I love my two dogs, but they couldn’t be much more different.

Bruce is a nine year old pug/staffy cross who looks like someone designed a dog using leftover spare parts and unchecked optimism. He’ll bark like the house is on fire if a wasp farts two streets over, lick anyone in range, and roll over for a tummy tickle from literally anyone.

Whiskey, on the other hand, is a Rhodesian Ridgeback: tall, beautiful, calm, and quietly affectionate. She virtually never barks and takes a while to warm up to people, but once she decides you’re good people, she is fiercely loyal. I am her favourite, and it drives my daughter crazy with jealousy.

And every single day, these two furry legends preach the grace of God to me.

A few months ago, I was preaching through Hebrews at church, and I’ve found myself reflecting again on one of its earliest warnings: don’t drift. Not in a dramatic, “I’ve rejected everything and moved to a cave” kind of way, but in that quiet, almost unnoticed way where your heart starts to float away from Jesus while life just keeps carrying on.

Hebrews opens with one of the biggest statements in the Bible. Before it tells us what to do, it tells us who Jesus is.

I recently got new sofas. And I have to say, they are dangerously comfortable. Not just “that’s nice” comfortable. I mean deep, soft, disappears-your-spine comfortable. The kind of sofa that doesn’t simply invite you to sit down, but seems to make a full theological argument for why you should remain there indefinitely. You lower yourself in for five minutes and somehow reappear forty-five minutes later, holding an empty mug, slightly disorientated, with no idea what happened to your plans for the evening.

I am not anti-sofa, by the way. Let’s be very clear about that. Sofas are a gift from God. Some of my finest moments have involved a blanket, a brew, and the deeply spiritual question of whether I can justify getting up for another biscuit. But Christianity is not a sofa-based religion.

Last weekend I visited the Areopagus in Athens.

If the name doesn’t immediately ring a bell, it’s the place most people know as Mars Hill, where the Apostle Paul stood in Acts 17 and addressed the philosophers, intellectuals and religious thinkers of ancient Greece.

If I’m honest, I had imagined something a little more dramatic. Perhaps a grand platform, an impressive monument, or at the very least a rock that didn’t feel like it was actively trying to throw me down a hill. Instead, what I found was a surprisingly slippery lump of stone. After a couple of thousand years of tourists, pilgrims and curious Christians retracing Paul’s steps, the surface has been polished smoother than my freshly shaved head. One wrong step and I could easily have found myself recreating the Fall in a very literal sense.

A few years ago, my wife Laura suggested I should go and see my GP.

I remember feeling genuinely confused.

Why would she think that?

As far as I was concerned, I was fine. Well, maybe not fine. I was tired, stressed, busy, adjusting to life as a new dad, and dealing with a lot at work. But that’s life, isn’t it? Everyone gets tired. Everyone gets stressed. Everyone has seasons where they’re carrying more than they’d like.

At least, that’s how I saw it.

I know what you’re thinking… it’s not Monday. Why am I getting a Grace & Grit article today?

Well, I’m sat in an Airbnb in Darlington, drinking a coffee and waiting for a couple of eggs to boil before heading back for day two of a leaders’ conference, and I wanted to share something I’ve been reflecting on.

Yesterday I listened to a teaching session from Chris Frost that I haven’t quite been able to shake.

Now, if you gather a few hundred church leaders in one place, you expect to hear about mission, church planting, discipleship, leadership and reaching people with the gospel. And rightly so. Those things matter. What I wasn’t expecting was to spend the evening thinking about a garden trowel taped to a stick.

My church is part of a family of churches called ChristCentral, which sits within the wider Newfrontiers family. One of the distinctives of ChristCentral churches is that we’re called to be “friends together.”

Now, I’ll be honest, that can sound a bit sickly sweet if we’re not careful. Like something embroidered onto a cushion in a Christian bookshop next to a mug that says, “Too blessed to be stressed,” almost exclusively owned by someone who is visibly stressed.

But “friends together” isn’t just a nice slogan. It’s not a networking strategy with a Bible verse stapled to it. It’s not simply church leaders saying, “We can achieve more if we pool our resources, share a PA system, and occasionally borrow each other’s folding chairs.”

There’s a strange idea that sometimes sneaks into Christian thinking without us even noticing. It’s the idea that the “real you” is your soul, while your body is basically just temporary packaging. A sort of fleshy Uber that carries your spirit around until heaven.

The problem is: that isn’t biblical Christianity.

The Bible doesn’t treat the body as a disposable shell. God created human beings as embodied creatures — spirit, soul, and body.

Good news! The Grace & Grit blog now has a comments section. After a few weeks of writing into the digital void and hoping somebody, somewhere was reading, there’s finally a way to talk back. If a post makes you laugh, think, disagree, nod along enthusiastically, or mutter “that’s rubbish, Dave”, you can now leave a comment and join the conversation. Feel free to ask questions, share your thoughts, add your own experiences, or chat with other readers.

One of the ways I worship is through writing, this blog, sermons and occasionally songs. I’ve been working on this song recently (Listen Here), and the main idea has been quietly messing with me.

God doesn’t need ANYTHING from me, not my service or my worship. He doesn’t need my money, my prayers, my surrender, my good decisions, my hands in the air, or even the songs I sing to him.

Which, on the face of it, sounds like possibly the least encouraging worship song ever written.

If you’ve spent any amount of time in Christian circles over the last couple of years, you will definitely have heard someone talking about the “quiet revival.”

Young people turning up to church. Teenagers asking spiritual questions. University students becoming curious about Jesus again. Youth ministries growing. Stories of unexpected conversions popping up all over the place.

And something definitely is happening. I’ve seen it myself.

What I’m about to say, I say as a church leader, but also as someone who doesn’t come to this subject from a distance.

My own particular flavour of neuro-spicy is something of an ADHD/ASD cocktail — served without a little umbrella — which means my brain can sometimes feel like it has seventeen tabs open, three of them playing music, one frozen, and none labelled. I’m also the father of an autistic teenager, so this isn’t theological theory for me. It’s personal. It’s pastoral. It lives in my home and my ministry.

Welcome to Grace & Grit — a blog about following Jesus in real life.

And by real life, I don’t mean the polished version where everyone appears to have had a quiet time, drunk enough water, forgiven their enemies, answered their emails, and become emotionally stable before 8am. I mean actual life. The sort where you love Jesus, but you’re also tired, distracted, occasionally grumpy, and sometimes one badly timed comment away from needing to go for a walk and have a word with yourself.

The plan is simple: a new article every Monday at 12pm.