(What a relief it has been in later life to find that there are some great church communities out there, with honest, loving friendships that help me with all of this stuff.) And the more of the Christian faith I discover, the more I realize that, at heart, it is simple. My journey ever since has been trying to make sure I don’t let life or vicars or church over-complicate that simple faith I had found. I remember sitting up a tree one night at school on my own, and praying the simplest, most heartfelt prayer of my life. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about. It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known. I mean, what does a child know about faith? The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up. If church stinks, then faith must do, too. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal.īut once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since.īut it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen.Īs a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural.

“Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since.

Bear grylls