Testimony of Joshua Owen
For the majority of my life I have been an atheist. Church was something that my school forced me to go to and God was simply a concept that my father made fun of. For me, as Nietzsche said, God was dead.
But looking back over the years, God never really went away. Through books and testimony he kept appearing or I would be taken aback that people I respected turned out to be Christians, like Francis Collins – the head of the NIH. But I didn’t really take notice as I was a scientist. I was working hard to try and have my own lab and achieve something with my life here on Earth. But then as time passes, and the progress you think you deserve does not come… what then? I remember I started to become so angry and frustrated that I could almost rage at the sea. Why was nothing the way it should be? Why was this application rejected? Why was this not working? And finally what is the point of it all? But in all these questions I had put myself at the very center of the universe and I couldn’t understand why it wouldn’t turn around me. I was losing sleep, becoming depressed and really couldn’t stand my life even though to an observer there really seemed to be nothing wrong.
But, I love to read. Usually on pretty much anything and as my life and values fell apart around me I decided to read the bible. If anything it is a key text in history so one should read it and I was fully ready for it to be a long, pointless, well written book about a tyrant in the sky. But it was nothing like that. It was confusing, contradictory, beautiful and most of all thought provoking. I couldn’t get questions and ideas out of my head. I was amazed by Ecclesiastes, Job, the Book of Judges which were nothing like I expected. At about this time I met Mary-Ann, a biologist working in a lab near me and knowing she was a Christian I inquired with her about God and told her that I was reading the Bible. We talked and she invited me to a church in Oxford called Saint Aldates which dates back a thousand years. In that church I saw kindness, love, friendliness and care for the community; actions that I had talked about but that the church actually did. It is a hard thing to realise that everything you believed in and based your life on was wrong. But evidence kept coming. I found my hero Newton was a Christian, Pascal too and Rousseau used to read the Bible every night. The Renaissance painters used to pray frequently and incredible things in history have been achieved by people of faith. The History of my country, Britain, is steeped in faith.
I realized I am not the center of the universe and I am not owed anything. I am a sinner who fails and makes mistakes over and over again. But there is so much more to this world than wealth and achievement and if you value yourself by those things you will never be fulfilled. So I kept going to church and I kept spending time with Mary-Ann and in time I was baptised and we fell in love and married. I am not a professor at a prestigious university or a world famous scientist but I am happy, I have purpose, I am loved by God and all my worries and troubles are as nothing compared to the suffering that a carpenter in Jerusalem did for me 2000 years ago. And he didn’t do it just for me, he did if for the whole world. As an atheist I had solutions to the world’s problems which were simple, reasonable and wrong. Now I know I don’t know the answers, but I know that there is a God above me, greater and more profound than I can comprehend and I know that through God this world has meaning.