By Kallie McKinney –
Turn yourself into the cops.
The voice of God was unmistakable. Still it was terrifying.
Alistair Wang had participated in a robbery years earlier, after which he was plagued with paranoia. His missteps ultimately led him back to God, where he got free from drugs and sin. After a Christian camp emphasized integrity, Alistair asked God to make him a man of integrity.
“Turn yourself in,” God responded.
“No no no no no no no no no way no way no way,” Alistair reacted. “That can’t be you, God.”
It was.
After wrestling for hours over the thought of losing his cherished freedom for a crime he’d escaped culpability for, Alistair drove down to the police station and asked for the detective, whose name he remembered.
The detective was confused. They would never have caught Alistair. Why was he confessing?
“I encountered God since I last saw you,” Alistair said. “He’s turned my life around. With the way my life’s gone, I don’t want anything to be in the dark. I want it all to be in the light.”
He spoke boldly with the peace of Christ.
The cops recorded the interview. They took his mug shot. They took his fingerprints. They charged him with armed robbery.
He had testified with certainty. But now waves of anxiety and doubt plagued him. Would he go to jail?
A year later, Alistair Wang was sentenced to probation and community service. No jail.
It was an anguished filled time that capped off years of struggle and on-again, off-again Christianity.
Alistair Wang was going to be aborted. His parents were from China. His grandparents raised in Australia.
At first, the problem of the abortion didn’t bother little Alistair. As the years progressed, however, it became a trauma in the background of his mind that drove him to rebellion, against God and the church, and into drugs and street life.
Starting with marijuana, Alistair took ecstasy (MDMA), cocaine, Xanax, DMT, mushrooms and LSD. He and his friends had an intense loyalty, and that’s what Alistair sought most.
Then the staged the robbery of a guy Alistair didn’t like. Alistair was sitting across from him, and when the masked robber came in, Alistair surrendered his phone, as if robbed, and the guy gave up an expensive watch.
But when the cops showed up at his home, Alistair’s dad called him on the phone that supposedly had been stolen.
He needed an alibi for the detectives.
It was: he looked for the robber, found him, got him in a headlock, got his phone back but didn’t get the other guy’s watch.
Alistair thought detectives would never believe him. But lacking other evidence, they had no choice.
The brush with law enforcement provoked a return to God.
Alistair came back to God through much backsliding and imperfect attempts and re-attempts. As he slowly and painfully straightened up his life, he finally got to the Christian camp that emphasized integrity.
“God I want to be a man of integrity,” he prayed. “Please make me a man of integrity.”
