The first believer in our family was ten years old.
Years before any of this began, when I was still a settled and comfortable atheist, my son Kasper sat across from me, small and certain, and told me that Jesus made the world and lives forever. I did what I thought a responsible, rational father should do. Gently, carefully, reasonably, I talked him out of it. His brother Kaeson nodded alongside him through those conversations, agreeing with his certainty, patient with the adults in a way young boys rarely are with the people who dismiss them. I filed the whole thing under childhood phases and moved on.
Kasper never really moved on. And years later, when the questions finally came for me, he had been waiting the whole time. Before Chrissie worked out what to do with God, before I did, before any adult in the household, our ten-year-old had already arrived. The rest of us followed him.
I carried real shame about those early conversations for a while. It dissolved on a February morning in 2026, when Kasper stepped into the baptism pool at St Philip's and went under the water while I stood at the side, newly baptised myself, and watched. He had believed first. Now we were both on the same side of the water. Kaeson was baptised that morning too, alongside Chrissie and me. Our oldest, Riley, spent the whole service in the pool beside the vicar, helping lower each of us under and lift us back up. He is not a believer, and he did that for us anyway, without hesitation and without making it about himself. That is love, plain and clear, and I see it.
We have six sons, and if you are imagining a neat row of matching believers in a pew, let me correct the picture. Two of the boys come to church with us most Sundays. The others are at various distances from the whole thing, from interested to indifferent, and every one of those positions is respected in our house. Nobody is marched to a service. Nobody is preached at over dinner. I spent too many years on the other side of this to have any appetite for pressuring people across the line, and besides, I have watched how little pressure had to do with it in my own case. The people who mattered most to my journey were the ones who made room and waited.
Our church seems to understand this instinctively. One of the parishioners, a woman who has been there far longer than us, started giving the two younger boys little jobs at the services they attend. Lighting the candles, mostly. It sounds small. It is not small. It is a way of saying you belong here, you are part of how this works, without a word of pressure attached. When the boys miss a service, she asks where they are. They are known. In a family where belief arrived in the strangest possible order, youngest first, parents last, oldest still watching from the side of the pool, that kind of unforced welcome is worth more than any amount of persuasion.
People sometimes assume a house with six boys and two recently baptised parents must be a house of enforced religion. Ours is a house where scripture audio sometimes plays in the kitchen while I cook, the way another household might have the radio on, and where the boys who believe pray and the boys who do not are loved the same. Faith arrived here the way it seems to arrive everywhere I have watched it closely. Not by force. By presence, patience, and the occasional ten-year-old who got there before everyone else and had the good grace not to say I told you so.