November 2025 

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God to salvation to anyone who believes, first to the Jew, and to the Greek.”

Romans 1:16, CSB translation

Sally Rooney’s Normal People begins with an epigraph. It is a quote from Daniel Deronda that reads:

It is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness.

Normal People is a book loved by someone who ended up meaning a lot to me at a pivotal time in my life. It’s a book that he recommended to me in one of our first conversations, and one that I was resistant to reading because about a year before I met him, I’d watched a few episodes of the BBC adaptation of it. Those episodes had left me feeling the kind of sadness that I wasn’t in a rush to feel again (as opposed to the type you seek out sometimes) so I held off on reading it for a while, especially because he’d told me that he felt the series paled in comparison to the book.

I ended up starting Normal People shortly after that conversation because after meeting him, it started to appear everywhere without me looking for it. (These appearances occurred offline for the people who will no doubt be ready to scream “the algorithms!” at me.) Weeks after meeting him and shortly after discussing it with him again, it was mentioned in a book that I’d started reading before I had met him. Even more strangely, not long before we met he’d picked up a graphic novel that would go on to also make an appearance in the book I was reading, showing up in the pages of my book only after he’d told me about it. 

At some point between our first meeting and our last, this person asked me why I was a Christian. We’d been talking about how I had not always been a Christian (there is no such thing as a person who has “always” been a Christian anyway, but more on this later) and had instead become one at nineteen without much of a Christian upbringing behind me so he naturally framed the question as “Why did you convert?” For further context, I had told him that I had gone into my first year of university very much not a Christian, and not really a believer of anything in particular apart from the most nebulous idea of some kind of higher power, and had returned to university for my second year a crazed ‘Jesus freak’. (These are my words, not his—he was far too respectful to ever say that to me, even if he may have thought it.)

I shared with him that I had gone from having the typical secular first year university experience — think nights out in the tiniest dresses imaginable in Manchester’s infamous rain (because what student wants to pay for a cloakroom when there are drinks to be paid for later, or ruin their look with the practicality of good future health?) and pre-drinking before said nights out, an activity which has the literal purpose of getting you drunk before you go out so that you spend less on alcohol once you get to the club(s), — to genuinely looking forward to going to church on Sundays during term time, craving mid-week Bible studies and prayer meetings, and happily eschewing the aforementioned hobbies.

More than a year has passed since that person asked me that question, more than a year since I first agonised (and I really do mean agonised) over an adequate answer to explain what exactly happened to me between that first and second year of university that caused me to become so all-consumingly attached to a man who lived thousands of years ago and claimed to be God in the flesh, a claim that would eventually get him killed. I never did finish Normal People, though I have designs to one day. But a few months ago, as I was flicking through my copy of it, I was amazed to realise that my answer to his question, which had left me tongue-tied since the day he asked me, had been contained in the very first sentence of the book he had given me to read when we had first met. The saying “God has a sense of humour” isn’t for nothing, folks. That sentence is the one at the beginning of this account: 

It is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness.

For Connell and Marianne, whose relationship with each other when they were sixteen was so transformative as to give each of them a ‘revelation of heaven and earth’, the personality that touched theirs with such a profound influence was each other. For the Christian, at the moment of their conversion, that personality is Jesus Christ, and the ‘how’ of this touching is achieved by the work of the Holy Spirit, who is the very spirit of God (or God in spirit form).

The person who introduced me to Normal People had a profound impact on me and I’ll remember him forever. But nothing I’ve experienced in my life has ever come close to the experience of coming to know Jesus as the one and only Saviour of the world in the spare room of my sister and brother-in-law’s house a few weeks before my twentieth birthday. No knowledge I’ve gained in my life has ever been as wondrous, and nothing beautiful I’ve read or seen in my life (and I’ve seen a handful of things considered to be some of the most wondrous sights a person can see) has ever filled me with the same awe as truly seeing for the first time the one person who died in my place for my sake.¹ I’d be very willing to put my money where my mouth is to make the assertion that there is nothing in existence that will ever strike you with the same life-altering force as what takes place in your heart when the Holy Spirit reveals the truth of the gospel to you when you’re least expecting it.

There isn’t enough time in the world to dissect that George Eliot quote with the amount of attention it deserves, but what I really love about it is that she seems to be saying that it is not necessarily the person (or “personality”) alone who inspires conversion in another; rather, it is that person’s arrival in the receiving person’s life at a certain moment in time that gives them those “powers” of conversion. It’s both the personality and the timing together that create the “peculiar influence” that results in a person’s conversion — one without the other would not yield the same results.

I find that distinction really helpful in illuminating the conversion experience of Christians raised in Christianity. It’s common to hear people raised in the faith to say that there was a point in time when the gospel that they’d been presented with their whole life took on a new life for them and resounded in their ears or read on the page differently, literally breathing new life into them. The thing that caused those words they had grown up hearing over and over again at home and in church and in their youth groups to have real meaning for them was the Holy Spirit giving them the ability to see through what had once been opaque, despite it being right in front of them for however long.

This is what happens at some point to everybody who becomes a Christian, regardless of their faith or non-faith background. It’s an experience that actually has to happen individually for every Christian because there is no true intimacy and fellowship with God without it. That collision between Jesus and us at a particular time in our lives, which is initiated and delivered by the Holy Spirit, is what Christians call being “born again”, and if you’ve ever heard a Christian say that Christianity is a “relationship, not a religion”, the necessity of being born again is why they are saying that. 

When they use that phrase, what they are communicating in Christianese are the two realities that to be a Christian is a relational thing  because Jesus is a living God who lives and works in every Christian through the Holy Spirit, and it also a deeply personal thing because every Christian must meet Jesus for themselves. Nobody is born a Christian or becomes a Christian through the faith of their parents or grandparents. To use John’s language in his own account of Jesus’ life, he or she “must be born again”.  I wrote earlier that nobody can make the claim that they have “always” been a Christian by appealing to their upbringing by Christian parents or their church attendance as a child —  that is the reason. 

For me, this being born again, an experience that made me no longer want in the things I had once desperately wanted in my life, and made me want to spend the rest of my life in surrender to God instead, came through reading the gospel of John. As I read, the Holy Spirit revealed to me that this idea that Jesus was the eternal Son of God who came to die to make atonement for a guilty world, an idea which had once sounded a little far-fetched to me in my Catholic school days, was actually true. I wasn’t under the influence of any illicit substance when this happened, nor was I under duress to believe it. I didn’t simply make the choice to believe that it was true, which is what some people believe happens when a person comes to faith (as though you can through sheer willpower convince yourself that something you don’t fundamentally believe in is true). I didn’t choose faith in Jesus in the way a person might choose to opt out of organ donation because the gospel didn’t come to me as an option that I could either take or leave. It was shown to me, through its own power, to be the truth, and humanity’s need for a Saviour undeniable. 

The gospel is that Jesus, who was co-eternal with the Father, came into a world ravaged by our sin to save us from the eternal consequences of our sinfulness. Through His death and resurrection, He washed us clean of our sins (and pardoned our proclivity for sin in the first place) and gave us a righteousness that was not ours, making us wholly acceptable before God the Father and restoring a relationship that had been broken by that love of sin.

For a lot of reasons, the word “sinner” is not one that is comfortable to hear for many people. Personal traumas aside, it isn’t a flattering term so the aversion is understandable. For some, it conjures up images of overly-animated street preachers shouting at them about various sins, people standing outside of abortion clinics hurling abuse at women and girls, compounding what for many is already an emotionally difficult time in their life, and medieval monks whipping themselves in penitence. In the part of the world I live in, Christianity is also becoming increasingly re-associated with ideologies and movements  that Jesus Himself would actually condemn, which is no doubt amplifying people’s resistance to identifying in any way as a “sinner”.

I can understand the average person’s offence at being referred to as a “sinner” if they do not have a higher power that they look to as their standard of morality because in such a case, there is no moral law that they have transgressed (which is what sin is), no holy God that they have offended through their thoughts, words or deeds, and there is therefore nothing to atone or make restitution for. Nobody likes to think of themselves as a bad person, and measured against other humans, the average human probably isn’t all that bad. But measured against a holy God (a God who said that even to curse somebody in frustration or to think of yourself as someone’s moral superior is dishonourable), even the most honourable among us are not even close to being good people.

Through reading the Bible, I saw myself as a sinner for the first time. This happened not in the histrionic way that produces violent, sometimes physically harmful self-loathing, but in the sobering way that you realise once you are alone with your thoughts at the end of a busy day that something you said or did that day probably caused emotional pain to somebody else, pain that you can’t take back. In its crudest sense, to sin is to transgress a holy law. But fundamentally, it is to in one way or another pervert the way we were intended by God to relate to each other, to ourselves, and to God himself. It has many forms, always beginning in the heart, but even if what is in the heart never makes its way outward in the form of evil acts or hurtful words, it is sin nonetheless. 

By the world’s standards, prior to my conversion I hadn’t done anything all that heinous. I’d never beaten anybody to within an inch of their life or actually taken anybody’s life. I’d never trafficked anybody. I had done none of the things that we typically think of as “really bad”, those things that to some are so bad as to be unforgivable. Even in my early adult years as a non-Christian, my “worldliness” was on the tame side by secular society’s standards because I had opted out of some of the things that define youth culture where I grew up. (I would later learn through my first experience of church as a Christian myself that to some very conservative Christians, to have even set foot in a nightclub at all or had a drop of alcohol that was not Communion wine, or gone on a date unchaperoned and drank alcohol on said date, all of which I had done prior to becoming a Christian (and still would, sans the nightclub) made me a woman of very questionable morals at twenty-one.)

At nineteen probably the worst thing I’d ever done to somebody else was speak really unkindly about them. If my sister were hanging over my shoulder reading this, this is about the time that she would probably bring up childhood stories of pencils allegedly being shoved in ears and people allegedly attempting to push other people down stairs in frustration, stories of which I really have no recollection. Talking maliciously about somebody may not sound so bad to some, but it’s also sin, no matter how much you think they deserve it. (By the way, if it doesn’t sound “that bad” to you, that’s how far removed you in your own flesh (myself included) are from God’s standard of holiness, which is total uprightness in the heart and in deed.) 

I’d never killed anybody, but I had misused my body in various ways and I’d hurt others through unchecked emotions. I’d used my tongue to gossip and speak cruelly about others, which dishonoured whoever I was speaking about, a person God loved and died for, and had allowed myself to sit and listen to the gossip of others to me, which dishonoured whoever they were speaking about, a person God loved and died for. I’d gorged myself on food over the years because there’s no harm in a little bit of indulgence sometimes (‘tis the season, after all) and I’d drank to the point of drunkenness many times because that’s what you do with your friends when you’re young and want to have fun. 

I’d done many of the things that my society deems normal and harmless and yet every time I did I was always harming someone. Sometimes it was a corporeal person who, if I had the humility and the means to, I could approach in person to apologise for my sin against them and sometimes it was myself. But even if there was no human involved in my sin, like my drunkenness on my nights out or my overeating purely because I wanted to and could (almost always not good reasons to do something, by the way), I was still harming someone other than myself. That someone was just a person that I couldn’t touch with my hands but who was real nonetheless. 

Sin isn’t just something we do, it’s our very nature. We can’t help but do the things that are offensive to God because our hearts are turned away from Him by nature and our natural inclination is rebellion against Him rather than love for Him expressed through obedience, which we were made for. Sarah Rice explained it well when she said “We are not, in fact, basically good people who just happen to mess up here and there; rather, we are each born with a fundamentally sinful nature that leaves no part of us uncorrupted… we aren’t sinners because we sin, we sin because we are sinners.”² As I read John’s gospel and the rest of the New Testament, the fact that I was not a good person and that there was no such thing as a good person (Romans 3:10, Psalm 14:3, Psalm 53:1-3) came into full focus as a reality of life that I couldn’t turn away from no matter how much I wanted to.

I was a really inquisitive and sensitive child and something that always bothered me growing up was why, for all the good there was in the world, there was also immense, sometimes overwhelming darkness. This was a question that upset me a lot and that I thought about often until my conversion. There were things I’d read and seen and experienced by my mid-teens that even at seven or eight I could tell were just not right and were a distortion of something that had once been right, although I wouldn’t have had the language to put it that way at the time. When I had my encounter with the Holy Spirit as I read the Bible for the first time, I saw so clearly, without any obstruction whatsoever, that that darkness in the form of the atrocities that humans had historically committed against one another, and continued to commit against one another, was the result of sin.

For every hug and kiss from a friend in the school playground, somebody somewhere was being subjected to unimaginable suffering by another person. Someone’s body was being mutilated while my dad gifted me a cuddly toy or a book I’d been pining for. Attacks were taking place, people were being economically exploited for some individual or group’s gain, someone’s husband or wife was abusing them, children were being sold across countries for various purposes, and children who themselves had been sexually abused were sexually abusing other children. You only have to turn on the news or open a newspaper to see that there is literally no end to our capacity for evil, and you don’t have to be a sensitive or inquisitive child to notice that.

A lot of us won’t have done or contributed to some of the more extreme of the above being acted out. But everybody is capable of greed and putting the fulfilment of their desires over someone else’s wellbeing. And whether we want to believe it about ourselves or not, everybody is capable of anger to the point of  certain extremities. There are things some of us have done or thought about that we probably could not look even our spouse or closest confidante in the eye and tell them about. Those things are known to God and they are even more offensive to Him than they are to you or would be to another human, yet He went to a bloody death to buy the forgiveness of those things for those who would receive Him in faith, and free them from the shame that threatens to overwhelm as a result of their sin(s).

It isn’t flattering to be called a sinner or told that you’re not a good person. But it is the truth, and for the gospel to have any efficacy and a person to experience the love of God the Father through Jesus Christ, a person must acknowledge that they are not what they would have themselves be. It’s by the Holy Spirit that I came to believe that there is such a thing as righteousness and unrighteousness that exists outside of our invention, that we are born with an innate knowledge of this righteousness within us (Romans 2:15), and that this knowledge is subdued both by the demands of a sinful nature and by the ever-changing tides of whichever society we find ourselves living in.

When I tell people that I became a Christian by reading John’s gospel, some people want to know what led me to open the Bible in the first place, given I hadn’t been raised as a Christian in any meaningful sense. Some ask in good faith, out of genuine curiosity, and some, who believe that Christianity is for the feeble-minded, downtrodden, or those who lack the ability to question what they were taught growing up, ask looking for some tale of woe to try to piece together why an intelligent person would possibly abandon all reason to believe in what is to them just a really ornate fairytale.³ The answer to that is that the Bible came to me at the end of a strange first year at university. While I was not having the most delightful time I’ve ever had in my life that summer, I also was not in an altered state of consciousness. I hadn’t been lured into religious involvement by any group that preys on first year students who are vulnerable as a result of being away from home for the first time, and I hadn’t been looking for something to believe in. 

Strangely, about a year before my conversion, I had felt an inward pull to buy a Bible and I spent an afternoon in the Waterstones in Deansgate trawling through their teeny selection of religious texts to find a Bible. I settled on a tiny white christening Bible, which would remain on the desk in my first year bedroom for the entirety of that year but which I wouldn’t touch for nearly a year until the beginning of everything. I don’t believe that had I been in the Shire itself and the Bible had made its way to me then, the outcome would have been different. I do not think I came to faith in Jesus Christ because I was experiencing mental anguish at the time, although that can be the case for people. I think I came to faith in Jesus Christ – to the belief that the assertions of the Bible about the state of humanity and the world, and that Jesus was the only hope for all mankind were true – because that was the time that God called me to Himself to see Him with new eyes. 

          When I stopped talking to the person at the beginning of this account, I prayed for him a lot. He was about to go on two really exciting trips so I prayed about his time on those trips as well as for some other things for him and for his family and his housemates and his friends. But out of all of these prayers, my biggest prayer for him was that he would one day know the depth of God the Father’s love for him personally, expressed in Jesus’s wilful endurance of a death He didn’t deserve to save his soul from eternal death and give him new life here on earth (John 10:10). That’s still my prayer for him and it’s my prayer for everyone who has not yet tasted and seen the mercy of God revealed in Jesus Christ.

“Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will also know my Father. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

– John 14:6

“When people work; their wages are not a gift, but something they have earned. But people are counted as righteous, not because of their work, but because of their faith in God who forgives sinners.”

– Romans 4:4-5

““Return, O faithless Israel,” declares the Lord. I will not look on you with anger, for I am unfailing in my love. I will not be angry forever. Only acknowledge your guilt, that you have rebelled against the Lord your God.””

– Jeremiah 3:12-14

“…And Levi made him a great feast in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at the table with them. And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” And Jesus answered the, “Those who are well have no need for a physician, but those who are sick. I have not com to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.””

– Luke 5:29-32

“Oh, what joy for those 

whose obedience is forgiven, 

whose sins are put out of sight.

Yes, what joy for those

whose record the Lord has cleared of sin.”

– Psalm 32:1-2

“…God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

– Philippians 2:9-11

1. Jesus was the only one who actually could save any human from the wages of their sins because He was the only person to live without sin. Chapter 10 of Hebrews explains why this is in good detail. ↩︎
2. Sarah Rice, Gospel Shaped Womanhood (10Publishing, 2024) ↩︎
3. I find it interesting that to subscribe to a Christian worldview is viewed by many people as the result of childhood indoctrination that must be undone by coming to one’s senses in adulthood but it’s somehow not indoctrination to raise a child without a faith, which comes with a worldview and a value system of its own. ↩︎