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Ten reps can feel impossible until someone looks you in the eye and believes you can do them. After a morning at Trojan Gym in Hastings, I share a small moment that caught me off guard: I’m grinding through dips in tired little sets, then a stranger asks, “Can you do ten for me?” I manage ten straight reps, and it leaves me wondering what just happened and why simple encouragement can change our limits so quickly.

That question takes us somewhere deeper: who is rooting for you, and do you actually know it? I talk about the Orthodox Christian practice of spiritual fatherhood and godparents, and how a parish priest, monk, or nun can become a steady guide. This isn’t about having perfect answers; it’s about having a trusted person who helps you stay honest, brave, and open to mercy when you’re tempted to hide.

We also explore confession and the biblical call to expose darkness rather than live in it. When anger, lust, jealousy, and shame stay buried, they grow heavier and drag us down. When we bring them into the light, they can be healed, redeemed, and transformed. Along the way I reflect on Jonah, the cry of “Lord, help me”, Pentecost and the Holy Spirit, plus a couple of quotes that underline the urgency of stepping into the light now.

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Anger, lust, jealousy, pride, cravings, addiction, we usually talk about them like they’re glitches to delete. I’m taking a different angle today, sparked by reading Orthodox bishop and theologian Kallistos Ware in The Image Of The Father, where he asks a brave question: are the passions evil by nature, or are they human energies that can be redirected and transfigured?

We sit with the language that really bites: do we say mortify or redirect, eradicate or educate, eliminate or transfigure? I share honestly that these aren’t abstract ideas for me. They show up in real life, and they can either push us into disconnection from our neighbour, disconnection from God, and disconnection from ourselves, or they can become the very place where grace starts to work.

We talk about practical redirection. What happens when anger stops targeting people and turns towards the roots of evil instead? What would it look like to educate lust and craving, training desire towards prayer, worship, time with God, and love of neighbour? This is the Orthodox Christian vision of transformation: not becoming less human, but becoming more human than we’ve ever been before, shaped into the image we were created to bear.

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A woman is healed of blindness by Saint Brigid of Kildare, takes in the world with tears in her eyes, and then makes a request that stops you cold: “Make me blind again.” That ancient story is not just strange, it is diagnostic. It forces us to ask what “seeing” is for, and whether clarity of vision always brings us closer to God, truth, and beauty.

We pick up that thread through the Orthodox Church’s Sunday of the blind man and Father Alexander Groves’ homily on spiritual blindness. Even with perfect eyesight, we can miss what matters most and reduce life to “mere mechanical fact”. The question is not only what is in front of us, but how we attend to it. We talk about distraction, the way modern life trains our focus, and why spiritual life often begins with learning to notice again.

Along the way we draw on Dr Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary to explore how attention shapes what we receive, and we end with a line from Kallistos Ware that reframes miracles entirely: the greatest vision is seeing a holy and humble person. If you have ever met someone whose humility felt like light, you will understand what we mean.

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