for emily, whenever i may find her

I'm watching a girl on the train, maybe twenty, her kid a baby girl with a pierced ear, sat in a pushchair. I'm watching them because baby dropped her bottle while we were getting on at Egham and I picked up it up to hand it back and the woman gave me the strangest look.

I'm wondering, what would she say if I told her about Jesus? Would she laugh, be suspicious, bemused, get pissed off or just pretend she couldn't hear me? It's not her so much, I'm sure she wouldn't mind, but it's the woman behind her, with the briefcase and the cynicism, I'm thinking I bet she'd judge me.

I don't want to be one of those loons who yells about damnation on the train. I really, truly, don't want that to be me.

But that's not the point. The point of this, is that I tend to act on stupid whims, because I'm reckless like that. I'll say whatever it is you dare me to say to someone, I'll wave at strangers through windows and offer commuters Mini Eggs to cheer them up but this, the one thing I want to tell everyone, I can't tell anyone.

If she and I had been the only two in the carriage, three with her baby, I'd have done it. I really think I would have said what I wanted to say but there's all these listening ears and I'm scared, for the first time, of what they'll think of me when the word Jesus passes my lips.

Not even sure what I'd hope for it to achieve. These evangelism stories you hear at church always end with, and then he told this woman that God loved her and she burst into tears because she'd prayed that morning for the first time in twenty years... You like to think that if you ever did do it, that's what would happen, and it would be amazing, and affirming, and a drive-by conversion the like of which you've never seen before.

I think it's more likely to be a bit of an awkward glance and a mumbled 'thank you', if any response at all. That's not the point, to change someone's life for good, the point is to say it, because people don't know it. And it's kind of our thinking that if people knew it, they'd like it.

I'm 16, at college, doing this play, Cyrano de Bergerac. We're changing in PA1, the girl's room, and I'm full of neuroses about my body, everyone else's bodies, how awful I must look, how intimidated I feel in this room full of gorgeous drama girls and suddenly, this voice cuts through my thoughts: "Bye girls, it might not matter, but I'm praying for all of you!" This girl, I don't even know her except that she annoys me a bit, pauses by the door and in that second I want so badly to say something back, to mumble or shout my thank-you. I've been a Christian for two months and it really, really does matter that she said that. I'm tongue-tied though, so I say nothing at all.

The thing is, back in the day, if someone had sat me down on a train and told me God loved me, I would have cried. It would have meant so much to me to hear that said, just like it meant so much to hear that girl, so offhandedly telling us that she was praying for us. I really needed to know that stuff, I needed to hear it said.

And what I needed to say to that girl was, thank you, you don't know how much it helped me that night to hear you say that.

You have to say these things, you see, or when you find out that that girl from college is dead now, that she was dying the whole time you knew her and now she's gone, suddenly you wish you'd said something. You wish you'd gotten round to just saying it, even if it didn't matter to her, at least it would've been said.

I say nothing on the train today, but swing over the back of the seat to blow raspberries at her child instead. I tell her she's lovely, her baby's lovely, and she smiles the smile of the mum who knows.

You don't know. You can't ever tell what your words have done and where they've been taken by people. I guess you're not meant to know, not meant to reap, just meant to say.