And I feel incredibly lucky to be surrounded by the most unlikely, oddball set of people: not necessarily the people I would have chosen for myself, but, thank God, the people God chose for me.Īs a kid, I was always writing.

My immediate family, my wife and daughter, as well as my mother, brother, and sister, are very important parts of my life. I hadn’t heard the words repeated so many times that they lost their power. But I think I’ve been blessed by coming to the faith later in life. I don’t think my Christianity is particularly radical - it’s actually quite orthodox.

But he’s a self-righteous, blindsided, unprepared mid-life convert, as I am, and I relate to his sense of the utter reality of Jesus. I have a great fondness for Romans, though it’s sort of perverse to be a left-wing, lesbian feminist who likes St Paul so much. We’ve helped launch 18 other food pantries around the San Francisco Bay area. We’re not a programme run by nice church ladies for poor people. It’s run entirely by these same people, that is, by the people who use it. It’s not a social service programme but a eucharistic community, modelled on the rather unworldly principle that God’s abundance is for everyone, without exception - thieves, whores, foreigners, cripples, saintly widows, upstanding citizens, little children, the annoying and “undeserving” poor. The food pantry is funded entirely by (mostly very small) donations - not by the church, or by government.

There’s often a moment when I’m hanging out with a group of Christians –– usually liberal Christians, the kind who care about global warming and inclusive language –– and I see them glance at me as if I’m a total freak. I embarrassed people by talking too much about Jesus. It’s crazy that Jesus would trust us, this bunch of cowards and clowns, to do his work, but I believe we’ve been breathed upon, and given the power to act as if we are, in fact, the real body of Christ. In Jesus Freak I continue to take Jesus’s charge to his disciples literally: heal, forgive, raise the dead. Now we serve more than 600 people a week. I wrote about the ways that communion inspired me to set up a food pantry in the middle of the sanctuary, around that same altar, giving away groceries to anyone who showed up. I wandered into a church one morning, was offered communion, and understood two things at the same time: I was eating a real chunk of bread, and God was alive, and in my mouth. I love the heat, the hilarity, the showing-off and camaraderie, the wild invention, the physicality. I worked for years as a line cook in restaurant kitchens. My first book, Take This Bread, was an account of my completely unexpected mid-life conversion - I’d been an atheist and a journalist, with no religious upbringing whatsoever. My new book, Jesus Freak, tells the stories of ordinary people who take up Jesus’s work in the world -feeding, healing, and raising the dead.

Take This Bread by Sara Miles