It was Saturday morning and my son was chilling on the sofa when he started a conversation the same way he starts many of them…

“Can I ask you a question?”

That conversation starter always fascinates me. It’s as if he’s been weighing up whether he should ask the question at all, and he needs permission before he lets it out. Whenever he says it, I mentally prepare myself because I genuinely never know what might be coming next. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know we’ve had some big questions before (What is a daydream?, When was the earth first made?, Why is life so hard?, Have I got a hole in my bum?).

So I said, “Of course you can.” And he asked…

“Am I a Christian?”

I paused for a moment and then said, “Well… that’s up to you.”

He replied quite matter-of-factly:

“But I have been christened.”

And he has been christened. I suppose that happened because of my own beliefs — or perhaps my half-beliefs. I wouldn’t say I am a Christian exactly, but I would say I’m spiritual. I believe in something, even if I’m not entirely sure what that something is. For me, it never felt right not to christen my children. I didn’t do it for the party (although we did have a party), and it wasn’t about the gifts. I did it because, deep down, I felt that their lives wouldn’t quite be whole without it.

That’s simply what I believe.

But that doesn’t mean they have to believe the same thing.

In fact, I have another slightly unusual belief about belonging. There’s a particular walk up a cliff that overlooks the town we live in, and in my mind you can’t call yourself a true resident of this town unless you’ve walked up that cliff. So as soon as both of my children were old enough to climb it themselves, I took them up there.

Which means that not only are they christened into something I’m not entirely sure I believe in… they’re also christened as true residents of our town.

Two ceremonies of belonging — one spiritual and one geographical.

Am I a Christian? What I Told My Son

When we returned to his original question, I explained to my son that he could believe whatever felt right to him. He could follow any religion he wanted, or he could choose not to believe in any of them at all.

I asked if they were learning about religion at school.

“Yes,” he said. “Muslims.”

“I don’t believe in that one,” he added quite confidently.

And so we ended up having quite a long discussion about different religions and beliefs, and whether any of them resonated with him. If you’re curious about what children learn about world religions in school, BBC Bitesize has a good overview.

Then he told me something else that fascinated me…

“I pray every day,” he said.
“Oh really?” I asked.
“Yes. I pray every day at 20:18.”
I asked him why.
“Because I was born in 2018.”

There was something so beautifully simple about that logic that I didn’t quite know what to say. “Because I was born in 2018.” Now, if you know my son, this actually makes perfect sense. He loves numbers. Numbers are certain. They don’t change, they don’t argue back, and they always make sense to him in a way the rest of the world sometimes doesn’t.

So of course his prayer has a number attached to it. Not just any number — his number. 20:18. The year he was born.

And somehow he has turned that into a daily ritual. I witnessed the pray a few nights later. Our bedtime routine has become long and drawn out and I sit with him for a long while. Some nights I feel I spend all the night in his bedroom but on this particular night I was waiting for 20:18 and at the exact time he did the sign of his cross, touched his head, chest, shoulder and shoulder then put his hands together on his head and said something to himself. It was truly fascinating.

I’m not entirely sure what he prays about, and to be honest I’m not sure it even matters. What fascinates me is the way his brain has connected something as big as faith to something as solid and predictable as numbers. For him, belief might not be about churches or rules or traditions.

It might simply be about patterns. And 20:18 is his.

When I later looked back through some of my older blog posts, I noticed something interesting. This wasn’t the first time he’d asked questions about religion.

He asked “Is God real?” in March 2025. He asked about Jesus in April 2024. And now, almost exactly the same time of year again, he was asking whether he himself was a Christian. It made me wonder…

Is there a push on religion in school around Easter time? The cult at work. Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe Easter simply nudges these questions to the surface.

Maybe he feels it more.

And maybe just maybe when he is older he will get his calling to the priesthood at this time this year at exactly 20:18 one night.