I was asked recently to bring an object that helps me talk about my faith. There was one rule. It could not be a church object, so no crosses, no candles and no Bibles.
My first thought was my book. It tells the whole story, and I wrote it. Then I pictured myself holding it up in front of a room full of people, and it looked too much like a sales pitch.
So I am taking my phone. It is probably the least holy object I own. It is also where all of this started.
Before I believed anything, I spent a lot of evenings on TikTok, as plenty of people do. The algorithm showed me whatever it thought I would watch, and for a while that included clips from a television series called The Chosen. Short scenes with no context. I watched each one to the end, thought it looked worth a watch, and scrolled on.
My wife told me I would never get round to it. She had a point. My watch list is mostly good intentions.
When I did watch it, it was on the projector in a dark living room. But when one scene stopped me, the first thing I did was pick up the phone and text her: you need to watch this.
After that, the phone changed jobs. I put the Bible on it and listened everywhere, in the car on the school run, in the kitchen while I cooked, at night with the lights off. Every time a question surfaced, and there were a lot of them, I reached for it and looked for an answer. I assess evidence for a living, and I went looking for it the way I always do. Most of it came through that screen.
These days a lot of my writing starts on it. Notes after a service, thoughts after a study session, lines that later turn into something longer.
It still surprises me. At an Old Testament study session this month, the evening opened with a music quiz: songs with lyrics drawn from scripture. Everyone else in the room recognised them. I did not recognise one. I did come away knowing that Creeping Death by Metallica is about the first Passover, which delighted me more than it probably should have.
The sceptic I used to be would have an answer ready for all of this. It is just the algorithm. You watched one clip, so it showed you more, and you mistook a recommendation engine for a calling.
I said the same thing for thirty-six years, and I still think it is a fair point. The algorithm explains why the clips appeared. It does not explain why I stopped on one scene in a dark room and could not let it go, or why the pull lasted after the screen went off. I have stopped trying to separate the two. If God is willing to meet people where they are, then for a lot of us, where we are is holding a phone.
What I take from it is that He did not wait for me to find the approved channels. I was not going to walk into a church. I was not going to pick up a Bible. He used the thing that was already in my hand.
So that is what I will be holding up. A phone is nothing special. Mine was the door I did not know I had.
If you are reading this on one, I am not going to tell you what that means. I will only say that is where I was too.