Like a few people in Globe, I work for an MP in Parliament. My days vary from the very exciting to the very dull. On the mountain tops, I can be in private meetings with Ministers, providing the press with hot-topic stories or helping my MP navigate painful questions around our party’s leadership.

On dull days I make tea. Lots of it. Like most office jobs, my tea-making is interspersed with replying to emails, organising Teams calls and occasionally taking notes in meetings. Most days broadly follow along those lines, with a bit of excitement sometimes mixed in.

Along with others from Globe, I completed a graduate scheme which is set up to prepare Christians for a career in politics. We studied theology, met with esteemed leaders and asked the big questions. In it all, we were repeatedly encouraged to remain faithful to Christ, to be a light and witness to him in a broken world, even when we’re tested – the same call that rests on all of us.

I expected the tests I’d face in politics to be big and obvious. That they’d land on my desk with a thud and an explanatory note stating in big red letters, ‘I’M YOUR TEST OF FAITHFULNESS, ACT WISELY’. Once or twice, they were like that: the clearest cut among them was whether I should do political campaigning (i.e door knocking) in work hours. This is explicitly prohibited by law, but was encouraged by my team. Here, the right course was relatively easy to discern: I will follow the rules and only campaign outside work hours, or while on annual leave, even if my team don’t like it. Box ticked. Faithfulness preserved.

But not all of these ‘Red Letter Challenges’ have been so clear cut. While my MP was weighing up whether to vote for the Assisted Dying Bill, it was incredibly difficult to know what to do. How could I witness for Christ without having my view dismissed as “just a religious belief”? On the other hand, if I tried to persuade my MP by pretending to hold the respectable view – in favour of assisted dying in principle but against it in practice – could I really claim to be faithful?

These were the obvious challenges. But what I didn’t expect was that the vast majority of the tests I’d face would be over small and seemingly harmless things. And these are often the hardest to resist. Will I follow Parliament’s ridiculous rules on where you are allowed to film, even if I won’t face any consequences for breaking them and the event organisers are desperate for that social media clip? Will I work hard, even when I’m working from home and my manager’s eye is not on me?

The inconvenient truth is that our characters are formed by these small decisions that we face in the everyday, normal rhythm of work and life. If we fall there, how will we stand when faced with the bigger, obvious tests?

I regularly miss the mark on this, but I want to choose the better way. I’m praying that God would give me the strength and wisdom to do so, as I’m convinced that it’s these small things – that are so often embarrassing or awkward for us – that will be noticed and remembered. In the end, beyond anything we might tell our colleagues about our faith, I believe that its faithfulness in the small things that will be our greatest witness.