“I’ve always been a science-based person. I’m wired that way. My whole career has been based on logic and analysis – how things are created and built. It started in high school and then continued at university – I got degrees that covered engineering, human physiology, physics, and chemistry.

After uni, my girlfriend and I moved out together. Everything was fine. Then Tracey became a Christian.

It felt very sudden to me. She started saying that Jesus was the answer. What was the question? She’d been talking with some girls at her work who gave her books to read, including the Bible.

I had a Roman Catholic background, and Mum had even sent me to an Anglican Sunday school. But I hated it. I thought it was all gobbledy-gook. As the years passed my main issue was with creation versus evolution. At university the lecturers were constantly talking about cells that turned into fish, then frogs, then land-based animals. There was no other way to view it. The idea of a creator was all bunkum to me, equating with a fairy story.

But Tracey kept talking about Jesus. And along the way our relationship changed. According to her, God had a bigger plan.

“He looked me straight in the eye and he spoke with his booming voice about the exact thing I was thinking about.”

She asked me to go to church with her and I agreed… because I loved her. She also gave me a Bible, and I read it for 5 seconds and threw it on the bed. It was still bunkum. But I went to church with her four times in a row. I sat up the back.

On the way there, though, each week, I had questions. Tracey replied, “Let’s see what the pastor says.”

Then, every week, we sat in church, and the pastor answered my questions in the sermon. He looked me straight in the eye and he spoke with his booming voice about the exact thing I was thinking about.

I said to Tracey, “What’s going on? Did you talk to this guy?” She said she didn’t.

“Was it possible that there was a Creator?”

After four weeks, I said to her, “Yeah, okay. There might be something here.” The minister then lent me a whole pile of videos from scientists on the topic of design and creation and evolution. I binge-watched them for six hours in a row. They were similar in style to John Lennox… and enough to raise questions in me. It turned out there could be a different, scientific way to observe and interpret the world around us.

Take cells for example. They do these amazing things inside them, they reproduce, in order, in perfect design. Or look at the moon and the tides. The water moves in and out in cycles, which influences the ecosystem. There are so many ‘accidents’ that work absolutely perfectly, on so many levels. Could they be random?

“Something changed in me overnight.”

I started to wonder. Was it possible that there was a Creator? It would mean I wasn’t in control and that I was a creation. It threw me into confusion and challenged everything I thought. If I wasn’t the top of the pile… If I was created, then I had a problem. It meant that I was in a different position, in front of a Creator.

I sat on my bed and didn’t know what to do. My position had changed. I said, “God, if you are who I think you are, help me to believe.”

The next morning, I just knew it was true. There was a Creator. Something changed in me, overnight, and I believed. I suddenly knew who I was, as a creation. Previously my questions had been around Jesus – who he was and what he had done. It hadn’t made any sense to me. But when my position changed overnight, I knew I needed Jesus. I owed a debt, and I couldn’t pay. Jesus had made me right with the Creator, and I needed to respond.

Overnight, it changed the way I thought and acted. I know God did it, inside me. I could never have changed myself. All my life I had been a person who loved being in control, and then that day I trusted God, who was in control. It wasn’t bunkum at all!”

Shaun’s story is part of Eternity’s Faith Stories series, compiled by Naomi Reed. Click here for more Faith Stories.