Recently I’ve been thinking about how simple life felt when everything was black and white.

Right and wrong.
Yes and no.
Good and bad.
Clear lines. Clear answers.

There was something comforting about it., a sense of order in the chaos.

In hindsight, that kind of faith served me for a season. It gave me protection, helped me draw strong boundaries around things that were genuinely destructive. Drinking, unhealthy habits and behaviour that would have ruined me if left unchecked.

For a while, those clear lines mattered.

But over time, I started to notice the cracks.

Black and white faith was good at correcting behaviour, but it never really touched the heart.

You get stuck in shame cycles when you can’t live up to the ideal. Some of the things I struggled with didn’t lose their power because I learned better rules. They were eventually interrupted by grace, by confession. By sitting in radical honesty with my wife. By sitting around a fire with other men who were willing to fight shadows together.

Relationship did what rules never could.

When I started to realise that following all the rules wasn’t necessarily making me more like Jesus, I sort of lost heart. Not just confidence in a model of faith, but almost confidence in Christianity itself.

I watched too many people who looked polished and put together on the outside quietly implode. Affairs. Burnout. Secret lives catching up with them.

It made me wonder what we were actually forming.

But recently I started noticing something else, something about the stories I love.

They’re never about characters who are purely good or purely evil.

See, good stories have clear lines but great stories have complicated characters. Mystery.

Ned Stark is honourable and deeply moral, but so bound by his rules that they destroy him in the end.

Gollum is deeply fractured, but there are times when something good shows up and surprises us, so much so that we care for him like Frodo does.

Tyrion Lannister begins as bitter and broken and somehow becomes one of the characters you trust the most.

One of my favourites is Malfoy, who spends most of the story trying to be the villain, only to become quietly pivotal in the end.

It’s the grey characters who move the story forward.

The longer I follow Jesus, the more convinced I am that discipleship looks less like living comfortably in the black or the white and more like walking a narrow path through the grey.

It feels less about flying a flag for this side or that side, and more about the practice of compassionate presence. An examined life. In step with the Father. Trusting him along the ancient pathways that lead to life.

It’s less about whether drinking is good or bad, or exactly where the line sits around sex and relationships before marriage. Whether we should be for or against same-sex marriage laws, or on the side of Israel or Palestine.

I just don’t think it’s always that simple.

Those questions aren’t wrong, they’re just incomplete.

We aren’t following Jesus by memorising a playbook. We’re following a deeply relational God.

Jesus ate with Pharisees and prostitutes.
He overturned tables and he sat at wells with women.
He wept over Jerusalem and celebrated with his friends at weddings.
He kept his own disciples in the dark and yet he was the light of the world.
He dismantled his enemies in debate and then told his followers to love them.

If you want to put the Christian God in a box so you can fully understand him, you can’t.

This faith cannot be reduced to a set of rules. Once we think we know everything, we quietly place ourselves at the centre. We try to put God in a box so that we can become god.

But God seems far more comfortable leaving us in the grey.

In the midst of the mystery.

These days it feels harder than ever to live this way.

Algorithms gently herd us into echo chambers where everyone sounds like us. Our views feel affirmed and our certainty feels justified.

But transformation rarely happens where nothing challenges us. Becoming more like Jesus means sitting with him in the uncertainty and learning to trust the Shepherd’s voice.

Think about the Good Samaritan...

He didn’t become the hero because he had the right theology or belonged to the right group. He became the hero because compassion moved him across the lines everyone else thought mattered.

The grey path moved him toward love.

I don’t think the grey is about freedom as much as responsibility. It asks more of us, not less and it requires trust rather than clarity.

The grey feels like holy ground and few people want to walk there.

I’m still a work in progress, I haven’t arrived. But I no longer trust perfect-looking faith that pretends otherwise.

This grey feels truer. Slower. Almost more human.

More like Jesus.

So I keep wondering if this is the invitation. Not to abandon conviction, but to deepen it by living closer to Jesus. Not to choose a side for the sake of choosing a side, but to choose relationship. Not to live safely inside certainty, but to allow the mystery to shape us.

Because maybe life isn’t meant to stay black and white.

Maybe the story only moves forward once we’re willing to remain in the midst of the mystery.