when one perceives a threat, the instinct is to pre-empt, to justify escalation as necessary, and to demand security through force. And yet, as Scripture repeatedly calls us to remember, retaliation is not the only answer. Jesus taught a way of turning the other cheek and loving enemies (Matthew 5:38-44), and Paul exhorted believers not to repay evil for evil but to overcome evil with good (Romans 12:17-21).

What feels like necessity, immediate strength or visible dominance, can easily become a collective appetite, hollowing depth and normalising cycles of violence that most of the world begins to regard as inevitable, even if they are anything but God’s will.

In some quarters of the world, a broken mode of existence has become accepted as inevitable, cycles of fear, deterrence, and pre-emptive strength. But inevitability is not innocence. And normalisation does not make the distortion true. There is a collective gluttony at work in modern geopolitics: the appetite for dominance, for visible strength, for immediate security. Nations, like individuals, are tempted to leap, to compel history to bend through force.

There was a day in the Lake District when I set out to climb a mountain. The kind that fills your horizon before you’ve even taken your first step. Clear summit. Defined ambition. The larger peak stood ahead of me, solid, inviting, almost inevitable.

Only I hadn’t noticed something.

It descended.

The ridge dipped sharply. The wind shifted. The ground fell away beneath my boots. And for a moment, it felt wrong, almost like retreat. I had worked to gain altitude, only to lose it again.

But there was no other way forward.

The only route to the higher summit required going down first.

Standing there, watching the larger mountain still ahead of me, it felt strangely symbolic. The landscape was teaching something I had not yet fully learned.

You lose sight of the summit for a time. You surrender the height you’ve just gained. You walk through a valley carved between two promises.

And yet that lowering is not failure. It is alignment.

Perhaps this is what the wilderness reveals about the Son. Before the Temple pinnacle, there is the desert. Before resurrection, the cross. Before public vindication, hidden obedience.

And perhaps this is what vocation requires too.

Not constant ascent. But willingness to descend when the path demands it.

Not every lowering is a loss.

Sometimes it is the only way to rise rightly. The wilderness exposes this instinct.

After the Father declares over Jesus, “This is my Son, whom I love.”

(Matthew 3:17).

The Spirit leads Him down.

Affirmation first. Testing second. Then comes the highest point of the Temple.

In the Gospel of Matthew, the devil quotes Psalm 91:

Jump. Demand protection. Turn identity into spectacle. But Jesus refuses.

He will not seize what is already His.

He will not convert sonship into display.

He will not grasp at visible vindication.

He answers with Deuteronomy 6:16, recalling Massah, where Israel demanded proof: “Is the Lord among us or not?”

Jesus will not test the Father. And that refusal is not weakness.

As Athanasius of Alexandria reminds us in his account of creation, we are creatures sustained by the Word. Creatio ex nihilo means we do not secure our own being. We are held into existence.

Gluttony forgets creatureliness. It behaves as though survival depends entirely on grasping. But the Son stands at the highest point and declines.

Not because He lacks power. But because He trusts the Father. In a world that has accepted escalation as normal, that refusal becomes scandalous. Restraint is not passivity. It is a strength under governance. History offers small parables of this.

As Caspar David Friedrich seemed to understand, the summit does not make us sovereign; it makes us small.

Perhaps what troubles me beneath Oxford’s towers is this:

Stone rises easily. Depth does not.

Missiles rise easily. Trust does not.

Personal ambition rises easily. Obedient patience does not.

The Son went deep.

And because He did, resurrection is not spectacle, it is vindicated obedience.

Maybe the real question is not how high we can rise, individually or nationally, but whether we can refuse what is too much, too soon.

Whether we can resist the appetite for immediate dominance. Whether we can remember that we are creatures, held, named, sustained, before we attempt ascent. In a world that has normalised fracture, faith refuses to call distortion natural.

It insists there is another way.

The way down before the way up.

I am deeply grateful to be upheld by the prayers and generosity of the Church. As Scripture encourages us to “pray in the Spirit at all times… and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people” (Ephesians 6:18), I would be deeply grateful if you would continue to hold me in your prayers. Please pray that I remain attentive to Christ, faithful in formation, and responsive to the Spirit as God continues to shape me for the service of His Church. Your prayers truly matter. They sustain this journey in ways that cannot always be seen but are deeply felt. By me, yet by God.

With every blessing in Christ,

Steven

Editor’s note: For daily life bites, find me on Instagram Stories @babytheologian

Dear friends in Christ,

Grace and peace to you, saints and sinners alike.

In such an old, historic place, surrounded by books. One would have thought that the dust would be resting all over the place?

Made me think deeply about the week that I have just experienced.

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

There are not many sentences in our culture that stop us in our tracks.

That one does.

It is spoken quietly, almost gently.

A thumb marked with ash pressed a cross onto my forehead by a friend of mine in church this week. No shouting. No drama. Just a truth we spend most of our lives avoiding. You are dust. Said in love.

And to dust you shall return. We locked eyes.

We do not like to think about that. We live as though death is theoretical, distant, someone else’s story. We plan, we scroll, we build, we accumulate, we achieve. We fill our calendars and our cupboards and our feeds. We live as though time stretches endlessly ahead of us.

Yet, the ancient lie still echoes: “You will not surely die.”

And so we distract ourselves.

It has never been easier. We carry entire worlds of distraction in our pockets. If silence begins to press in, if a strange ache rises in the middle of the night, if loneliness taps at the door, we reach for something, anything, to mute it. News. Notifications. Noise. Another episode. Another purchase. Another conversation.

But Lent interrupts that avoidance.

Ash Wednesday is not morbid. It is merciful. It tells the truth.

We are dust.

Not as an insult. Not as humiliation. But as reality. You are finite. Fragile. Mortal. You cannot hold your life together by sheer force of will.

And somewhere beneath all our distraction lies a deeper restlessness. We long to be happy, every one of us, and yet happiness proves elusive. We chase it in achievement, in romance, in recognition, in beauty, in the small electric thrills of success. And for a moment, a concert, a victory, a first embrace, a long-awaited breakthrough, it feels like we have grasped it.

But it slips through our fingers.

Like trying to hold water.

What we discover, if we are honest, is that the ache remains. Even after the applause. Even after the promotion. Even after the holiday. There is a quiet, persistent sense that something is missing.

Earlier this week, I sat in an Ash Wednesday service where Bishop Graham Tomlin spoke about what he called the “four D’s” of Lent: deception, desire, discipline, and delight. The simplicity of it struck me. Not complicated theology. Just a clear naming of the human condition. We deceive ourselves. Our desires become distorted. We require discipline. And yet, at the end of it all, we are invited into delight. I left that service aware that Lent is not primarily about austerity, but about honesty. And honesty is always the beginning of transformation.

I found myself thinking this week about another kind of honesty: moral honesty. Not the shallow kind that says, “I feel it, so it’s true,” but the deeper kind that asks whether goodness is real. If “good” exists apart from God, he seems unnecessary. If it exists only because he commands it, it begins to look arbitrary. But the Christian tradition offers a steadier answer: God commands the good because God is good, not by whim, but because love and holiness are not external standards placed above him; they are the shape of his own life. Lent, then, is not moral performance. It is learning again to live in alignment with reality, to live with the grain of the world rather than against it.

In Carl Spitzweg’s Ash Wednesday (1855), a solitary monk sits in the quiet poverty of his small cell. There is no grandeur, no dramatic gesture, only the stillness of a man enclosed within bare walls, facing the discipline of Lent. The room feels narrow, almost compressed, as though the painting itself participates in the restraint of the season. Nothing distracts him. No crowd. No spectacle. Just a human life reduced to essentials before God. Ash Wednesday is not performed for others; it is endured alone. And in that aloneness, illusion has nowhere left to hide.

The monk’s solitude echoes the deeper solitude of the human heart, that moment when distraction falls away, and one must confront dust, desire, and dependence. In the smallness of the cell, we glimpse the smallness of ourselves, and the quiet mercy of being seen there by God.

There is music that understands dust.

In Handel’s Messiah, the choir does not begin with triumph. It begins with ache. “He was despised…” The melody stoops low, almost to the ground, as if kneeling in the ash. It does not hurry. It does not explain suffering away. It lingers there, in rejection, in frailty, in the smallness of a human life pressed into sorrow.

Only later does the sound widen.

Only later does light break open.

“Hallelujah” is not the first word. It is the faithful word that comes after humiliation has been faced without denial. It rises not as noise, but as vindication. As if heaven itself has waited until truth has been told.

Lent is like that.

We stand in the minor key first. We let the dust settle on our foreheads. We listen to the low notes of our own mortality. And in that honest stillness, something begins to gather, not spectacle, not self-improvement, but resurrection.

The music teaches us patience. Glory is not rushed. It is revealed.

But good things become cruel masters when we ask them to be ultimate.

We become slaves to whatever we think will make us happy.

Lent does not teach us to despise the world. It teaches us to put it back in its proper place.

When Jesus says, “Do not store up treasures on earth,” he is not condemning joy. He is rescuing it. He is asking why we spend so much energy chasing what cannot last, what rusts, what breaks, what fades.

Lent is not about shrinking our desires. It is about reordering them. It is an invitation to examine what we are depending on to make us whole.

Is it the next purchase? The next relationship? The next achievement?

The next hit of affirmation? For forty days, the Church gently suggests: put limits around those things. Not because they are evil, but because they are not God.

Fast from something.

Turn down the noise.

Give away more than feels comfortable.

Sit in silence longer than you normally would.

Not as punishment. Not as a performance. But as a way of loosening the grip of false saviours.

Yet there is a question we must not ignore.

What does Lent mean for those whose lives are already marked by deprivation?

For some, Lent is giving up chocolate, though most of us renegotiate that promise by day three or four.

For others, life has already taken almost everything.

For those in captivity or even in prison cells.

For those navigating poverty.

For those who wake each morning with loss as their companion.

For those whose freedom, security, or stability has already been stripped away.

They do not need curated deprivation. They are already living with it.

Dust sits not only on foreheads, but on policies, courtrooms, and prison walls.

And here is where Ash Wednesday becomes something more than moral discipline.

It does not simply say, “You are dust.”

It declares that Christ has entered the dust.

The God who formed humanity from the earth did not stand back in disgust when we fell into it. He stepped into it. Into our frailty. Into our mortality. Into our exile. Into the long ache of human loneliness.

Dust is not the end of the story.

Incarnation is.

When the ash is traced in the shape of a cross, it is not merely a reminder of death. It is a sign that death has been entered and overcome, from the inside.

There is a strange paradox here. When we loosen our grip on the things we thought would save us, when we step back from endless consumption, when we sit quietly before God without distraction, we begin to taste something else.

A deeper stillness. A quieter strength. A joy not dependent on circumstance.

Not constant. Not dramatic. But real.

Moments in worship when something breaks open inside you.

Moments in prayer when you sense you are not alone.

Moments in friendship when love feels weightier than fear.

Moments in silence when the ache is no longer empty but expectant.

These are not sentimental experiences. They are foretaste.

They are small rehearsals for resurrection.

Lent teaches us to say no, not because God delights in our restraint, but because in saying no to lesser things we create space to say yes to the One who made us.

We fast so that we might learn again how to feast.

We practice self-denial so that we might discover what truly satisfies.

We accept that we are dust so that we can receive the breath of God anew.

There is nothing gloomy about that.

To live aware of your mortality is not despairing; it is clarifying. It strips away illusion. It makes gratitude sharper. It makes grace sweeter. It reminds you that every apple, every cup of coffee, every hedge-lined road, every conversation with a friend is a gift.

When you deny yourself something for a season, you discover how precious it was all along. You begin to see the world not as entitlement but as mercy.

And beyond the gifts, you begin to seek the Giver.

Why would we spend our lives chasing reflections when we are invited into the source of light itself?

Ash Wednesday is an interruption.

Lent is an invitation to tell the truth about your frailty. Notice your desires. Practice discipline. Rediscover delight.

We are dust.

But dust, breathed upon by God.

“In the beginning… the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7).

Dust was never meant to remain inert. It was always meant to be animated by breath. And even when that breath feels faint, even when the dust settles heavy on our shoulders, the promise remains:

“He knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14).

Not with contempt. With compassion. And the breath does not end in Genesis.

The risen Christ stands among frightened disciples and “breathes on them” again (John 20:22).

New creation begins in a locked room.

And one day, the dust itself will answer the voice that first called it into being:

“The dead will be raised imperishable” (1 Corinthians 15:52).

Ash is not the final word. Breath is.

We are dust. But dust remembered. Dust loved. Dust entered by Christ.

Yet dust destined for resurrection. In Jesus name.

I am deeply grateful to be upheld by the prayers and generosity of the Church. As Scripture encourages us to “pray in the Spirit at all times… and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people” (Ephesians 6:18), I would be deeply grateful if you would continue to hold me in your prayers. Please pray that I remain attentive to Christ, faithful in formation, and responsive to the Spirit as God continues to shape me for the service of His Church. Your prayers truly matter; they sustain this journey in ways that cannot always be seen but are deeply felt. By me, yet by God.

With every blessing in Christ,

Steven

Editor’s note:

Reflections from daily life, find me on Instagram Stories @babytheologian

Dear friends in Christ,

Grace and peace to you, saints and sinners alike.

Trees do not compete with one another.

They lean toward the light.

Oh, how I was leaning in today. The sun came out after a season of rain. It was still cold, but it felt like relief, something to lean into. Something offering unqualified care. No price to pay. Just the gentle conversation that comes when you walk in the Spirit, asking and listening. The park was beautiful this morning. Familiar faces. Some with recognition from previous encounters. Others simply smiled again. Like days of old, when we walked in the sun and believed the world was made for us.

If you know me, you know I have a habit of singing as I walk. I don’t remember when it began. A line from a hymn. A fragment of melody. Sometimes, no words at all, just sound pressing outward. When it rises, I let it. I don’t measure the pavement or scan the room.

Some things grow because they are alive. Perhaps that is what growth feels like?

No tree rises to prove itself. It grows because light draws it upward. Light does not argue; it attracts. Most people around me know enough of my history to recognise the distance travelled. While they mostly do not know or understand the route taken. I do not need to construct a new narrative. I do not need to prove that grace has worked. Imagine being a walking miracle, someone whom you can clearly see God has placed His hand on. The gifts and grace.

And yet.

The instinct to prove is still stubborn in the frailty of the human psyche. It whispers that fruit must be displayed, misunderstanding corrected, silence filled. It tempts me to let scrutiny shape the direction of my branches.

But trees do not grow to justify themselves. They grow because they are alive.

Grace does not wait for worthiness. It creates it. Once you know that, proving begins to lose its urgency. Not every tree grows in open ground.

Some grow among thorns.

Sometimes you do not merely grow beside them, you must pass through them.

Recently, it has felt a little like that.

Nothing dramatic. Just a little friction. A comment slightly sharpened. A tone recalibrated. A question that lingered too long. Nothing you could name outright. But enough to feel the scratch. Enough to pinch my clothing.

You can expect thorns and still flinch when they catch.

That’s what unsettled me, not the scratch itself, but my reaction.

There is a version of me that stiffens when pricked. That withdraws warmth. That quietly hardens. Thorn meets thorn. This is reactive growth, growth shaped by resistance rather than by light.

Reactive growth still grows. But it grows crooked.

It grows to prove.

It grows to defend.

It grows to protect its own image.

And slowly the tree leans, not toward light, but toward self-preservation.

Sometimes you must walk through thorns knowing they will cut. Not because you enjoy it. But because the path toward light runs through them.

The question is not whether you will be scratched.

The question is what will be formed because of it.

Reputation can be curated. Character cannot. Reputation flourishes in visibility, character is carved in resistance. It is shaped in the quiet negotiations of the heart, in how we respond when misread, when affirmation cools, when recognition wavers. The thorns do not threaten reputation first. They test fibre. They ask whether growth is anchored or merely visible. Whether humility remains when applause fades. Whether the roots hold when the bark is torn.

It is possible to bear fruit and yet lack weight. Possible to grow quickly and remain shallow. But pressure exposes depth.

Not what we say about ourselves.

But who we are becoming?

In a previous newsletter, I mentioned that God does not remove every thorn.

He redeems what it reveals. The fracture remains, but grace presses into it like gold into broken clay, not concealing the crack, but illuminating it.

History bears witness to this pattern. Frederick Douglass found criticism rising just as his voice strengthened, not only from enemies, but from allies uneasy with his independence. Vincent van Gogh painted through obscurity and fragile anguish, producing colour long before affirmation came. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote of costly grace from a prison cell, his convictions narrowing his freedom even as they clarified his faith.

Some grew defensive. Others grew deeper.

And then there was Saint Valentine.

Long before greeting cards and candlelit tables, he was a priest in third-century Rome. When the emperor forbade Christian marriages, believing single men made better soldiers, Valentine quietly continued to marry couples in secret. Love, for him, was not sentiment. It was a covenant. It was costly.

For that fidelity, he was imprisoned. Tradition tells us he was beaten and executed for refusing to renounce Christ.

He did not argue with the empire.

He remained.

There is a level of sacrifice that comes with true love. Not loud love. Not performative love. But covenantal love, the kind that abides when threatened.

Sadly, most of us withdraw in this moment. Counter to the teaching of the saints and prophets and Jesus Himself.

An Oxford don was once warned that writing for ordinary readers might cost him academic standing.

Long before lecture halls and printing presses, Anthony the Great entered the Egyptian desert not to be seen as holy, but to be made whole. As the Church gained imperial favour, he chose obscurity. The desert stripped away the audience and affirmation. There were no crowds to persuade, only silence, temptation, and the slow shaping of the soul.

His life, recorded by Athanasius of Alexandria, speaks of fierce spiritual struggle. Yet what marks him is not spectacle, but steadiness (currently reading ‘The Incarnation’, by Athanius). He did not leave when it grew difficult. He did not argue with the silence.

He remained.

In that remaining, he embodied what Jesus commands in John 15, to abide.

You don’t need to perform fruit, but to stay attached. The desert fathers understood that the one who cannot remain with God will struggle to remain faithful before men.

Antony did not chase influence. He cultivated attachment.

And fruit came.

Character outweighed reputation. Patience outlasted impulse. Endurance steadied the soul. Character forms where friction persists.

Long before vineyards and upper rooms, Scripture spoke of a tree planted by streams of water (Psalms 1). Not a wild tree that happened to survive, but one deliberately planted, positioned near a steady supply in an otherwise dry land. The psalmist does not promise ideal weather. He promises rootedness. Fruit comes “in its season,” not by performance, but by sustained nourishment. The leaf does not wither, not because heat never rises, but because the roots run deep. The alternative is chaff, light, wind-driven, reactive.

Psalm 1 is not about speed. It is about spiritual gravity.

And when Jesus says, “I am the vine; you are the branches” (John 15:5), He intensifies the promise. He is not offering advice for self-improvement. He is naming a reality. The branch has no life of its own. It does not generate fruit by effort or defend it by argument. It bears fruit because it remains attached. Apart from the vine, even the most impressive growth is hollow.

The season does not determine the fruit.

The root does.

In 1847, Henry Francis Lyte wrote:

I need Thy presence every passing hour;

What but Thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?

Who, like Thyself, my guide and stay can be?

Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me.

Abide with me was not written for applause. Not for escape. But for presence, through clouds and sunshine alike.

Not that the thorns would vanish, but that grace would remain.

And perhaps this is where we struggle most.

We struggle to remain because remaining feels like weakness. It does not defend itself. It does not retaliate. It absorbs. It waits. It trusts that roots are stronger than reactions.

When it gets difficult, something in us reaches for control. We want to clarify, to correct, to secure our standing. We mistake movement for maturity. We confuse noise with strength.

Remaining feels slow.

Remaining feels unseen.

Remaining feels vulnerable.

And yet the vine does not panic when the wind rises. The branch does not shout at the season. Life continues beneath the surface long before fruit is visible.

We struggle to remain because we forget where life comes from.

We forget that fruit is not manufactured but received. That pruning is not punishment but care. That silence is not abandonment but formation.

True love, the kind Saint Valentine embodied, absorbs cost without surrendering conviction. True holiness, the kind Antony pursued, chooses depth over display. True grace, the kind Bonhoeffer wrote about, clarifies faith in confinement.

Remaining is costly because it requires trust.

But it is also freeing.

Because when you remain, you no longer need to prove.

The vine holds.

The root runs deeper than the thorn.

And grace remains.

I am deeply grateful to be upheld by the prayers and generosity of the Church. As Scripture encourages us to “pray in the Spirit at all times… and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people” (Ephesians 6:18), I would be deeply grateful if you would continue to hold me in your prayers. Please pray that I remain attentive to Christ, faithful in formation, and responsive to the Spirit as God continues to shape me for the service of His Church. Your prayers truly matter; they sustain this journey in ways that cannot always be seen but are deeply felt. By me, yet by God.

With every blessing in Christ,

Steven

Editor’s note:

Reflections from daily life, find me on Instagram Stories @babytheologian

Dear friends in Christ,

Grace and peace to you, saints and sinners alike.

I am learning to try to live more slowly now.

Not because I have nothing to say, but because I am increasingly wary of how quickly speech can become either a performance or a strategy for survival. Speed offers protection. It lets us pass through rooms without having to dwell in what is actually happening there. But some experiences refuse haste. They do not ask for an explanation. They ask for attention.

Silence has begun to press on me again, not as absence or delay, but as presence. The atmosphere. The kind of silence that listens before it speaks. The kind that registers weight before it names meaning.

Scripture does not fear this silence. Again and again, God withholds speech until the ground is ready to receive it. Revelation is never rushed. God does not compete with noise, nor does He force understanding before attentiveness has been learned. Before the law, there is wilderness. Before the still, small voice, there is wind and fire spent of their fury. Before the Word stands accused, He remains quiet.

The Psalms return to this again and again.

“Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10)

This is not an invitation to disengage, but a summons to relinquish control, to stop striving, stop narrating, stop asserting, and allow reality to be named by God rather than managed by us.

Elsewhere, the psalmist says,

“For God alone my soul waits in silence” (Psalm 62:1).

Silence here is not despair; it is trust held without commentary. The prophets knew this discipline well. There are moments when they speak with fire, and moments when they are commanded not to speak at all. Silence becomes obedience when speech would distort the moment.

“The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him” (Habakkuk 2:20).

Silence here is reverence, the appropriate human posture before divine holiness.

I feel that tension acutely. The desire to move, to respond, to set things right, and yet the growing conviction that movement, too early, would interrupt the work God is doing. To remain still here is not to abandon agency, but to entrust it.

When I move too quickly from that place, I misread people. I mistime honesty. I offer truth where safety has not yet been established. Silence is becoming the discipline that is slowing me into sight. And it is teaching me something costly: love, like faith, is often distorted not by hostility, but by familiarity without attentiveness.

At other times, silence feels less like stillness and more like tension held with care. I often think of a moment in Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet where love pauses on the edge of loss. The music does not rush toward declaration; it hesitates, holding tenderness and danger in the same breath. Longing rises, but it is already shadowed by what must be endured. Nothing is resolved. Nothing is secured. Love remains present anyway, consenting to vulnerability without spectacle. It is beautiful not because it is safe, but because it stays.

Some relationships feel like this to me, moments of deep harmony followed by passages that require patience, restraint, and the courage not to rush resolution. What is beautiful is not the absence of difficulty, but the willingness to remain within it without forcing the music forward.

There is something profoundly incarnational about this. Love that does not bypass tension but enters it. Love that refuses spectacle. Love that stays.

He does not resolve the world from a distance; He inhabits it, slowly, bodily, vulnerably. Faith, like love, unfolds through restraint honestly endured rather than problems quickly solved.

I know myself well enough to say this plainly: I can talk too much. Trauma does that. So does a life spent having to explain yourself before you are allowed to exist comfortably in a room. I carry histories that trained my mouth to work faster than my body. But I have never believed that control of the narrative is the answer. I trust love more than management. I would rather let those who truly know me speak for me than defend myself endlessly.

I am becoming increasingly aware of how presence can be rationed. How some bodies are received effortlessly, while others must regulate themselves into acceptability. How a room can register you long before it acknowledges you. No announcement is needed for this to be felt. It lives in glances that pass too quickly, introductions that skip a name, conversations that orbit but never land.

Recently, I sat among people marked by education, vocation, and moral seriousness, people fluent in the language of justice, formation, and discipleship. And yet I found myself unaddressed. Not rejected outright. Simply unengaged. Introductions were made. Connections established. And then, without comment, I was passed by. I thought I should talk at that moment, so I named it lightly, playfully, and the moment was softened immediately. ‘It’s fine. She’s met you before.’ Quite like a ‘hey, nothing to see here, move on type of tone’. We literally had a formative teaching session on this recently. The basis and behaviours we have, and how that affects people. And yet something had already lodged itself in me when this happened. Not anger. Something quieter. A familiar tightening. The knowledge that what had happened would never be considered significant, because it had not been costly for anyone else.

When she entered the room, I was the only one who stood and greeted her. I shook her hand and smiled. I made her a cup of tea. These were not gestures of virtue. They were reflexes, habits formed from knowing what it is to be new to a space, or overlooked, and choosing not to reproduce that absence in others. As the evening unfolded, the pattern held. Engagement arrived only if I initiated it. Speech was possible, but recognition remained conditional. At one point, trying to keep the tone light, I asked a woman working on her laptop what she was doing. ‘Window shopping’, she said. I joked that she should put it on the television. As we had just been watching the rugby, which had finished, but now in a weird sort of social, but not social space. The humour landed awkwardly. The room felt strangely curated, as though participation itself had rules I had not been given. Pass me a bucket, please. I felt so sick.

What lingered was not hostility, but control, exercised through silence.

We see you, the room seemed to say, but acknowledgement will come on our terms. Eventually, I took a video call. Almost immediately, commentary followed. ‘Who’s he talking to?’ Loud enough for my friend on the phone to hear. ‘Why is he on the phone?’ This was the plot twist. My reaching for connection elsewhere was being held and framed as disrespect, it seemed. One person remarked that I lacked boundaries. Said quietly, but I heard.

The statement landed heavily.

Boundaries, invoked suddenly, only after attentiveness had already been withheld. Moral language is deployed not to protect communion, but to regulate it. Silence had erased me. Speech disciplined me.

As though my place depended on permission that had never been offered. I felt choked and seriously disappointed by the way the evening and conversation unfolded. Gave me reasons to look at my faith and what I am trying to achieve.

This is not always intentional. But it is never neutral.

As a Black man, I am constantly regulating my voice, how loudly I laugh, how freely I respond, and how much passion I allow to surface. What is an ordinary expression in one body is often misread in mine. Warmth becomes volume. Joy becomes excess. Conviction becomes a threat. Passion is mistaken for instability.

This constant regulation is exhausting. Closer to swimming than anything I can think of as an illustration. However, it is building me up. I feel like a better person and man running after God’s own heart.

It drains something vital over time. It teaches you to confuse peace with disappearance, restraint with holiness, and silence with safety. It makes you wonder whether being loved requires becoming smaller.

When I remember the Moonlight Sonata, how it opens not with grandeur, but with patience. The melody does not hurry toward resolution. It lingers, repeating itself with slight variation, asking the listener to stay rather than anticipate. Nothing is forced. Nothing is explained. And yet everything necessary is already present. It is not background music; it is an invitation to attend. The piece teaches what silence has been teaching me: that meaning deepens when it is not rushed, that truth does not need volume to carry weight, and that some of the most faithful movements happen slowly, almost imperceptibly, beneath the surface. The music does not demand the room’s attention. It earns it by remaining.

C. S. Lewis understood this kind of restraint. He warned that modern life trains us to treat immediacy as insight and noise as sincerity. In The Screwtape Letters, he observes that one of the Enemy’s great aims is to keep souls distracted, not necessarily by evil, but by constant stimulation, so that they never dwell long enough in reality to recognise God. Elsewhere, Lewis insists that love is not primarily a feeling, but a commitment to remain when the feeling fades. Silence, in that sense, is not the absence of love, but its discipline, the refusal to flee when clarity is delayed.

This is why silence so often precedes recognition in Scripture. Before God speaks, He waits. Before the answer arrives, there is stillness. Before the Son responds to the accusation, He stands quietly before power. Silence becomes the space where truth gathers weight, where presence proves more faithful than performance.

Some relationships feel like this to me, marked by harmony that must learn patience, by closeness that resists hurry. What is beautiful is not smoothness, but fidelity under strain. Love does not always resolve; sometimes it simply stays. That staying, unadorned, unhurried, is its own kind of faith.

There is something profoundly Christ-shaped in this. The incarnation is not spectacle, but restraint. God does not shout redemption from heaven; He enters the world quietly, bearing the cost of proximity. Even in the garden, when anguish presses hardest, there is a long silence before surrender. Love, here, is not a dramatic escape, but a costly presence.

We are living in a moment, particularly in the UK and across Western Europe, where race is spoken about carefully and encountered clumsily. Language has improved. Attentiveness has not always followed. Difference is welcomed abstractly, but becomes unsettling when it enters shared authority, shared space, shared intimacy. Silence, here, is often misread as agreement, and speech as disruption.

Jesus is watched long before He is addressed. Misread before He is accused. And when He finally stands before power and violence, He is silent, not because He lacks truth, but because truth does not need to argue for its right to exist. His silence is not absent. It is an authority under restraint.

Not everyone is for you. Scripture does not hide this. The Pharisees did not resist Jesus because He was unclear, but because His presence threatened their control. Jealousy often disguises itself as concern. Moral anxiety can mask fear of displacement.

I am learning not to explain myself in rooms that have already decided how to hear me.

This posture is reshaping how I love. It tests me and stretches me.

Love does not grow by proximity alone. It grows by attention. By the willingness to receive another without requiring them to perform, belonging. Human love, I am discovering, is an apprenticeship in discipleship. What is asked of me in relationships is what is asked of me before Christ: to remain present without control, to listen without defensiveness, to resist both shrinking and dominating when the room becomes uncomfortable.

I have written this slowly, allowing something truer to form.

Yes, I know, I still talk too much sometimes. I still laugh loudly. I still carry stories that rush toward daylight. But I am learning to trust that those who love me will not require me to diminish myself in order to understand me. And I am learning that silence, when chosen rather than imposed, can be a place of dignity rather than erasure.

Silence does not mean nothing is happening.

It does not mean absence.

It does not mean untimeliness.

It means something is being weighed.

Something is being tested.

And sometimes, something holy is being formed.

Thank you for staying at the table with me. I am deeply grateful to be upheld by the prayers and generosity of the Church. As Scripture encourages us to “pray in the Spirit at all times… and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people” (Ephesians 6:18), I would be deeply grateful if you would continue to hold me in your prayers. Please pray that I remain attentive to Christ, faithful in formation, and responsive to the Spirit as God continues to shape me for the service of His Church. Your prayers truly matter; they sustain this journey in ways that cannot always be seen but are deeply felt. By me, yet by God.

With every blessing in Christ,

Steven

Editor’s note: Reflections from daily life, find me on Instagram Stories @babytheologian

Dear friends in Christ,

Grace and peace to you, saints and sinners alike.

Over the last few day the current leading librarian has been packing up her belongings as she is transitioning to another location. I’ve been sitting in the library wondering how much she has read over the years. I have also been thinking about silence. Not the absence of sound, but the kind of silence that feels alert, inhabited. The kind that listens back.

Here I am surrounded by millions of letters. Words and phrases. Sources and explanations. Dictionaries and poetry, prose and rhyme. Voices speaking across centuries, addressing the present, gesturing toward futures they could not yet imagine. The room is disciplined into quiet, yet the air is thick with speech.

Meaning presses in.

From every shelf.

And still, silence holds.

It is difficult not to notice the irony. A space renowned for silence contains an overwhelming density of voices. Past and present speak at once. Arguments, laments, hymns, and histories all insist on being heard. Yet beneath the accumulation of languages there remains another register, one that cannot be hurried, indexed, or mastered.

I have come to believe that it is in silence that we hear most clearly from God — not simply by catching the content of what He may be saying, but by attending to what the silence itself produces. Scripture does not portray God as endlessly verbose. Often, He arrives after the noise has exhausted itself. Sometimes He thunders within the stillness. I am learning that faithfulness often begins not with bringing God somewhere, but with recognising where He already is and joining Him there.

Silence does not paralyse us.

It prepares us.

From silence, action is born, not reactive, not performative, but responsive.

A gentle internal pressure becomes movement. Discernment becomes decision. We do not act because we are certain, but because the moment has made itself known.

Silence becomes dangerous only when it curdles into indifference. The silence Bethany teaches is not withdrawal, but nearness, the refusal to look away.

I have found, over time, that I carry a growing passion for silence, not as retreat or refusal, but as fidelity. Silence feels like the last place where we are not required to express our convictions. It strips away urgency and leaves us with truth. It is no accident, I think, that Bethany sits where it does in the biblical narrative, poised on the threshold of the Passion. The anointing happens just before the machinery of betrayal, accusation, and violence begins to turn. Before words harden into charges and crowds find their voice, there is this quiet act, unargued and unresolved. Bethany is the stillness before suffering, the last moment where love speaks without defence.

This is why Bethany matters.

Bethany is not a pause in the story, but its key, a moment that interprets the cross before it arrives, teaching us how to see what is about to unfold.

It is not loud. It does not announce itself as a turning point. It is a room, a table, a body reclined in vulnerability, and a woman who acts without explanation. She does not speak. She does not ask permission. She does not justify the cost. She breaks open a jar of perfume and pours it out. The fragrance fills the space. The act cannot be reversed.

It matters that this happens in Bethany, not Jerusalem, in a borrowed room, not a centre of authority, as though recognition comes more easily where power has loosened its grip.

The silence breaks only after the gesture has been made.

The objections arrive immediately. Rational. Ethical. Measured. Why this waste? The perfume could have been sold. The money could have been given to the poor. These are not wicked thoughts. They are sensible ones. Calculated ones. They belong to a moral imagination trained to value efficiency, to demand outcomes before obedience.

Their objection is not cruel, only mistimed, a refusal to let the moment itself determine what faithfulness requires.

But Bethany is not governed by calculation.

It is governed by recognition.

The woman has discerned what the others cannot yet bear to face: the time has shifted. The cross is no longer distant. It is now. This moment will not return. Silence has taught her how to hear it. Faithfulness, here, is not strategic.

It is timely.

She does not interpret her own act. She leaves its meaning suspended. Only after resistance, only after misunderstanding, does Jesus speak. And when He does, He does not defend her efficiency. He names her act beautiful.

Beauty, here, is not excess or ornament. It is fittingness, an act aligned with reality as it truly is, not as we wish it to be. Some obedience cannot be understood in advance. It becomes intelligible only after it has been given.

Before Jesus speaks, the act appears wasteful.

After He speaks, it becomes Gospel.

In Matthew’s telling, the act does not wait for understanding; meaning arrives afterwards, spoken over what has already been offered. Christ is never drawn toward order for its own sake. He moves toward what is wounded, because compassion does not wait for things to be resolved.

John Stott writes in The Cross of Christ that before the cross can be explained, it must be encountered; it silences our moral calculations before it answers our questions. Bethany feels like that kind of moment: meaning withheld until after the cost is paid, truth disclosed only once the act has already been given.

This is the grammar of the cross.

We are living through a season of profound turbulence. In America, the public square feels increasingly brittle; conversation gives way to accusation, and certainty hardens faster than wisdom. Beyond it, the world itself feels destabilised, wars grinding on, institutions fraying, truth contested, fear amplified. In such a climate, many are choosing silence. Not apathy, but fatigue. Not indifference, but overload. The volume has become so relentless that speech itself feels compromised, too quickly conscripted into outrage or performance. Abraham Lincoln once warned that speech, untempered by restraint, can do more harm than silence, that there are moments when holding one’s tongue is not cowardice, but wisdom. Silence, for some, has become the only place left where thought can breathe, and conscience can recover its balance. Whether that silence becomes discernment or disappearance remains the question before us.

My silence around wars and rumours of war is not indifference; it is obedience. Scripture does not require the man of God to speak first, loudest, or most often. Again and again, the biblical witness commends restraint, the refusal to answer every provocation, the discipline of waiting before the Lord while the nations rage. Silence, in that sense, is deeply biblical. It is how truth is borne rather than broadcast. The prophets learned it. Christ embodied it. Before accusation, before violence, before the machinery of death gathered momentum, He was silent — not because He lacked truth, but because truth does not need to shout to prevail. For the man of God, silence is not the absence of conviction; it is the soil in which faithful action takes root. Words spoken too soon may satisfy urgency, but silence endured before God is what gives weight to speech when it finally comes.

Bethany remains saturated with silence. The woman does not argue. Jesus does not rush. The meaning of the moment emerges slowly, after the jar is broken, after the room has reacted, after the cost has been borne. Silence here is not passivity; it is attentiveness stretched to its limit.

Bethany has also come to me in another form.

My friends have a one-year-old daughter named Bethany. The most beautiful little girl. At first, she kept her distance. I tried to meet her with noise. It did nothing. Trust arrived only when I stopped trying to summon it. Then, quietly, something shifted, a smile, a wave, recognition without explanation.

Silence had done what effort could not.

That is what Bethany has come to represent for me now. Presence without demand. Attentiveness without control. The courage to remain still long enough for recognition to arrive on its own terms.

Not every faithful act is loud.

Not every decisive moment announces itself.

Some moments require waiting. Others require pouring out. Wisdom lies not in choosing one posture permanently, but in learning, through silence, how to tell what time it is.

Bethany teaches this without argument. The woman listens. The disciples speak.

Judas counts. Only one responds to reality as it stands.

Jesus promises that her act will be remembered wherever the Gospel is proclaimed. Not because she explained herself well. Not because she persuaded the room. But because she recognised the moment and acted without reserve.

She did not manage her devotion.

She surrendered it.

Perhaps this is the invitation that remains with us: not to become more efficient, more articulate, or more secure, but more attentive. To recover silence as a form of faith. To trust that when we learn how to listen deeply enough, action will come, not from anxiety, but from obedience.

Bethany, the place, the woman, the child, has taught me this:

Silence does not mean nothing is happening.

It often means something holy is being prepared.

May we have the patience to remain in that silence, and the courage to act when the moment finally speaks.

Thank you for staying at the table with me. I am deeply grateful to be upheld by the prayers and generosity of the Church. As Scripture encourages us to “pray in the Spirit at all times… and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people” (Ephesians 6:18), I would be deeply grateful if you would continue to hold me in your prayers. Please pray that I remain attentive to Christ, faithful in formation, and responsive to the Spirit as God continues to shape me for the service of His Church. Your prayers truly matter; they sustain this journey in ways that cannot always be seen but are deeply felt. By me, yet by God.

With every blessing in Christ,

Steven

Editor’s note: Reflections from daily life, find me on Instagram Stories @babytheologian

Dear friends in Christ,

Grace and peace to you, saints and sinners alike.

In the benign words of Chris Martin, lead singer of the band Coldplay, “Where do we go to draw the line?” Taken off their classic 2002 album “A Rush of Blood to the Head”. Yes, the big existential question of life, and while options are afoot, I am learning that the most important conversations do not happen when we are standing strong. They happen when we are seated, when the urgency to prove ourselves gives way to the slower courage of telling the truth. Which we all need to hear at times (mostly), either intro or retrospectively. Love the, let’s go for a walk scenario, on the phone, especially FaceTime, brings a level of closeness. All real credible options.

However, at tables do it for me. There are many tables, though you ask. Ok, whether it’s for communion, a place I feel God speaks to us through the sacraments. Or even one where eating is what generally takes place, even one where big decisions are made. How I love them all. The table is where it is at.

A table does not reward eloquence or control. It does not ask us to manage impressions or justify ourselves. It asks only that we remain present long enough for grace to find us where we actually are. In that sense, the table is already doing the work Paul describes in his letter to the Corinthian church, refusing the fantasy of self-sufficiency and making room for weakness to be named without being shamed. Like adding lime or mint to water, to what was already there becomes refreshing. I am here for that. Attending to a deeper inner quench. For me, I am continually noticing that this is what makes for the table experience as humanly possible, human. Does it not only quench our desires, but also replenish?

On a stage, Ellen Steawart said, “You don’t perform to be safe. You perform to be alive.” Is that suggesting that strength must be demonstrated? Maybe. Notably, at a table, strength is exposed and exposure, Paul insists, is not the enemy of grace but its precondition. My reasoning here is the work he unpacked for us in 2 Corinthians 12.

Most people do not break dramatically. They break quietly, while continuing to function. They keep turning up. Keep meeting expectations. Keep carrying responsibility. Not because they lack faith, and not because they have rejected God, but because they have learned that faithfulness means coping without being seen. Which, for me, is a mark that someone is operating at a higher level of humanising. They’ve shown up, but is the true version of them even present?

Paul would recognise this instinct. He knew how easily strength becomes something we cling to, how quickly even spiritual experience can become a form of self-protection. Which is why he speaks of the thorn not as a failure to overcome, but as a mercy that prevents illusion.

What we refuse to name does not disappear. It reshapes us.

Often in ways unseen and unhelpful.

Something I have noticed that I dislike so much, when you’re looking into the eyes of someone as they talk, and you can see the holding back of emotive thoughts, in an attempt to regulate the narrative coming out of their mouth. While I acknowledge that this is a self-preservation tactic, also one that could be interpreted as, I do not want to offend. It’s also one which holds back the said recipient from being their real, authentic self.

And one of the first places it shows is not in belief, but in speech. Tone tightens. Patience matters. Words become guarded, sharp, evasive, or withdrawn. We continue to communicate, but no longer truthfully. Weakness, if left unattended, does not remain private; it leaks into the way we speak to those closest to us. Even worse, if we’re speaking to people not in our circle, it could end in a disastrous encounter.

This is not hypocrisy. It will be your formation if left without surrender.

When someone we know speaks out of turn, out of character, we notice. If it happens regularly, we’re left wondering if that person is actually alright. Clearly a sign that they are caring about something, a burden under the skin. It’s also probably right there, just under the skin, like a thorn. Small, but prickly. An irritant. One you can live with, but one that is clearly an annoyance to you.

Paul does not say that grace removes the thorn. He says grace is sufficient in its presence. Look at verse seven. I think this is the hinge of the chapter. Which means that the weakness is now exposed, although entrusted to God, God does not always heal us. But, big but, by covering us with His grace. See verse nine. His presance make the situation bearable, even if not understandable.

This is why communication is never merely interpersonal. I believe it is theological.

“Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit.

Turn from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.” Psalm 34:13-14

Our speech reveals where we are resisting grace and where we are allowing it to work. Long before we articulate it, our words announce whether we are living from dependence or still negotiating control.

Godly communication is not produced by intention.

It is formed by integrity.

Eric Collins, in ‘We Don’t Need Permission’, argues that one of the most corrosive lies we absorb is the belief that we must be authorised before we can speak truthfully. That lie has consequences. It trains people to trade agency for safety and to mistake silence for wisdom.

A table that practices true hospitality refuses that bargain. It does not ask whether a voice has been sanctioned, only whether it is honest. In that sense, hospitality becomes an act of resistance, a way of saying that dignity is not conferred by power, but exercised through presence.

I have learned to measure people and weigh some of my friendships by this standard, especially if we are seated at the same table.

Let me tell you this, many of my friends are dead. Yet, when I sit at the table long enough, I still wonder what they would make of the conversation if they were here with me now, flutes with bubbly clinking, knife and forks or cups in hand, listening carefully, probably musing, seemingly unimpressed by the polish and gibber jabber you find floating around most tables these days.

I know Aishah, she’s always attentive to rhythm and omission, she’d be asking, almost whispering, “What is being hidden here, and who benefits from that?” Aiahah Rahman indeed would remind me that language always serves something. While I imagine Andy Razaf, head leaning back, listening for whether my words still carried breath, whether pain had made them careful instead of true. Kicking me under the table. When my thoughts slipped, which my words would betray.

Though not speaking, Ernie, as always, probably had that half-grin on his face. Though letting silence do the work, I imagine he would be asking what I was avoiding naming and how much it was costing me, now and in the long-term. It’s just how Eranest Hemingworth thought; we see this through his work over time. Wow, then imagine C. S. Lewis, pressing the difference between sincerity and truth, warning me how easily self-protection dresses itself up as wisdom. He and Martin Luther King Jr., refusing abstraction, asking whether my words carried any cost, whether grace had actually made me freer, or merely safer. Urging me to let the thoughts of Christ, which I was supposed to have captured, bless the table with precision and grace.

None of them would be impressed by strength on display. They would recognise the deeper question, like the ones Paul poses: Where is grace actually doing its work? Not where weakness is denied, but where it is entrusted?

This is why the table matters to me, not as image alone, but as discipline. We must speak the truth in these moments. You’re letting yourself and the host down deeply if not in these moments. It is borderline disgraceful. Sacralige even.

There is a family who invite me to dine with them. Most Fridays, we gather at the same table, and over time, the meal has taken on something close to a sacrament. Bread is broken. Wine is poured. Just to let you know, what is offered is not explanation, but presence.

We sit there at Christmas and Easter too, and the holiness does not announce itself. It simply arrives. No one performs. No one manages the moment. We receive what is given.

There is something quietly Pauline about it all. Grace does not arrive as resolution, but as sufficiency. Weakness is not solved; it is shared. And in that sharing, something heals.

All week, I am surrounded by the pressure to sound convincing. Ok, I might put my hand up in a seminar from time-to-time, asking the tutor/room questions, not to show the tutor how engaged I am. Shadow boxing with myself, fighting my intellect, through abstraction, and the constant temptation to curate myself. Yet that table interrupts the economy of performance. Each Friday, it brings a balm. A cooling of the soul. A reminder that God’s power does not require my polish.

I know now that without that table, I would not survive.

Paul says that when he is weak, then he is strong, not because weakness is virtuous, but because grace finally has room to act. The table teaches me the same lesson. Christ does not meet me where I appear capable. He meets me where I stop defending myself.

And perhaps that is the invitation this letter is really offering, not to become stronger Christians, but more honest ones. Not to speak better, but more truthfully. Not to perform faith, but to receive grace, again and again, until our weakness becomes a place where Christ is known.

Thank you for staying at the table with me. I am deeply grateful to be upheld by the prayers and generosity of the Church. As Scripture encourages us to “pray in the Spirit at all times… and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people” (Ephesians 6:18), I would be deeply grateful if you would continue to hold me in your prayers. Please pray that I remain attentive to Christ, faithful in formation, and responsive to the Spirit as God continues to shape me for the service of His Church. Your prayers truly matter, they sustain this journey in ways that cannot always be seen but are deeply felt. By me, yet by God.

With every blessing in Christ,

Steven

Editor’s note: For daily life bites, find me on Instagram Stories @babytheologian

Dear friends in Christ,

Grace and peace to you, saints and sinners alike.

This morning, while making an omelette, I was struck by something unexpectedly simple. Nothing of substance happens until the eggs are broken. Left intact, they remain whole but unrealised; only through breaking do they become something nourishing, shared, and sustaining. Standing there, I found myself thinking of Christ. His body broken not out of cruelty or accident, but out of love. Jesus did not endure the cross because suffering was good, but because love was costly. His breaking was not the end, but the means through which life was given. And I wonder if the same is often true of us. Not that God delights in our pain, but that He does not waste it. Perhaps resurrection life is not forged in spite of the breaking, but through it.

There are seasons when God whispers, and seasons when He rearranges the furniture of our lives so that we cannot avoid hearing Him. This season of formation has felt less like instruction and more like exposure, not to shame, but to truth. Rearranging furniture is rarely gentle. There are collisions, disruptions, moments of discomfort. Yet it reveals what is already in the room. I am learning that God is not primarily interested in refining our competence, but in reclaiming our surrender.

As Tyler Staton puts it, “Prayer can’t be mastered. Prayer always means submission.”

Much of this work has happened quietly. In prayer. In Scripture. In worship. In the unremarkable faithfulness of shared meals and ordinary days. Yet beneath the stillness, something is stirring. Formation, I am discovering, is not God preparing us for something later; it is God insisting on His lordship now.

Again and again, I have been drawn back to one passage of Scripture: Isaiah 61, not as a text to be mastered, but as a word that has been mastering me.

Isaiah is not a marginal book for specialists. It is one of the great load-bearing texts of Scripture, for Israel and for the Church. It is prayed, sung, preached, and passed down across generations because it requires a deeper faith. It holds judgment and hope together, ruin and restoration side by side, and insists that God does not merely rescue individuals but remakes communities and futures. Isaiah reads like a cathedral built over generations, many voices, many moments, one great insistence: the Holy One of Israel will not be managed, only trusted.

Isaiah 61 speaks into the aftermath, not the breakthrough. The people have returned home, but the ruins remain. Exile has ended, but restoration has not yet begun. This is not a victory speech. It is a summons spoken into the dust, when survival has given way to the harder, holier question: What will we build now?

The chapter opens not with God speaking directly, but with a Spirit-anointed voice declaring a commission:

“The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is upon me…”

Not the voice of a king asserting control.

Not the voice of a general demanding compliance.

But the voice of one sent, to the poor, the broken-hearted, the captive, the grieving.

God does not rush past the wounds of His people. He names them. He honours them. And then He clothes them with dignity. Ashes are not denied; they are exchanged. Mourning is not silenced; it is transformed. Yet comfort is not the conclusion.

Because Isaiah refuses to let healing terminate in sentiment.

“They will rebuild the ancient ruins.” Isaiah 61:1-8

This is where the text sharpens.

This is where it becomes dangerous.

Healing becomes vocation.

God does not restore His people to preserve them in safety. He restores them to send them back into places still marked by devastation, not as victims returning to trauma, but as witnesses entrusted with rebuilding. The language Isaiah uses is slow, deliberate, and costly. This is not a spectacle. This is obedience.

I have learned that rebuilding rarely looks impressive. It begins with what is unstable. It continues with what is unseen. It requires patience, humility, and the willingness to labour without applause. Yet this is precisely how God advances His Kingdom, not through acceleration, but through surrender.

An image that has stayed with me is the Church as a hospital. People arrive wounded, weary, desperate for healing, some visibly, others quietly. Others arrive exhausted from caring for those wounds. Most of us move between those roles throughout our lives. Isaiah 61 speaks to both. God does not demand that His people be fully healed before He calls them faithful.

They are often the ones entrusted with it.

This truth confronted me sharply during a recent preaching course led by Tim Benton of GSB Comms, designed to strip us of scripts, safety nets, and control, training us to preach for twenty minutes without notes. I entered the week holding both caution and excitement. There was vulnerability in standing with nothing in my hands, and yet a quiet expectation that God might meet us precisely there.

I chose to preach from Isaiah 61.

As the week unfolded, it became clear that I was not preparing a sermon so much as standing inside a word that had already shaped my life. Over the past two years, two different people, in separate contexts and without prompting, had prayed this passage over me and offered it as a prophetic word. I received it patiently, allowing time to test it. Returning to Isaiah 61 now, within the steady pressure of formation, I recognised how faithfully it has accompanied me, naming both healing and responsibility, comfort and calling.

Preaching without notes, I discovered that what has been lived does not need to be forced. The text carried its own authority. I spoke not from performance, but from surrender. One piece of feedback stayed with me: that I had not lost my fire, something that can quietly happen in theological college. I received that not as affirmation, but as a charge.

In recent months, this sense of calling has been confirmed not only in Scripture and community, but in place. I was born in Birmingham, and recently returned to an area that carries weight in my story. Standing there again, I was struck not by fear, but by clarity. The place no longer defined me; it summoned me. The ruins did not repel me; they clarified my calling.

Time spent in London has done the same. At a worship gathering in Hackney, something startled me. Only a few hundred yards away stood a place I knew well, a place marked by longstanding darkness. Worship and wound stood side by side. Light pressed close to shadow. It felt unmistakably biblical. The Kingdom of God does not hover at a safe distance; it advances into contested ground.

With some amusement, the irony of all this is not lost on me. As I write about ruins, rebuilding, and surrender, I am doing so while living in one of the most affluent areas of the most affluent city in the UK. Yet perhaps this too is part of the lesson. God has never been constrained by postcode, and the Gospel has always unsettled both the poor and the comfortable. If anything, this setting has sharpened my awareness that surrender is no easier when one is surrounded by abundance.

This season has also forced me to confront how I have understood church growth. For much of my life, I have measured it by what is visible, numbers gathered, seats filled, and signs of momentum. Yet Isaiah has always warned against confusing activity with faithfulness.

Again and again, the prophet exposes our tendency to trust substitutes, alliances, strategies, power, scale and anything that feels safer than surrender. Judah looked to empires and horses; we look to metrics and momentum. The word is the same: do not outsource your security. Trust God.

The Church does not grow most faithfully by filling rooms, but by forming people. When Christ is invited only to bless our strategies, we may gather crowds. When Christ is given full control, not partial influence, but lordship, He builds something far more enduring.

This is not a rejection of growth. It is a reordering of it. Older saints who have walked with God for decades have said the same to me: keep your walking boots on. The deeper the roots, the sweeter the fruit.

We are living in a moment of remarkable convergence. Across the globe, young people, particularly Gen Z, are turning toward the Church. This is not a trend to be curated. It is a moment of visitation. When God sends hunger, He expects His people to feed.

If they are coming to the tree, we must make the fruit reachable: honest prayer, trusted Scripture, reverent worship, space for real repentance and a Gospel that is clear, costly, and alive.

As Stephen Foster reminds us, “The church goes upward in age and inward in focus naturally…

It’s only intentional that the church goes downward in age and outward in focus.”

This wave does not need curators.

It needs stewards.

Jesus Himself stands in Nazareth, reads Isaiah 61, and says, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” He announces Jubilee. Restoration, not escape. And even risen, victorious, He still bears scars. The Kingdom is rebuilt by a wounded Messiah who entrusts His work to wounded people.

By God, this is not theory for me. It is the life I am being asked to live, as a man of God, under God, for the sake of His Kingdom.

This is the call I am learning to obey.

Calling is not clarity without cost. It is obedience without guarantees. Healing becomes a vocation only when we allow God to take full control, not to tame us, but to send us. Not to preserve us, but to spend us.

As I continue in this season of formation, I do so with growing conviction that God is on the move, quietly, powerfully, relentlessly. And if we would allow Him to lead fully, not managing His presence or negotiating His authority, we would see the Kingdom of Heaven advance in ways unimaginable.

My prayer is simple: by God, to remain attentive to Christ, faithful in formation, and courageous in surrender. And my hope is that together we might become a people willing to step into the ruins, not with answers, but with obedience, trusting that where Christ reigns fully, restoration will follow.

Thank you for walking with me in this season. I am deeply grateful to be upheld by the prayers and generosity of the Church. As Scripture encourages us to “pray in the Spirit at all times… and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people” (Ephesians 6:18), I would be deeply grateful if you would continue to hold me in your prayers. Please pray that I remain attentive to Christ, faithful in formation, and responsive to the Spirit as God continues to shape me for the service of His Church. Your prayers truly matter; they sustain this journey in ways that cannot always be seen but are deeply felt. By me, yet by God.

With every blessing in Christ,

Steven

Editor’s note: Reflections from daily life, find me on Instagram Stories @babytheologian

A Tale of Many Doors...

Dear friends in Christ,

By God’s grace, I have completed Michaelmas Term. Drawing to a close, I wanted to express heartfelt gratitude and share something of what God has been doing during this first season of study and formation. I am so deeply conscious that none of this journey is something I carry alone. Your prayers, encouragement, and generosity have made this term possible, and I am profoundly thankful.

Philippians 3:14-16 “I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus”

My dearest brothers and sisters in Christ.

Even before the term began, this journey required a step of faith. Moving out of my flat of four years was a real wrench. That space had held much more than furniture and sentimental values. No, it had been a place of stability, recovery, prayer, and slow rebuilding. Leaving it felt costly, yet it was also an act of trust, stepping forward into what God was providing rather than clinging to what had been familiar. Since arriving at Wycliffe Hall, I have been deeply grateful for the room I have been given here. It has been a tangible expression of God’s provision, a place of quiet, safety, and attentiveness, offering enough space to think, pray, read, and grow. In ways I did not anticipate, this simple gift has enabled me to settle and to give myself fully to the work of formation God is doing in me. And because you have stood with me, I have been able to be fully present to this season, not distracted by survival, but attentive to what God is doing.

That sense of grace and provision was powerfully underscored during matriculation at the University of Oxford. Taking part in this once-in-a-lifetime moment, stepping into a tradition shaped by centuries of prayer, scholarship, and service, was profoundly moving. To stand within that history, conscious of where God has brought me from and where He may be leading me, filled me with awe and gratitude. Matriculation was not simply ceremonial, it felt like a quiet testimony to the faithfulness of God, a reminder that He delights in lifting people into places they never imagined, not for their own sake, but for His purposes. My gratitude to God spilled out on the day. I was consumed by His grace and joy. I couldn’t stop singing His praises. Once I started singing on the walk from the college to the Sheldonian Theatre, most of my college peers joined in too. We walked together and sang praises onto the Lord. A powerful public witness of our faith. Students from other colleges were looking over, smiling, some even singing too. The presence of Christ was among us, we could all feel it. Powerful.

Stepping into this place and its long tradition might easily have been overwhelming, but what I encountered instead was something quietly grounding. The weight of history did not draw attention to achievement or status, but pointed me back to the simple, faithful practices that have sustained generations of Christians before me. Very quickly, the focus moved from ceremony to formation, from the moment of arrival to the daily, repeated act of turning my attention toward God.

Life at Wycliffe Hall is shaped by a steady rhythm of worship, Scripture, study, and community. Central to this has been the tradition of daily morning chapel. Gathering each day for prayer and the Word has undoubtedly provided a strong spiritual foundation, drawing me continually into closer communion with Christ. Beginning each morning in God’s presence has anchored me beyond academic demands, reminding me that formation starts not with what we do for God, but with who we are becoming before Him, learning, day by day, to abide in Christ.

Academically, the term has been demanding, stretching, and deeply enriching. I have had enormous joy digging deeply into Scripture, wrestling with biblical texts, tracing themes across the whole story of God, and rediscovering the richness and coherence of the Gospel. Loving God with the mind has become a lived discipline rather than an abstract ideal, and I have been reminded that theology serves the Church best when it leads us back to worship, faithfulness, and mission. I have been selected to attend a mission week at Betel House. A Christian-run recovery centre, where a small team of us will get the opportunity to reflect Christ and the gospel to the residents, with whom we will live for a week. I am really looking forward to this and grateful that your support is helping make space for these opportunities of service and witness.

I am also deeply conscious of the privilege of learning in a context where I have opportunities to learn from and speak with highly regarded scholars and theologians. This term, N. T. Wright has taught us on the book of Malachi. His passion for Scripture, the resurrection, and the faithfulness of God has been both intellectually stimulating and spiritually encouraging, reinforcing my conviction that rigorous biblical scholarship and vibrant Christian faith belong together.

Alongside my core studies, I have been blessed by opportunities that have broadened and deepened this formation. Time spent at the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities has been mind-blowing. I have Faculty lectures there, of which I particularly enjoyed, the ‘Old Testament - Narratives of the Hebrew Bible’, and the ‘Introduction to the New Testament’. Together with participation in the Theologos Program and the New Renaissance Programme, these experiences have placed theology in conversation with wider questions of culture, justice, beauty, suffering, and human dignity. These experiences have strengthened my sense that Christian theology does not retreat from the world but seeks to love it rightly. I am confident that Christ is Lord of all, and that the Gospel speaks powerfully to the deepest questions of our time. It has helped me speak more clearly about the heart of the gospel when talking with people with limited or no faith. While I am beginning to see how the Good News lands differently when spoken with both confidence and compassion.

One of the most personally encouraging experiences of the term was taking part in a guided visit to The Kilns, the former home of C. S. Lewis, led by a world-leading scholar. Walking through the place where Lewis prayed, wrote, and wrestled with faith was unexpectedly formative. It was a reminder that faithful theology is often forged quietly, through disciplined prayer, careful thought, friendship, and obedience over time. This was a profound encouragement and understanding to pursue theology that serves the Church with humility and devotion. It is a part of what I am called to achieve.

Community life has also played a vital role in this term. Participating in ‘formal hall’ at Wycliffe Hall and being invited to attend formal halls at other Oxford colleges has reminded me that formation happens not only in lecture rooms, but around the table. From the table fellowship of Jesus to the shared meals of the early Church, faith has always been shaped in community. For someone whose earlier life was marked more by exclusion than invitation, these moments of hospitality have spoken quietly but powerfully of God’s redeeming grace. One of the quieter but deeply life-giving aspects of this term has been the daily rhythm of shared meals. I am especially grateful for the care and kindness of the catering staff, whose work makes these moments possible day after day. Mealtimes have become places of genuine fellowship, space to sit, eat well, laugh, listen, and talk together about faith, study, and life. In these ordinary moments around the table, community is formed gently and naturally, reminding me that Christian formation happens as much through hospitality and shared presence as it does through lectures and books.

Revelation 3:8 “I know all the things you do, and I have opened a door for you that no one can close”

There is one reality I want to name honestly. There is no one here who comes from my background, or who has walked a similar road into this place, and at times the weight of that feels heavy. Yet Scripture reminds us that God often calls people to stand in places where they do not naturally belong, not despite their story, but because of it. This has deepened my dependence on God and strengthened my trust that He wastes nothing, and that His strength is made perfect in weakness. Rather than discouraging me, it has also quietly confirmed the need for voices shaped by God’s redeeming grace to be present in these spaces, and it has strengthened my resolve to serve the Church faithfully with the story God has entrusted to me. I have also enjoyed getting to know people from different cultures and church denominations. It’s been so fascinating to see how people love God in different ways. The community here has been richly rewarding and supportive in many ways.

A particularly formative moment this term was the ISW School of Evangelism formation week. Rooted in daily worship and rich theological teaching, this week clarified that evangelism is not an optional extra, but a core expression of faithful priestly ministry. Wrestling with how to proclaim Christ in a sceptical, post-Christian, and often wounded culture strengthened my confidence to bear witness with both conviction and compassion, proclaiming not myself, but Jesus Christ as Lord. Again, I have felt so supported knowing that many of you have been praying for me as these foundations were being laid. Thank you.

As I reflect on this first term as a whole, I can see how God has been at work not only in my learning, but in my character. Through prayer, study, worship, community, joy, and challenge, I am being formed more deeply into the likeness of Christ. This season has been an invitation to share in the mind of Christ (Philippians 2:5), learning humility, obedience, and self-giving love. I am becoming more aware that pursuing ordained ministry is not primarily about gifting or visibility, but about holiness of life, faithfulness of character, and availability to God. As Paul writes, “we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Corinthians 4:5).

‘I want to say this plainly, this term has happened because of you’

Your financial support has provided stability and freedom. Your prayers have sustained me in moments of stretching and growth. Your encouragement has reminded me that this discernment is not a solitary journey, but one carried within the body of Christ. As I look ahead to the next term, I do so with gratitude and hope, trusting that “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion” (Philippians 1:6). Please continue to pray for wisdom, perseverance, humility, and faithful discernment as God continues His work of formation. Thank you for walking with me in this season. I am deeply grateful to be upheld by the prayers and generosity of the Church. As Scripture encourages us to “pray in the Spirit at all times… and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people” (Ephesians 6:18), I would be deeply grateful if you would continue to hold me in your prayers. Please pray that I remain attentive to Christ, faithful in formation, and responsive to the Spirit as God continues to shape me for the service of His Church. Your prayers truly matter, they sustain this journey in ways that cannot always be seen but are deeply felt. By me, yet by God.

With every blessing in Christ,

Steven

Editor’s note: For a look at my daily story, check out my Instagram page @babytheologian