Does God even exist?

Hello, and welcome to Maidenhead's Questions, Esther.

Hello.

Hi.

It's great to be here.

Oh, it's so good to have you here.

Esther, could you maybe tell us a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, of course.

Um, so my name is Esther.

I love walking.

I love swimming in the sea.

I love music, and I'm a Christian.

Um, at uni I studied maths and philosophy, and I've been working as an accountant for the last, uh, four and a half years or so, but just a few months ago started working for an organization called OCCA, the Oxford Center for Christian Apologetics.

Um, and what we do here at OCCA is just try and create spaces for people to engage with big questions of life, faith, and meaning, much like we're doing here today.

Oh, I'm...

I for one am very grateful for the work of OCCA.

Esther, one of the things I've enjoyed about the Maidenhead questions is hearing different people's stories about how they come to know Jesus for themselves.

Could you maybe tell us a little bit h- about how you came to know Jesus?

Yeah, of course.

Um, so I grew up in a Christian family.

Um, but as I got into kind of late school, sixth form, university, I started to think, what does it actually mean for this to be real to me? Not just for this to be something that my parents believe, but for faith to make a real difference in my life.

And so as I, um, got into those questions, I just started asking some questions.

What...

Who was Jesus? What did he really teach? Is there good evidence for, um, the faith that I have been taught? And actually, what I found is that I...

as I digged into questions, rather than just kind of assuming what the answers might be, I found, um, that Christianity had really compelling answers to the questions I was asking.

Um, but more than that, I found a real relationship with the person of Jesus, um, and that he gave me hope and he gave me a purpose for my life, and, um, decided actually I wanna live my life for Him.