Happy Easter! Indeed, given the time of year, the story that follows is a fitting one. It's for those who, like me, have knocked on the door of faith but couldn't bring themselves through it. It's for those conditioned to see belief in the divine as ludicrous, and who don't understand how to even begin believing despite having a niggling sense that it might just be good for them. Simply, it's the story of how, for the past five months, I've slowly cultivated a relationship with Jesus -- as well as the peace of mind this brings -- off the back of two seemingly unrelated events: reading East of Eden and a night of debauched drinking. I hope it helps.

It started on a Friday in late October. I'd gone to the pub with work colleagues for a couple, and -- now a slightly sad single man -- went all out after the first two slipped down. By "all out," I mean blackout. I woke the next morning with no recollection of how I'd made it home. Staggeringly, my door was locked, my keys were safe, my phone and wallet were in my coat pocket, and my glasses weren't broken -- albeit I'd placed them neatly on the floor at the foot of the bed, which felt uncanny to me. It was as if I'd wanted to put them on my bedside table where they normally belong, but didn't quite have the capacity.

This was just one of a few inexplicably bizarre things I noticed that morning: my flat was strewn with autumn leaves; mysterious stains darkened the wooden floor near my bathroom; and my clothes were soaked in fluids I couldn't identify. Entrenched in the uncanny valley, and thinking about the absolute state I must've been in the night before, I wondered how I'd made it home so safely. I felt I shouldn't have, yet I had.

Raised in a secular culture, I wasn't one to make 'irrational' leaps, and yet I couldn't shake the idea that something supernatural might've helped me out. Thoughts kept crossing my mind: What angel guided you home? Someone wants to keep you alive for something. I felt, really, like I should've died, like I should've had some tragic accident -- but I hadn't.

That sense -- that there's truth to the supernatural, that it's not just fantasy -- coincided with this feeling I'd been getting about Christianity, and how it offers followers decent protection in a world that's often perilous and difficult to navigate alone. Like daffodils in spring, this idea bloomed while I was reading East of Eden and saw characters battling good and evil. I realised that those best able to cope with life's worst -- and, hence, those I admired the most -- were imbued with the knowledge of Christ.¹

On that hungover morning, however, I hadn't yet put two and two together -- I was too enthralled by all that's mystical, and so couldn't, for the rest of the weekend, shake the sense that something was protecting me; but what? Then, on Monday, I embarked on a solo drive to Scotland to surprise my mum. I left at 4 a.m., and 13½ hours later pulled up in Blairgowrie. Hindsight tells me that on that journey I was praying to God -- obviously I didn't understand this at the time; all I knew was I was reaching out to something, and it delivered me to Scotland safely despite my exhaustion.

The standout moment had to be taking a wrong turn off the motorway onto the backroads. Navigating this narrow and twisty route forced me to perk up -- another couple of hours cruising on the motorway might've seen me napping...

While I stayed in Scotland, I had a series of intense dreams. One reminded me of Ebenezer Scrooge's spiritual transformation in A Christmas Carol. The ghosts, though, didn't appear to show me my past, present and future. They were the ghosts of myself living alternate lives: one without faith, one with some faith, and one with a seemingly overwhelming zeal. Witnessing them, I felt like Goldilocks trying out the Three Bears' breakfasts. The life with no faith ended in my destruction; likewise the zealous life failed since I couldn't maintain the zeal and quit. The life in which I had some faith, now that was the dulce vita. The dream was a call to begin a faith I could sustain -- what I now know Jesus would call mustard-seed faith.

I remember waking with absolute clarity, as if I'd literally been told what to do: if you can follow an exercise routine to strengthen your body, you can follow an exercise routine to strengthen your spirit. I knew quite suddenly that all I needed to do to grow my faith was commit to a regimen of spiritual exercises and let time -- God -- do the rest.² I'd come around to the idea that I needed to be spiritually strong to endure life's trials -- and now, by the grace of God, I knew how. Genuinely, it felt miraculous.

That said, I still wasn't fully on board with the stuff I used to think of as 'irrational' in spite of all the seemingly miraculous goings-on. Nevertheless, the simple fact I now doubted my prior beliefs was all I needed to get going.

You see, I'd tried Christianity in earnest about a year before, but this attempt was a false start: my heart was open; my mind was closed. Although I believed in the truth of acting in the world as Christ taught,³ I was resolute that Jesus was not the Son of God -- I found the idea ridiculous, but this was my faith's undoing. I lacked the openness to truly know Jesus and learn that I am loved -- forever -- by him and by God, and that God so loved the world he sacrificed his one and only Son for my sins.⁴

Lacking that understanding, this particular Christian journey was doomed: I had no way of reconciling my sinful nature with my belief in acting as Christ taught. In my mind, the two couldn't coexist. I simply couldn't accept myself -- as both God and Christ accept me -- in spite of my sins. My model of Christianity only worked if I lived sinlessly. Now believe me, I tried to do that; but when I couldn't rid myself of the desire to sleep with my partner before marriage, I got angry: why do I have to be so f---ing pure all the time? It's impossible.

I'd started to believe my faith was making me miserable. So, to escape the guilt and the anger, I started to 'rationalise': You don't actually believe in God, do you? And Jesus is just a man who lived two-thousand years ago, so some of his rules must be outdated, right? If you want to sleep with your partner, f--- it, sleep with her; it's fine. God ain't even real anyway, so if He ain't judging you, why are you even bothering to judge yourself?

The next thing I knew, I was sleeping with my partner and my YouTube algorithm was feeding me videos of atheists teaching me the Bible is corrupt by way of its scribes, that hidden gnostic gospels challenge its authenticity, and so on. Poof -- just like that, one of my longest and most promising Christian journeys went up in smoke.

In essence, I just described the life I saw in my dream characterised by 'overwhelming zeal.' It's a life where I'd gone, what I considered, 'all in' on faith -- that is, I was trying to live a spotless life by Jesus' standards -- but I couldn't see that it lacked the firm foundation it needed to stand. It was built on sand. I now know that belief in the supernatural aspect of Christianity -- as insane as it seems to someone brought up in a post-enlightenment, secular culture -- is the rock on which a long and peaceful faith is built.

The nascent sense I got after waking post-blackout -- that God might just be real -- coupled with the belief that living by Christ's standards offers guidance and protection, let me reconcile what I couldn't before: I can sin and be Christian. This is possible because I now believe that God loves me despite my sins -- in fact, he can't even see them since they are covered by the blood of Jesus. This knowledge provides profound peace: to feel, despite all the bad in me, completely and truly loved by God -- a divine, all-knowing presence -- lets me forgive, accept and love myself as I am, and fills me with such overwhelming gratitude that I can't help but try my best to do good, even when it's hard.

Of course, the me in Scotland who'd just woken from his apparently God-sent dream would have read that last paragraph and called it, at best, cute; at worst, bats--t. I suppose the question I'm trying to answer is: how did I come to find the peace I've described and which no doubt seems peculiar -- yet strangely alluring -- to a non-believer?

Well, I did as my dream told me. I created and consistently followed a simple program of spiritual exercises:

• Wake up, shower, dress and make a cup of tea.
• In silence and solitude, study the Bible and journal your thoughts.
• Have breakfast while listening to a holy song.

Doing this every morning is what helped me to believe. It gave me the understanding I needed to enter the door on which I'd been knocking. I had no way of knowing that following this simple routine would lead me to adopt other spiritual practices such as prayer and Church, and that together they would cultivate within me a belief in Jesus -- and all that he has done and continues to do for me -- such that I felt compelled to clean up my act and lead a better life in which I'm kinder and more loving to both myself and those around me.

I'm certainly not perfect, but I now understand that when I mess up, all I have to do is own it and seek to make amends, knowing that's what God wills me to do. This puts me in a much better spot than my old, post-wrongdoing modus operandi: turning my back on Christianity and fleeing to a nihilism where I take on the role of God and worship myself by attempting to guiltlessly pursue my impulses. As in my dream -- and the past 30-odd years of my reality -- a life like that, a life without faith nor moral compass, certainly doesn't bring about the dulce vita.

That's not to say life's easier now per se; I still endure the same hardships as before -- but knowing Jesus makes them feel... lighter.

I'm suddenly conscious that I'm talking a lot about how good Jesus makes my life without really offering up any stories to prove it. I've every intention of telling them, but they're beyond the scope of this piece. For now, I'm going to attempt to draw this all to a conclusion:

When you feel like an outsider, finding faith and the peace it brings seems like a complicated business. Earlier, I brought up one false start, but that was only one of many. I remember, six years ago, cycling to St Mark's in Battersea, desperate to walk inside -- but I just couldn't. Again, I'd concluded that following Christ was fundamentally good -- I just didn't believe he was real. How could I sit in there and look others in the eye, knowing they believe and I don't? I wish today's me could've walked outside, looked myself in the eye and said it doesn't matter if you don't believe yet, it only matters that you're open to believing, so come on in.

And that's it. In my experience, it really is that simple. All you have to do to find faith is open both your mind and heart to it and then, one day at a time, pick up your Bible and study. For me, reading East of Eden opened my heart; getting blackout drunk opened my mind; and my dream prompted me to study. And the rest? Well, that's God's work:

“A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how.”⁵

I wish you a blessed Easter, and pray that, like the mustard seed, our faith grows to become greater than all the garden plants such that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.⁶