God

“Jesus the Mother Swan”– a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 7 May 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Gary Davies on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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A bit of gossip for you. There’s a couple in our neighborhood that everybody’s been talking about lately.

A pair of swans in the local pond.

Last year, very sadly, they lost all their children to avian flu. So this year we’ve really been rooting for them.

In March they built their nest under a little bridge. And eventually there was one perfect egg – but the next day it was gone, stolen perhaps by a fox. But the next day there was another egg – and from then on, Mama Swan hunkered down and never left her nest.

Cycling to work, I’d stop to greet her, or out for a jog. Others did, too: kids on the way to school, tourists, locals. Eventually the council had to put up barriers to give her some peace from her fans.

Last Wednesday evening, I noticed her posture had changed: her wings spread out like feathery canopies. I wondered, I waited, and when she shuffled, I saw them: four babies, another one pecking through, and four still-unhatched eggs.

“Oh, my goodness!” I said outloud. Someone stopped, I pointed, and soon a clutch of us were there on the bridge, lost in wonder. And doing something English strangers don’t usually do: talking with each other.

One woman – we realised we lived on the same street. “Hey, we’re neighbors!” she said. A teenager stopped, temporarily transfixed. A security guard came over with tears in his eyes.

The next morning, they were all there: nine babies and two proud parents. I told my fellow swan-fan-onlookers something I’d learned from Sir David Attenborough: Swans lay eggs on different days, but the baby cygnets coordinate through their eggshell barriers to hatch together on the same day.

“Wow!” said a woman on her phone. “My mum in Swansea says to tell that swan, she’s a star!”

In the Bible, Jesus says: How often I’ve wanted to gather you like a mother hen gathers her children under her wings.

We live in a vulnerable and fragile world – and the danger we face is real. Foxes need to raise their babies, too. It’s nature. And sadly, we’re never short of human tyrants who unnaturally thrive on violence and domination.

According to Jesus, God is not a tyrant, but a mother swan – who doesn’t guarantee us safety but definitely promises us love. God who, I believe, gathers cygnets and humans under her wings, reminding us that we’re not strangers, but neighbours. That we belong not only to God but to each other, and all creation.

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“The difficult freedom of being human”– a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 27 April 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Gary Davies on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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I’m a decent preacher – I don’t generally put people to sleep – but a few times in 25 years of sermons, I have unintentionally provoked someone to walk out.

Once when I accidentally cussed in the pulpit.

Once during LGBTQ Pride when I joked that God loves straight folks, too – not just the gays – and that despite loads of evidence to the contrary, it is possible to be both heterosexual and Christian.

But I was really surprised when someone quite dramatically stormed out after I suggested that Christians should embrace the biblical practice of confession: to regularly come clean with a trusted friend or pastor about how we’ve screwed up.

After the service, I approached the offended person and said: “Did something hit a nerve?”

They said: “Oh yeah, when you told me I had to tell my sins to someone other than God”.

I felt tempted to respond: “Would you like to confess something to me now?”

But I did not say that. Because I know personally how scary and unappealing confession sounds.

I got sober through The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Step Four suggests we write down a moral inventory of our entire life. Then Step Five suggests we read that inventory out loud, admitting “to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”

When I first heard that, I thought: Uh-uh. No way.

But I have come to believe: that if we haven’t shared the honest truth with another person, we probably haven’t really told God – and we certainly haven’t accepted it ourselves.

On my podcast, Spill the Spirituality, I recently chatted with Harry Clark, Traitors winner. His new documentary follows his rediscovery of faith, including his attempt to meet up with the Pope at the Vatican. (Spoiler: he did!)

But Harry told me his most transformational spiritual experience wasn’t meeting Pope Leo, but going to confession for the first time as an adult – describing his mess, in detail, in the loving presence of another person.

I get that. In my Fifth Step, I had a lot to confess. It was very painful, but my deepest feeling was relief, even joy. The person I shared it with said: “Well done. You have now joined the human race”.

Which reminded me of Jesus’s words after receiving confessions. He says: “Take heart, friend.” “Go in peace.”

When I feel the temptation to walk out on the truth, may God help me to stay put, take heart, and practise the difficult freedom of being human.

“No one is left behind”– a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 2 March 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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We moved to the UK ten years ago. From Chicago—where I’d spent my adult life and had a close group of friends—to Birmingham, where I knew precisely no one, and couldn’t even understand the accents!

Up to that point, most of my friendships had been forged because we’d been through something big together. We’d survived university or got sober or started a church from scratch. When you undergo something tough-and-beautiful with people, true friendship can emerge.

Lots of these rites-of-passage, though, happen in the first half of life. So when I arrived in Brum, aged 40, there wasn’t a natural stage-of-life experience to hook into. I felt disconnected, sometimes isolated. Making friends isn’t straightforward at any age, but it’s even trickier as we get older.

So I decided to join a running club. I’m a long-time runner, but still I worried: Would I fit in? Would I be slower than everyone else? Did I really want to sweat and stink around people I’d never met?

But I went anyway, and the Birmingham Swifts welcomed me on a run and even invited me to the pub afterwards. Because of them, I’ll forever associate Brummie and Black Country accents with laughter and kindness.

The Swifts had designed something ingenious to make sure no one got left-behind. They didn’t separate us into “fast” and “slow” groups. Instead, we ran at different paces – but along the route there were several connection points. When you reached one, you’d turn around and run back to the last person, and then circle back ahead again. Only when everyone made it to the connection point did we run the next leg. You ran at your own pace – but still with everyone else.

Because of that wise, inclusive approach, I made new friends. Not through a dramatic rite-of-passage, but through ordinary conversations, shared streets and sweat. I found real friendship with real people. Which is, I believe, what we’re all after. Way beyond counting likes on social-media, we want to know others – and be known – in detail.

Sometimes people imagine God as a distant cosmic force – benevolent but aloof, unknowable.

Jesus teaches us something quite different: “I no longer call you servants,” he says to his followers, “I call you friends.” Jesus shows me the God who actually likes us, because he knows what it is to be us, sweating and stinking and celebrating along the tough-and-beautiful course of life. A God who is knowable, who makes us her friends. And so always turns back for us, so nobody – absolutely nobody – is left behind.

“Spring clean of the soul” – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 16 February 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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My husband Jonathan and I have very different food obsessions. His is cheese. If there’s Cheddar in the fridge, or Brie or Emmenthaler – it doesn’t matter the type, really – if it’s cheese, it calls to him. It whispers savory-nothings into his stomach.

Me? Cheese doesn’t woo me that much. But bring any kind of deep-fried, ultra-processed junk-food into my house, and good luck finding it later. Once that bag of snacks is open, I am powerless over its pull.

At least what Jonathan craves is actual food. The stuff I crave is basically a sludge of extruded starch paste, held together by salt and artificial fats. Totally fabricated, no nutritional value – and God do I love it.

In Copenhagen once, I noticed in a corner-shop that junk-snacks were displayed in a section marked “Not-Food”. That was the actual sign on the shelf: “Not-Food”. At least the Danes are honest: “Everything for sale here is edible, but it’s not really food.”

The season of Lent begins this week – an annual spring-cleaning of the soul, when, for 40 days, Christians experiment with abstaining from something that we regularly depend on for a fix. Some substance or habit or attitude we use for a hit of dopamine, like chocolate or shopping or porn or self-righteousness or social media. Something we use to change the way we feel, even if that thing ends up draining the life from us.

Compared to our Muslim siblings who, during Ramadan, fast completely from sun-up to sun-down, Lent is somewhat less involved, but it’s still not easy. Abstaining from just one simple thing can bring us right up against the deeper reason we’re tempted by it.

It was Lent in 2009 when I finally admitted I was powerless over alcohol and drugs. It was so painful to admit, but it was also such a relief. And with God’s help, it led to me stopping for good, and eventually, amazingly, to the craving itself being removed.

In the Bible, Jesus describes feeling tempted himself, which is also a huge relief to me. If the Son of God can be honest about his own temptations, then I can admit mine, too.

I believe the goal of true spirituality is not to heroically strengthen our willpower for an anxious life of compulsive avoidance, but to learn to let go of our fixes and relax more fully into God. To leave the “Not Food” aisle of our lives to get a taste for freedom and what’s really real.

“Closer to us than our self” – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 9 February 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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I got on the train recently during morning rush-hour — packed with hundreds of humans, my face pressed up against the doors. And at the next station, a young couple pushed on. There was absolutely no room; they shouldn’t’ve crammed in, but of course, they did. We’ve all been there — I get it.

But now we were extremely close. My face, maybe two inches from their faces. I could smell their eyebrows. I could see right into their pores. It was so uncomfortable, I closed my eyes. They started talking, I could feel their breathing.

And then, for the rest of my journey, they made out. They made out intensely. As if they were going on honeymoon rather than to work.

I could not believe it. It was so ridiculous I started laughing. Two inches from their lips, I started laughing — but that didn’t stop them. Finally, I escaped, at my station, and I did not say, “Y’all. Get a room!

I did say, with my acquired British sarcasm, “Thank you so much for sharing your morning with me.” The woman replied, totally sincere, “Oh, you’re welcome.”

If that couple’s listening: happy early Valentine’s Day. Long live your young love.

To be honest, though, their sloppy-snogging made me feel like a prude. Then I felt guilty for feeling like a prude and fulfilling that old stereotype that all religious people are buttoned-up, embarrassed by passion.

And not just religious people. There’s a stereotype that English people in general are constitutionally-averse to any kind of emotion – sexual, spiritual, political. “Keep it private”, people say. “Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve”.

One of my favorite images of Jesus is an icon where he exposes his heart – he opens up his chest to show it on fire with love. Maybe you’ve seen one in a church or museum. Jesus doesn’t just wear his heart on his sleeve, he hands it over to us, I believe. He’s offering himself to the world – as a brother, as a father, as a mother, as a lover. As a true friend, available now in flesh-and-blood.

The Christian theologian St Augustine wrote: In our heart of hearts, God is closer to us than we are to our self.

I love that. I believe that. A God so embarrassingly loving that she comes closer to us than our own breathing. So extravagantly generous that he hands over his heart to expand our hearts – on crowded trains, in cramped lives – so we can learn to love as God loves.

“We are, all of us, pilgrims” – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 24 November 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

Last year we moved to the Docklands – part of the East End of London, that from medieval times was the world’s largest port. Boats moved cargo in and out of vast docks along the Thames.

Today most of these harbors have been filled in to create parks and housing, but you can still sense the history in the names of things. We live on the old whaling dock, and our local pub? It’s called the Moby Dick — with some of the best fish-and-chips in-town.

I was exploring the neighborhood one day at low-tide and noticed a stretch of sand and pebble. And a memorial to a voyage that started there in 1620, when 65 people boarded a ship sailing for what Europeans then called the New World. Need a hint? The pub next-door – it’s called the Mayflower.

This week, at Thanksgiving celebrations across the US, Americans will tell this story: of the Pilgrim mothers and fathers braving the seas for a new life, for a new home. Half of them perishing the first winter; the others surviving only through the compassion of the indigenous Americans, of the Wampanoag Nation.

This story is so central to American lore that we often romanticize the Pilgrims as heroic pioneers – or we stereotype them as colonial oppressors. I confess I’ve done both in my life. It’s so easy, but so lazy, to turn people from centuries ago into cartoons or villains.

But standing there on Rotherhithe Beach, I could see them as humans — children clinging to their parents as anchors lifted, prayers being whispered: for a safer life, for economic stability, for freedom to practice their faith without social hostility or government interference. These prayers feel to me like deeply human desires, both 400 years ago, and today.

We like our stories neat: good-or-bad, all-or-nothing. But real humans aren’t that simple: we’re a mixture of motives. We move, we migrate. We don’t stay in one place emotionally, or spiritually, or geographically. We change. As I stood on the pilgrims’ wharf that day, I heard people speaking in at least four different languages, and only one of them was Cockney. And I thought: we humans, we are all of us pilgrims.

In the Bible, I believe God makes a promise: “Let no foreigner say, ‘I am not welcome.’” God says “I will give them a home and a name better than ‘daughters and sons’”.

It’s a promise of belonging that flows across generations and nations and borders. My prayer this Thanksgiving is that God’s vision will happen here: on earth as it already is in heaven. Because in the end, I believe we are, all of us, pilgrims searching for the belonging of home.

“The Sea in my veins” – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 17 November 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

We’re recently back from a week in Norfolk, on a stretch of the coast so beautiful it could be a scene in a holiday snow-globe. Except instead of snow, stars and sunrises, seascapes and fields. And at this time of year, massive colonies of seals. Everything held together in an atmosphere of awe.

On the first morning, I ran along the dunes to see the grey seals, mottled and crooning on the sand, waiting for their babies to be born. That day I saw only one little white pup, maybe the first-fresh-born, held close by its mum.

But every day after that, there was growing crèche of cottony seal-babies. 125 by week’s end, with 3000 expected by January. I’d stop and gaze at the sheer exuberance of nature. So bold and, at the same time, so fragile: 40% of those babies won’t make it through winter. So terrible, so beautiful, so compelling that you half-expect David Attenborough to show up with a camera crew.

And Norfolk absorbed me in another way, too. Amidst all this new animal life were quiet reminders of human life and mortality. Walking the coastal path, stopping in seaside villages, I saw memorials everywhere. Names carved into monuments: young men, women, a generation, we will remember them. And simple plaques at beachfronts, on benches tied with flowers, giving thanks for loved ones who’ve crossed to the other shore.

For Nigel, who loved it here.

In memory of Mum, we miss you so much.

For Aisha, we’ll love you forever.

One of my favourite Bible passages is Psalm 148, which describes all Creation praising God—not just humans, but sun and moon, children and elders, sea creatures and ocean depths. All week-long in Norfolk, I felt drawn into this tidal movement of praise. I felt baptized again in the currents of the living and the dead. As the poet Thomas Traherne put it, I “felt the Sea itself flowing in [my] veins”.

For me, as a Christian, the reason for all this praise isn’t that everything is amazing all the time – it’s definitely not. For me, the reason for the praise is that God can be trusted to hold us together through terrible things and beautiful things. To hold everything together, actually: eons and generations, and me and you, and colonies of seal-pups, too. God somehow makes sure everything belongs.

In this cosmic sphere, we will live and we will die, and, I believe, we will be okay. All shall be well, everything held forever by the one God and Mother of us all.

“God is infinitely knowable” – a BBC Pause for Thought

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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.

“Bicycle Race” – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 22 September 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

Earlier this month in London, there was a near-total Tube strike for an entire week. One of the results of that was that everybody who owns a bike in greater London decided – understandably – to cycle to work, even if they hadn’t ridden their bike in years and had to dig it out from behind the stacks of boxes in the very-back-corner of the garage.

Picture it: It’s 7:15 in the morning, and the generously-sized bike lanes into central London are already rammed with commuters.

We are a heaving movement of humans, metal, and lycra that feels wild to be part of – and also slightly precarious. People who’ve never commuted on their bikes, people who look like they’ve never been on a bike: there they all are, God bless them, huffing-and-puffing and trying to get to work with nearly-flat tyres, rattling-rusty-chains. People pedaling in stiletto heels, three-piece-suits. It’s a Great Migration, radically diverse.

But there’s one thing that all these folks have in common. They’ve all discovered or remembered their bike-bells. They haven’t ridden a bike in ten-or-twenty years, but oh their thumbs are still strong. And they know how to use those bells. They ring at every pedestrian who steps within a meter of the cycle path, jangle at falling leaves or slight curves in the road, clang at any infraction they perceive in their fellow cyclists. Don’t you love a new convert?

To me, it feels like a few herds of buffalo have joined the antelopes, alongside a parade of elephants, giraffes, and the occasional flamingo — and we’ve all been crushed together onto the goat path. For several miles. It’s cumbersome, hilarious, and even joyous: and as I surrender to this unwieldy commuting congregation, I realise I’m being converted, too.

One Christian author says: the spiritual journey is “always personal but never private”. It’s more “us” than me. I feel that so keenly in this pack – we’re held together as we amble along the narrow path, and then there’s the turn onto London Bridge and for a blessèd 300 meters, we race and expand into width and length, height and depth: love surpassing understanding, before we come back together in freedom with all the people on the other side of the river.

And all of it is the journey. Not so much towards God, because, whether buffalo or flamingo, I believe we’re already in God: in whom we live and move and have our being.

“The Best Definition of Heaven” – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 15 September 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Sara Cox on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

I am a shameless eavesdropper. Partly because I’ve got good hearing. Partly because I’m just plain nosey. But mostly because I’m genuinely interested in human beings. We are fascinating creatures.

And you can learn so much about us just by listening to what’s happening around you.

For example, I ran by a woman in Greenwich the other day, and I heard her say into her phone: “Why, Linda, why? Why did we let that happen, Linda?” (I thought, Lord, we’ve all been Linda).

Another day last week, two guys were getting off the train, and one said to the other: “They’re all being idiots! Every last one of them. And that’s exactly what I explained to Helen in one of my many emails”. God bless Helen. We’ve all been there, too.

Listening to people isn’t just a hobby of mine, it’s a calling. It’s what makes me a decent evangelist. Now I know – “evangelist” is a weird word with a complicated history. I remember walking in a Gay Pride parade in uni and being yelled at by so-called evangelists with Bible-verse placards, screeching that we would burn in hell.

For me, being an evangelist is the exact opposite of that kind of spiritual abuse. It’s listening for the good in the world, the kindness in people, the light shimmering through. When I notice those things and speak about those things, I can feel God moving.

In August I was at the Edinburgh Fringe interviewing stand-up-comics for my podcast, and I joined a group of Methodist evangelists at the Festival. Together we rolled a sofa-on-wheels up and down the Royal Mile and invited strangers to sit down and share a time when they were lost in wonder.

I thought we’d get a few extraverted-takers, but all week long, hundreds of people queued-up to be listened to, to sit down and tell stories – of falling in love, hearing music, losing a child or parent, seeing stars and signs and sensing the spirituality running through everything.

It was a sofa of miracles and I could have stayed there forever.

At one point, an elderly woman walked by. She was clearly caught up in the energy of the crowds, the thousands of Festival pilgrims. And I heard her whisper to herself: “My God! Everyone’s here.” I’m so glad I was eavesdropping, because honestly, that might be the best definition of heaven I’ve ever heard.

“My God! Everyone’s here!” In my opinion, that old woman was a true evangelist: listening for and speaking out the joy of human life and the goodness of God.