About

From the age of ten I wanted to be a biologist. I collected shells, picked up the egg cases of rays from the beach, pinned wasps and had a microscope of my own as a child. At secondary school chemistry came along and took hold of me just as firmly: while my classmates were still learning in biology how to tell an insect from an arachnid by counting the legs, I was making a study of the genetics of budgerigars. So by the time I sat my final exams I knew exactly what I wanted to read — something in which biology and organic chemistry came together.

Before going up to university I spent a few months in Israel, on a kibbutz. Something happened there that I had not gone looking for. The history of the land moved me, and that of the Middle East, and a realisation pressed itself upon me that there must be a Creator. I became a theist.

Only then came Wageningen. At the Agricultural University I read environmental science and specialised in microbiology, and there I came to admire something most people look straight past. Bacteria are not plants and not animals and not anything in between; they are organisms, and plants and animals make up only a small part of what falls under that word. For all their apparent simplicity they adapt themselves to very nearly any environment. That admiration has never worn off.

The fourteen years after my studies were about something else entirely: understanding how enterprises work. I began at a large company, not as a biologist but where business administration meets IT, and studied business administration alongside the work. Since 2008 I have worked for myself.

To be a theist is to believe that there is more than the visible world and the observable universe: that there is a Creator who brought time, space, matter and the laws of nature into being. Most people do believe that there is something, but they do not take the step of finding out what that something is. I took that step, and my starting point is the Supreme Being as the Bible describes him.

What is self-evident to believers is not self-evident to others, and that is precisely why openness and respect belong here. What I share is meant first of all for those who do not believe: to show that believing need not be illogical, and need be neither fantasy nor wishful thinking. Have you ever asked yourself why there is anything at all, rather than nothing? Beyond that it is meant for my brothers and sisters in the faith: we do have the faith, but do we truly listen to and read what is asked of us, or are we more often occupied with what others think of us?

I want to share, to connect and to offer clarity — an invitation to conversation, not to debate. I want to bring you before the Father; from there you continue on your own way.

Since 2024 I have been active in the Messianic congregation Bracha in Apeldoorn. Outside my work I play bass guitar and photograph nature, and I am glad to be among friends and family.

Werner Vorstman lives in Epe. His career is on LinkedIn.