When I first became a Christian, I wanted to understand everything.

I read theology, studied the history of the Church, tried to learn the context of the Bible and the meaning behind the scriptures. I wanted to know what scholars thought, what different traditions believed, and how all the pieces fitted together. Like many new Christians, I assumed that the deeper my faith became, the more complicated it would become.

In some ways, that was true. The more you study, the more you realise that things are rarely as simple as they first appear. The Bible is ancient and layered. The Church has two thousand years of history, much of it inspiring, some of it troubling. Christians disagree about many things.

And eventually you come to a slightly uncomfortable realisation: the more we know, the more we realise how much we don’t know.

But something else has happened to me over the years.

In a strange way, faith has also become simpler.

After years of reading and thinking, I find myself returning to a single idea that sits at the heart of it all: God is love.

If something is done in love, it carries the mark of God.

If it is not done in love, then however religious it may sound, I struggle to see God in it.

(1 John 4:8)

That doesn’t mean love is easy. In fact, it may be the hardest calling of all. Love requires patience, humility, forgiveness, and compassion. It asks us to see other people not as enemies or problems to be solved, but as fellow human beings made in the image of God.

Over the years I have seen Christianity expressed in many different ways. Some of it has been thoughtful and gentle. Some of it has been loud and certain of itself. Some of it has been tied very closely to politics and power.

But the older I get, the more I find myself returning to the question: Where is the love in this?

If love is there—real love, not just words—then I feel confident that God is there too.

If it is absent, then no amount of religious language can quite convince me otherwise.

I am also increasingly aware that it is not my place to decide who is or isn’t a Christian. That judgement belongs to God alone. My task is much simpler, and perhaps much harder: to try, however imperfectly, to live a life shaped by love.

After all the books, all the debates, and all the years of thinking about faith, this is what seems to remain.

Faith is not really about winning arguments or proving that we are right.

It is about learning, slowly and imperfectly, how to love.