Here’s the text for the 29 September 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Sara Cox on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

My friend Kimberly is one of my best mates in the whole world. But we didn’t start out that way. We met 30 years ago in theology college — also known as ‘vicar school’ — and immediately got off to a rocky start. We were both committed Christians, of course, but I was a lefty, she was a righty, and ‘never the twain shall meet’.

We also had serious personality differences. She was a sorority girl: popular, fiercely-intelligent, super-confident. I was confident too (also known as egotistical) but saw myself as more “cutting-edge”. I had long hair. I wore earrings, a big wooden cross around my neck, and t-shirts with messages like “No one knew I was a lesbian until now”.

Our competition and mutual-suspicion were thinly-veiled. Classic rival stuff, which came to a head one day when I told Kimberly I was one of two final candidates for a youth-worker job at a local church. She grimaced and said: “What do you know? I’m the other candidate.”

And then came the twist – the church hired us both, asked us to share the job. At first, we didn’t love it. But over the next two years, something unexpected happened. Our disagreements and resentments slowly melted into respect. And then into true, abiding friendship.

Thirty years later, we’ve never lived in the same city again and we now live in different countries. But emotionally we’re so near: we talk and text, we holiday together, we’ve written the other’s dating profiles in the past, officiated at each other’s weddings. Her boys are our God-children. We’ve been friends for so long that Kimberly knows the depths of me as well as (maybe better than) my husband.

Because of our friendship, our philosophies and theologies have grown – they’re less reactive, healthier, more mature. But more importantly we’ve realised that one of most beautiful things that faith makes possible is deep friendship in which we’re loved well and known in detail, across difference.

That feels so important – especially these days, when it’s easy to get locked-up in echo-chambers and view the other as an eternal opponent or enemy.

For me, though, it’s not only about friendship with each other, with other human-beings: it’s also about friendship with God.

Someone in my 12-step-recovery-meeting recently said: “It’s not that God is unknowable: it’s that God is infinitely knowable. Like a friend.”

I love that. In my opinion, God’s mystery isn’t about being distant or unknowable.

God’s mystery is simply that there is so much of God to know.

Not far-off, but endlessly-discoverable – like Kimberly, like a dear, unexpected friend.