If you are a Christian watching this, perhaps wondering whether your faith is real or whether you are just performing it the way I was performing mine for so long.

I want to tell you that the performance and the real thing are different in a way that can be known, not theorized, known.

And if what you have feels like performance, the answer is not to perform better.

The answer is to do what I did in my study.

To stop performing, to bring what is actually there in all its honesty and mess to the one who said he already knows it and came anyway.

And if you know a jun, if there is someone in your life who carries that inexplicable peace, who lives their faith with that quiet, unforced consistency that you have noticed and filed away without examining, pay attention.

God sometimes does his most significant work through the most ordinary people in the most ordinary roles.

My driver changed my eternity and he did it without trying to.

He simply refused to be anyone other than who he was.

There is a Sunday morning tradition in our house now.

We sit together, Fatima, Rayan and I, before we leave for the gathering and we pray simple, ordinary family prayer.

Ryan always has something specific to pray for.

a friend who is struggling, something he wants to understand, something he is grateful for.

He prays with the directness of a child who has not yet learned to be embarrassed by honestly needing things.

And every time he does, something in me that is still learning to pray that way recognizes it and is moved by it.

Fatima prays with the depth of a woman who came to this through suffering and uncertainty and the slow private dismantling of a very thorough formation.

Her prayers have a weight to them that mine do not yet have and I learn from them.

I pray with the gratitude of a man who spent too long in a room with no windows and then found the door.

On one of those Sunday mornings, not long after we arrived in the new country, Ryan looked up at me after we had finished praying and asked whether Jun also prayed for us wherever he was.

I told him that I was almost certain he did.

He thought about this with the gravity that he gives to important things.

Then he nodded, satisfied, and went to put on his shoes.

I sat for a moment in the quiet of the morning, thinking about a man in a small province in the Philippines, sitting perhaps in his own early morning, his own prayer, his own faithful, ordinary Sunday.

And I thought about how the distance between us, geographical, cultural, economic, everything that a world built on the logic of category would say should make us remote from each other had been made irrelevant by the simplest and most extraordinary thing.

The same person, the same presence in the boat, the same Jesus who had sat with a woman at a well and known everything about her and spoken to her.

Anyway, is sitting now with a Filipino worker in Mindanao and with an Emirati businessman in a rented house in a new country, holding both of them with the same hands.

The God who came, Emmanuel.

I have no better word for it than this.

I am no longer performing.

I am no longer carrying it alone.

I am no longer the man behind the glass watching other people’s peace from the inside of my managed, curated, expensive, hollow life.

I am home.

And the way I got home was a quiet man who hummed songs in the front seat of my car and prayed for my family in the dark when no one was watching.

Jun, if you ever see this, and I think you will because you have people who love you who will make sure you do, I want you to know something.

The prayer you prayed in a hospital waiting room in Dubai in the middle of the night on for a family you had known for less than a year.

A family that had not yet earned the name of your God.

That prayer is still answering.

It will keep answering.

It crossed an ocean.

It crossed a religion.

It crossed every category and every distance.

You asked Jesus to show himself to us.

He did.

Thank you, my brother.

Thank you for not being ashamed of who you were.

Thank you for being exactly yourself, exactly where you were.

Thank you for the songs and for the quiet and for the prayers in the dark.

You brought a rich man home.

And now I spend my days in the small and ordinary way that is the only way available to most of us.

Trying to do for someone else what you did for me.

To simply be present.

To simply be real.

To simply refuse to be anyone other than who I am in the hope that someone in the back seat is watching.

« Prev