Owen: My Story of Divine Duplication

There are moments in life when God speaks so clearly that the sound reverberates through your entire being, changing everything you thought you understood. For me, that moment came not in a burning bush or a voice from heaven, but in a single word spoken by a doctor during what I thought was just another visit by our son, Owen’s, medical team.

The Question That Started Everything

It all began with my heart wrestling with questions that I’ve written about previously: Why does suffering exist? What is God trying to teach us through hardship? But this wasn't theoretical theology for me; this was deeply personal. My son Owen had been born with heterotaxy, a complex condition where organs don't develop in their typical positions, creating a lifetime of medical challenges and uncertainties.

Like Job questioning God's purposes, like David crying out in the Psalms, I found myself asking the fundamental question that pain always brings: Why? Why our child? Why this struggle? What could God possibly be trying to say through my little boy's complicated anatomy?

My search for answers led me first to Scripture, to understanding what the Bible says about multiplication- that divine principle I kept encountering throughout God's word. I’ve researched it several times before and even read a book by John Bevere called, “X – Multiple Your God Given Potential.” From the very beginning, multiplication appears as God's signature: "Be fruitful and multiply." The feeding of the five thousand. The exponential growth of the early church. But what was God really trying to convey through this concept?

The Divine Economy of Abundance

As I studied deeper, a pattern began to emerge. Biblical multiplication reveals something profound about God's character; He operates from abundance, not scarcity. When Jesus multiplied loaves and fishes, He wasn't just solving a hunger problem; He was demonstrating that divine provision transcends natural limitations. This challenged every one of my human instincts toward hoarding, fear, and self-preservation.

The multiplication principle showed me that God invites humanity into participatory creation. The command to "be fruitful and multiply", which we are partially fulfilling with Owen who is our fourth child, isn't just about having children; it's about joining God in His ongoing creative work. Whether in relationships, spiritual growth, or kingdom impact, God calls His people to be co-creators in an ever-expanding reality.

Unlike human economics where sharing diminishes resources, I learned that God's economy multiplies through giving. His love doesn't decrease when distributed- it expands exponentially. This pointed to something infinite in God's nature, something that defied earthly logic.

From Multiplication to Duplication

But I sensed there was more. Then came the appointment with Owen's heterotaxy team- what I thought was routine visit but was actually a divine appointment disguised as healthcare. The nurse practitioner was discussing the complexities of Owen's condition when she mentioned something that stopped time for me: "duplication."

She was speaking medically, describing how certain structures in heterotaxy patients sometimes duplicate in unexpected ways like his lung lobes. But in that moment, it felt like God reached through the clinical terminology and smacked me in the back of the head. The word hit me like lightning, like Moses encountering the burning bush, like Isaiah's lips touched by the coal.

It was like God saying, "Pay attention. I've been preparing you for this moment."

The concept of duplication began to surface in my thinking—related to multiplication but distinctly different. From what I started to look at was where multiplication implied growth through diversity, duplication suggested something about faithful replication, about maintaining essential character while allowing for creative expression.

I started with a word study that revealed the Hebrew tselem, image or likeness, used when God created humanity "in His own image." This wasn't about identical copying but essential resemblance, like a shadow that carries the essence of what casts it. The word originally meant "to shade" or "represent," suggesting that duplication in God's vocabulary was about making the invisible visible, the eternal temporal.

The Greek eikon expanded this concept. Paul used it to describe Christ as "the image of the invisible God"—a perfect duplication that makes the unknowable accessible. The word typos showed me how God duplicates patterns across time, with Old Testament events serving as "types" of future realities.

Through medieval theology and into modern understanding, I discovered that duplication had evolved to encompass questions of identity, authenticity, and what constitutes faithful representation. But at its core remained the biblical principle: true duplication preserves essence while allowing contextual adaptation.

The Revelation in a Name

And then the pieces began falling into place with the precision that only God can orchestrate. Owen—the name we had chosen for our son before we had known about his conditions—suddenly revealed its prophetic significance to me.

Owen, from the Welsh "Owain," meaning "noble warrior" or "well-born." But also connected to the Gaelic "Eoghan," meaning "born of the yew tree." And then I discovered something that made my heart skip: Owen is also used as a Welsh form of John, derived from the Hebrew name Yohanan, which means "God is gracious." As I researched, I discovered that in Celtic tradition, yew trees were sacred not despite their unusual growth patterns, but because of them. These ancient trees could live for millennia precisely because they didn't follow conventional structures. They grew with multiple trunks, branches that duplicated and intertwined in seemingly impossible ways, yet they were among the strongest and longest-living trees on earth.

The revelation took my breath away: Owen's very name had been prophesying his purpose before his first breath. God had been preparing me through our choice of his name- a noble warrior whose strength would come not from conventional structure, but from an unusual, enduring pattern of growth designed for longevity and resilience.

The Deeper Truth

Through this experience, I've come to understand that Owen's heterotaxy—the condition that causes organs to duplicate or position differently—is a physical manifestation of a spiritual principle. Just as God duplicated His nature in Christ (fully God, fully human in a pattern that shouldn't work but perfectly does), Owen's anatomy duplicates certain divine qualities in ways that transcend typical human understanding.

The struggles are real for us: the medical challenges, the uncertainties, the heart-wrenching questions that come with loving a child who faces difficult battles. But God has shown me that duplication in His kingdom often comes through what appears broken or irregular to the world.

I now believe Owen may be duplicating God's heart in ways that will touch lives no "typical" child could reach. His noble warrior spirit, like the enduring yew tree, will grow strong precisely because his pattern is different. He carries the image of God (tselem) not in spite of his condition, but through it.

The Continuing Story

This story is still being written in our lives. I now understand we're not just raising a child with medical challenges; we're stewarding a living testimony to God's creative power, a walking demonstration that His strength is made perfect in what the world sees as weakness.

We’re still trying to see how every challenge can be an opportunity to see God's duplication principle at work: how He takes what seems insufficient and multiplies it beyond imagination, how He preserves eternal truth through temporal circumstances.

Owen's story has reminded me that God often speaks most clearly not through dramatic supernatural interventions of burning bushes, but through the intersection of His word, our circumstances, and hearts prepared to hear. Sometimes the most profound revelations come disguised as medical terminology, spoken by healthcare providers who don’t realize they're delivering divine messages.

In the end, I've learned that Owen's story is really everyone's story- how God takes what seems imperfect, irregular, or broken and reveals it as His perfect design for displaying His glory. How He duplicates His own character through unlikely vessels, creating noble warriors whose very existence testifies to His power to bring beauty from ashes, strength from weakness, and eternal purpose from temporary struggle.

The yew tree grows for thousands of years not despite its twisted, unconventional form, but because of it. My Owen, too, is built to endure- a noble warrior whose unusual pattern of growth is actually God's signature of strength, His duplication of divine resilience in human form.

And I wouldn't change a single thing about God's perfect design.