I Am Not Ashamed Of The Gospel

Particularly during a recent visit to Britain, several non-Caribbean readers have asked for a few more details about our late Bro. Aaron Isaacs ­or Glen, as he was fondly known to everyone. Glen was many things in his short life. He was a brilliant medical student but diverted to become a nuclear physicist with the Institute of Nuclear Medicine at Mona. Then he deliberately turned from fame and fortune to found the Science Institute in downtown Kingston, which catered to educationally deprived or failing students and pre­pared them for distinguished careers in science and medicine.

The Jamaican government acknowledged that the Institute — along with its sister college the Institute of Higher Learning, of which Bro. Donovan Isaacs (Glen’s brother in the flesh) is the Principal — consistently produces results which surpass the country’s best grant-aided high schools. This is why, at the recent anniversary of Glen’s death, the Minister of Education pleaded for the work to continue after Glen’s death. That will be hard to do, for the Science Institute did not just teach science. Its Principal was an out ­spoken Christadelphian who was not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, and whose oddly-named faith and undoubted courage were very widely known. He was determined that the science his students learned must bring them closer to the God of heaven, and Daniel was always his model.

He had a quite extraordinary gift for communicating both science and faith, and also was ruthless in puncturing egotistical posturing by his scientist colleagues. I recall the silent shock when he asked publicly why they knew all about the big black hole far away in the middle of the Milky Way but nothing at all about the big black hole in the middle of Kingston.

Physical scientist though he was, he gently mocked clever men and women who can read the human genome with ease, but are willfully blind to the word of God. “It is absurd,” he would say, “that we are more interested in what is going on inside our tiny chromosomes than inside our big heads and hearts”. As a former Editor of the Caribbean Pioneer, Glen left behind material in our editorial files, some of which we hope to publish from time to time.