There is a photograph of David Stevens from years ago that he barely recognises as being him. Bearded, a bit wild about the edges, a man who could hold his own at a party and often did. “I used to be a massive drinker,” he says. “Oh God, I could drink. I’d go out and party. It feels like a different person.”
What that man really wanted, quietly and for a very long time, was a child.
“I think I probably knew I wanted children when I was 16,” David says. “But around the age of 35, I believed that it was probably a little bit not going to happen.”
Then he made a commitment to change his life, and not long after that he met his wife, Please. She wanted a child just as much as he did. They married. Within a year they had decided to start trying. Another year went by.
It was Please who walked into St Mary’s Cathedral one day. Neither of them was Catholic – David describes himself in those days as agnostic – but a baby was all either of them could think about, and she found herself praying to Our Lady for one. She also made a promise. “She said that if she got a child that month, we would then become Catholics,” David says. “She would take both me and my son into the faith.”
“And that’s exactly what happened.”
His first reaction was pure joy: “I was ecstatic! I truly thought that time had passed.” His second, when his wife explained the rest of the bargain, was rather different. “The shock for me was when she initially said that she was going to go into the Catholic faith and wanted to take our son and me with her.”
He went along to RCIA at All Saints Parish in Liverpool. “I didn’t want to feel like I was misleading people. So, I said to the coordinator that I was just coming to listen, with an open mind and an open heart.”
But David didn’t really expect the listening to take.
“It was very much the toad in the water,” he says, reaching for the old analogy about the creature that never notices the temperature rising. “Everything came over me quite slowly. Every week I felt a little bit more strongly that the things I was learning were important.”
He can name the moment the ground shifted. “One of the biggest points in RCIA for me was when Fr Paul gave me a Bible.”
“I think the Bible is an amazing template for living one’s life, and RCIA enabled me to explore that in small pieces,” he says. “I think we have the ability, if we follow the teachings in the Bible, to create heaven for ourselves through sacrifice, like Jesus did. I really do.”
At the 2026 Easter Vigil, David and Please were baptised together. A couple of months later, so was their son.
“Pearce is my miracle baby, for sure,” David says. “He’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. That dimpled smile kills me every time. I don’t need anything else.”
Ask what difference the faith makes to the father he is trying to be, and he does not hesitate.
“The church has more to offer than people would like to admit. It’s critical for me to bring Pearce up in the faith, and I think the Catholic faith is the one to bring him up in.
“It gives structure and form, and puts you in touch with a community of people who want to do better. They want to help people. They give of themselves without thought of anything coming back. And those are the kind of values that I want to instil as a father.”
He is not much given to looking backwards, to the bearded drinker who would be the last to leave the party. “I look to the future with hope. Looking at the past is more difficult for me, because it’s already done and seeking forgiveness has given me the ability to look at it that way.
“It only really matters what I do now and in the future. But I’m very happy with where I am. Very happy, especially with the Catholic faith. And my miracle baby who has brought me to my new faith.”
David’s story features in Episode 28 of Disciple Diaries, produced by the Sydney Centre for Evangelisation.
