Why Faith Is at the Foundation of Verosia Studio

What a cold plunge has to do with discipline, work, family and trying to follow Jesus faithfully.

For the past few months, most of my mornings have started by walking out into the garden and getting into a tank of freezing cold water. The cold plunge itself is something I had talked about building for months before I finally got around to it. It started life as a big IBC container, which I clad in timber so it would sit reasonably nicely in the garden rather than looking like an industrial water tank dumped outside the house, and since finishing it I’ve been getting into it pretty much every morning.

People ask me quite a lot why I would willingly do that to myself, especially when it is cold, windy and raining outside, which in Northern Ireland is not exactly unusual. The simple answer is that I want to be more disciplined and I like starting the day by doing something hard to break the cycle of looking for comfort. The deeper answer, though, has much more to do with Jesus than it does with cold water.

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The cold plunge isn't really the point

I should probably make something clear before going any further. I don't believe getting into cold water makes me more spiritual, earns me anything from God or somehow makes me a better Christian, and I definitely don't think everybody needs to start doing cold plunges in order to follow Jesus properly. For me, it is simply a small daily practice that exposes something I already know about myself, which is that I quite like being comfortable and can very naturally drift towards whatever feels easiest in the moment.

That can show up in all sorts of completely ordinary ways. I can put off the harder thing, buy something because I think it will make life better, look forward to the next holiday or experience, pick up my phone when I don't really need to, or distract myself rather than deal with whatever is actually in front of me. A lot of those things are not bad things either. I enjoy holidays, I like good food, I like technology probably more than I should, and I don't think following Jesus means deliberately making life miserable or refusing to enjoy what we have been given.

In fact, Jesus explicitly invites people who are weary and burdened to come to Him and find rest. That matters here because I don't think the choice is between being comfortable and being a good Christian. The deeper question is where I am looking for my security, satisfaction and peace, and whether comfort is slowly becoming something I organise my life around rather than something I can receive gratefully without depending on it. Matthew 11:28–30

I've gone through periods of my life where I have chased possessions, experiences and comfort believing, probably without ever saying it out loud, that the next thing would make everything feel more settled. Sometimes it does for a while. You buy the thing, go on the trip, finish the project or reach whatever milestone you had in your head, and there is genuine enjoyment in it, but eventually the novelty passes and you realise you are still looking for something deeper.

Jesus speaks directly into that. He warns against storing up our treasure on earth because, as He says, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” and He tells the story of a rich man who accumulated enough for himself that he thought he could finally take life easy, eat, drink and enjoy everything he had built. The problem in that story isn't that the man had a successful harvest or that enjoying life was somehow sinful. Jesus introduces it with a warning against greed and finishes by contrasting storing things up for ourselves with being “rich toward God.” Matthew 6:19–21 and Luke 12:15–21

I recognise myself in that warning more than I would like to. It is very easy for good things to become ultimate things, and it is very easy to become comfortable enough that I stop noticing how much I am relying on myself.

A line in the sand

I was baptised last November, and although I had been a Christian before that, baptism felt like a very deliberate line in the sand for me. It was a public acknowledgement of what I believed and of the direction I wanted my life to take, but one of the things I remember thinking beforehand was that I wasn't making a decision that would suddenly make life easier. If anything, I knew there was more responsibility in choosing to take my faith seriously because I was acknowledging that I didn't want my own will to be the thing directing my life anymore.

Jesus says, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” It is the word daily that I keep coming back to, because following Jesus isn't a decision I made once in November and then moved on from. My preferences, ambitions, distractions and desire for control didn't disappear when I was baptised, so every day still contains choices about whose will I am actually following. Luke 9:23

One of the passages that has become especially important to me is Jesus in Gethsemane. He knows what is coming, He is facing suffering beyond anything I can imagine, and He prays to the Father, “Yet not as I will, but as you will.” He then returns to His disciples and tells them, “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Matthew 26:39–41

Obviously my circumstances are nothing like Gethsemane and I would never want to make that comparison, but I understand something of the tension in those words. I can genuinely want to follow Jesus faithfully while also knowing how easily I drift towards what I want, how easily I become distracted and how quickly the things directly in front of me can become more important than the bigger thing I say I believe. That is why I need reminders, and for me the cold plunge has gradually become one of them.

What this has to do with running Verosia Studio

Running a company has brought a lot of this closer to the surface because there are days when building Verosia is exciting and incredibly rewarding, but there are also difficult decisions, uncertain periods, projects that don't go exactly according to plan, conversations I would rather avoid and work that still needs to be done when motivation isn't particularly interested in turning up. Alongside the business I am a husband and a dad, and I don't want to build a successful company at the expense of being present for my family, nor do I want success in business to become the thing that tells me whether my life has value.

That forces me to keep asking what Verosia is actually for. If you read the story of how Verosia Studio developed, you will see that the business has grown out of quite a strange mixture of design, websites, physical making, horticulture, running small businesses and learning by doing. Today we help businesses through websites, SEO, content and brand identity, but I don't believe those skills are mine simply to use for my own advancement. I believe they are gifts I am responsible for stewarding well and using to serve other people. "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters." Colossians 3:23

In practice that shows up in small, unglamorous ways. The clearest example is that I will not guarantee rankings. Plenty of people in this industry will, and saying it would win me work, because it is what a nervous business owner wants to hear on a first call. Search engines do not work that way and nobody can honestly promise a position. So I say that plainly, and occasionally I lose the job because of it. The work we did with Woodcroft reached number one for their main search terms and doubled their traffic over a year, and I still did not promise it in advance. Telling somebody what they want to hear is the comfortable option in my line of work, and it is the one I have to keep choosing against.

I won't get all of that right. I already know there have been times when pressure, money, busyness or my own ambitions have taken up more space than they should, and there will undoubtedly be more of those moments ahead. But when I talk about Verosia being a founder-led studio, that is part of what I mean. The business isn't something separate from the person making the decisions behind it, so I think it is important to be honest about the values and beliefs that shape those decisions.

That applies to family as well. Peachy Pastures has become one of the places where our family life, creativity, learning and work naturally overlap, and it has taught me a lot about the difference between pursuing attention for its own sake and building something around a story or purpose that genuinely matters to us. Those lessons inevitably find their way back into Verosia because I don't think work, faith and family can be neatly separated into completely different boxes.

Why “true voice” matters to me

The idea I wanted the name Verosia to carry was true voice, and that means more to me now than simply helping a company sound clear or authentic in its marketing. If Verosia is going to talk publicly about honesty, purpose, care and meaningful work, then I think I need to be willing to be honest about the foundation underneath those things as well.

For me, that foundation is Jesus. It would actually feel less authentic to keep my faith completely separate from the business while talking publicly about everything else I believe Verosia stands for, but there is an important distinction here too. I don't want Christianity attached to Verosia as a marketing angle, and I don't want faith to become a way of signalling to a particular group of people that they should hire us. The phrase we have used internally is faith-rooted, not faith-marketed, and I think that captures it quite well.

If my faith is real, I would rather it be visible in how the business is actually run than simply in what the website says. It should affect how I treat people when something goes wrong, how I deal with money and pressure, what work I pursue, what I am willing to say no to, how much weight I place on growth and what I ultimately consider success to be. None of that requires every piece of Verosia content to talk about Christianity, and it certainly doesn't require everybody we work with to share my beliefs. We work with all sorts of people and businesses, and I want every one of them to feel respected, understood and properly served.

There is naturally an additional level of shared understanding when we work with churches, Christian charities or ministry organisations, because I understand that the website, brand, SEO or content is never the mission itself. Those things are tools that should make the organisation easier to understand, help people find what they need and support the actual work it exists to do. That is something I would love Verosia to do more of, but it has to come from the same foundation as everything else rather than becoming a separate version of the business created simply because there is a market there.

A small reset every morning

That brings me back to the cold plunge. Most mornings I still walk outside and think I would much rather stay warm, particularly when the rain is coming sideways and it feels fairly ridiculous to willingly get into cold water before starting work, but once I am in there everything tends to become very quiet very quickly. My breathing settles, my mind stops jumping between ten different things, and for a few minutes there isn't an email to answer, a project to finish or another problem I need to solve.

It gives me a small space to pray, remember what Jesus has done for me and remind myself that the day ahead does not need to unfold exactly according to my plans in order to have value. It is also a chance to remember that Verosia isn't ultimately something I want to build purely around my own ambition, and that being a husband and dad is not something I want to squeeze around whatever time is left after the business gets everything it wants from me.

More than anything, it gives me another opportunity to ask a question I suspect I will need to keep asking for the rest of my life: am I living according to what I want, or according to what He wants?

The cold water cannot answer that question for me, and it doesn't make me any closer to Jesus simply because I got into it. It just gives me a few quiet minutes every morning to remember to ask.

Not my will, but yours.