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My faith has been found hugely wanting these past two years, my ingratitude coming to the fore. I’m ashamed of my reaction to a friend’s act of kindness last winter, thinking only to keep us warm. And here we are, a year on, keeping ourselves warm just as he intended. I had to apologise afterwards, which he accepted, but that still doesn’t make it right.

Nobody had ever seen a meltdown like that from me before — neither my wife, nor our kids. It was completely out of character: a sudden rage, shaking the entire house, my face turning purple. After yelling at my wife, I stormed upstairs and exchanged curt words with my friend on the phone, telling him first to speak to me only, and to take that pile of logs away.

Taking stock the following morning, I concluded that I had had some kind of anxiety attack. I apologised to my wife via WhatsApp when she didn’t return home after the school run. She was out walking in the fields across the valley at that point, and told me to leave my work to join her. I wouldn’t usually do that, but as I was feeling so awful, I told my colleagues I needed some time out, and set off on foot to join her. We walked up the valley beneath a cloudless sky, sun warming our backs, talking it over.

Honestly, she was still a bit perplexed. “Maybe you should cut down writing and increase more walking,” she suggested. “I can’t see anything overwhelming in our life.” She was right. All I could think of were the stresses of work, building a house in another country, raising teenagers, the lingering pandemic. And, yep, my writing too. We were friends again by the time we had made a full circuit of the field and returned home.

“Maybe you need a change of scenery,” she said, and suggested I visit my parents in Bath one weekend. It would do me good, she thought, so I messaged them as soon as I got back, inviting myself over. As they were busy with various church commitments until then, we agreed the first weekend in December. By the time I arrived at their place on Saturday afternoon a month later, my friend had had the pile of tree trunks divided into logs, and the kids had stacked them in the wood shed to season.

All in all, it was completely bizarre, but of course it did not occur in isolation. Rather, it followed a year of gloom, in which I had lambasted myself as a complete failure, having taken to comparing myself to others — or rather to their shiny, curated résumés — completely forgetting that whatever blessings we have is from, not ourselves, but the Creator of our selves. Such deep depression, thinking myself a lost cause, when here I am with sound employment, respected by colleagues, my work valued.

Perhaps I could excuse myself, noting that the pandemic completely screwed with my head. I was working throughout, supporting those on the frontline, providing the IT tools to facilitate their extremely traumatic work. Perhaps we could say I was burnt out, dealing with the unending demands of my back-office role. Perhaps we could say I made it worse by spending my spare time writing, instead of recuperating.

But probably, what we should really say is that I lacked faith through that testing period, dwelling too much on the past, consumed by my regrets. Perhaps it’s a good thing that I’ve spent more time walking this year, nearly every weekend, with a trusted friend, reflecting on the profound. Perhaps I’ve found a way to rekindle my faith. It starts with gratitude, and that recollection: yes, God is firmly in control.