Apologies for the long silence on this site. We are back with renewed enthusiasm, all ready to tell you what we're discovering about God's infinitesimal kindness in our everyday lives, and determined to be more consistent about blogging!

I was chatting to a new friend this week, and she told me that although she goes to church she could never understand how people could be so certain of their faith. I think it possibly seemed arrogant to her to make claims about one religion over another. I could see how much sense her point of view made.

The conversation took me right back to the many questions I had as an agnostic sixth-former - wasn't anyone's religion an accident of birth, based on where you happened to live? Wasn't it more likely that there is no God, and the universe came about by random forces?

From there, by the age of 20 , I'd arrived at a place of explosive, unbridled joy and confidence in a God who not only created the universe on purpose, but lived in it as a human named Jesus, and who is still triumphantly alive and reaching out in love to us today. I got there via a zig-zag path of reading John's gospel, thinking a lot in a field full of sheep, a revelation while I was washing up, and a good-looking young curate in my local parish church. It's a long story...

But I realised this week what an unlikely, precious thing it is to have any certainty about God in Jesus. It's not arrogant to be certain; it's vital to faith, because 'faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we cannot see' (Hebrews 11:1). Jesus longed to see it in his followers, got exasperated when it was absent ('oh you of little faith!'), and delighted when he found it in unlikely places such as a Roman centurion. And if I have any faith at all, it's because God patiently gave it to me. I remember being without it and I wouldn't go back there for the world.

If you can say, hand on heart, that you believe Jesus was who he said he was, and is there for us right now, you have an extremely valuable commodity; don't underestimate it, however feeble it seems. If you don't have it, it's a gift, so ask. You might be surprised.