He was an intellectual atheist … until a series of miracles baffled him
By
Christine Leow
, 31 July 2024
Raised by Christian parents, Paul Wong was in university when he became an atheist. All photos courtesy of Pastor Paul Wong.
TRIGGER WARNING: This story contains mentions of suicidal ideation. Reader discretion advised.
At the age of 27, Paul Wong was a chain smoker, smoking 60 sticks of cigarettes a day.
“I was also drinking and doing all kinds of stupid stuff,” Paul, now 62, admitted.
Coming out of “a very bad relationship”, Paul became so depressed that he could not get out of bed.
“After my friends prayed for me, my life got worse.”
“I didn’t want to come out of my room. I was incapacitated,” recalled Paul, who worked in public service for almost 20 years.
“When I lay in bed, I felt a weight pressing upon me. Every other day, I thought of how to kill myself,” he said.
His condition was so bad that his father dragged him to see a psychiatrist. Paul was diagnosed with clinical depression and was prescribed medication.
“In the morning, I had to take a set of drugs to keep me up. In the afternoon, I had to take drugs to make sure I didn’t get too high. Come evening, I had drugs to help me sleep,” Paul recalled.
“I thought: ‘This is not a life’.”
Becoming an atheist
Paul comes from a long line of Christians on both his father’s and mother’s sides of the family.
His parents brought him regularly to church, and when he was old enough, sent him to Sunday School.
Paul (centre), at age 4, with his parents and siblings.
“I went dutifully and listened to the Bible stories,” he said.
He also attended a mission school.
“But just because you go to a Christian school or go to church doesn’t make you a Christian,” he pointed out.
By the time he was in his teens, Paul started to “do my own stuff” which got him into “a lot of trouble”.
At the age of 16, he was caught for fighting.
Paul, at the age of 16, at an Anglo-Chinese School track and field meet in 1978.
“We were hauled into the principal’s office. We found ourselves in a room with three police officers,” he recalled.
He was let off with a warning.
By the time he was serving National Service, Paul stopped going to church.
“I don’t think I was ever a Christian,” he said.
Disappointed by the inability of Christians to answer his questions, Paul became an atheist.
In university, disappointed by the inability of Christians to answer his questions and propelled by the influence of the Philosophy course he took, Paul became an atheist.
“How do you know the resurrection of Christ is real? How do you know it isn’t a hoax? Was Jesus a mad man, liar or really who He says He is?” Paul asked.
“The thing that upset me about Christians was: You can’t answer the really tough questions, and you want to talk to me about salvation?
“Religion didn’t make sense at all to me. I felt this thing called God was more a figment of our imagination. If you want to believe, you believe.
By the age of 20, Paul had become an atheist.
“I believed in myself. I was, in essence, a humanist,” he said.
That worldview influenced his lifestyle.
“I was doing everything a young guy would do. You would see me in a bar every day. I treated my home like a hotel.
“I think I disappointed my parents tremendously during that period.”
The depression deepened
In the 1990s, Paul sunk into depression after a breakup.
With nothing else better to do, he went to a birthday party his old classmate invited him to.
There, he started talking to a woman, Barbara Tjoa, about what was happening to him. She became his confidante, and she and her prayer buddy, Dorcas Sim, started praying regularly for him.
Dorcas, a teacher, would eventually become Paul’s wife.
But at that point, Paul said: “After they prayed for me, my life got worse.”
He lost his job in insurance because his depression made it difficult for him to work. Then his depression worsened.
Barbara (left) with Dorcas. Dorcas saw the compassionate side of Paul when she asked him to ferry her student, who was ill, back to Johor – somewhere he had never driven to. Paul visited and played the guitar with the student when the latter was hospitalised.
“One day, it was so bad, I called Barbara at about 10pm. We spoke till about 2am.”
Every time they spoke, Barbara would speak to him about Jesus – and the peace that only He can offer. That night was no different.
“She told me, ‘For all your intellectualism, what has it brought you to? What have you got to lose by receiving Christ?’”
“For all your intellectualism, what has it brought you to?”
Stumped for an answer, Paul allowed her to guide him into inviting Jesus into his life.
But nothing changed. Yet.
The next day, he woke up with the same desire to smoke. Within an hour, he had puffed away four sticks of cigarettes.
He called Barbara.
“I told her, ‘I can’t be a Christian.’
“When she asked, ‘Why not?’, I told her that I was still smoking.
“She told me that smoking did not make me less of a Christian.”
Barbara encouraged him to pray if he wanted to stop smoking.
“I thought: This woman is crazy. But I will just humour her. I am going to pray,” Paul recalled.
“I have not touched a cigarette again since that morning of June 2, 1992.”
He said a simple prayer asking God to take away his desire to smoke.
“When I ended my prayer, I lost the urge to smoke. It befuddled me totally. Did I call it a miracle? Absolutely not, because I couldn’t wrap my mind around what just happened.
“On hindsight, I believe that God was ‘messing’ with my mind to show me how foolish and small my mind was.”
He took all the cigarettes from his drawer and threw them into the bin.
“I have not touched a cigarette again since that morning of June 2, 1992,” he said.
“Last message before I leave God”
Paul started attending church with Barbara. But instead of becoming better, his life slid further downhill in the months that followed.
“It was the toughest time. Most terrible. The devil was still after my soul,” he said.
Paul was unable to sleep. There was days when he thought of killing himself. On other days, he fought to carry on.
“I was like a washing machine going round and round.”
“I was like a washing machine going round and round,” he said.
He was assaulted by thoughts that told him that he was a hypocrite not worthy of the Christian faith.
On the verge of giving up on Christianity, he decided to go to one last church service to listen to a visiting pastor.
After the sermon, the pastor invited people up so that he could pray for them. As he did so, rows of people fell to the ground under the power of God’s Spirit.
“I thought: This is mass emotionalism, mass psychosis. This is crazy. Just because I said a prayer to be a Christian doesn’t mean I have left my brain on the shelf,” he recalled.
“Just because I said a prayer to be a Christian doesn’t mean I have left my brain on the shelf.”
Paul refused to go up for prayers. He did, however, go up to the pastor to thank him for the “really good message”.
“I thought it would be my last conversation before I leave God. The pastor looked at me and asked, ‘Has anybody prayed for you?’
“Then he prayed, ‘I rebuke the spirit of intellectualism in you.’
“I thought: ‘How did he know that?’”
The pastor did not even touch him, but Paul fell to the ground.
There, he felt something happening to his heart that had been shattered because of the broken relationship.
“I felt like the jigsaw puzzle of my heart was coming together.
“I felt like the jigsaw puzzle of my heart was coming together.”
“This threw my so-called intellectualism based on human thoughts and logic out of the window. Suddenly, it just clicked that God is real. It totally pulled me to the truth of Jesus.
“Then I heard a voice say, ‘You will never love Me the way I love you. But I am going to teach you how to love Me.’ I realised it was the voice of God.
“Then something was lifted out from me. It was a demonic spirit. When I got up, my legs were like tauhu (beancurd), like I was drunk.
“The pastor prayed for me to be baptised by God’s Spirit. The depression left me, and never came back,” he said.
Like a man possessed
Paul who suddenly “knew who God was” became “like a man possessed by the God’s Spirit”.
For six months, he stayed in his room, reading the Bible from cover to cover and praying non-stop. He listened to sermons and read Christian books.
“My parents were shocked.”
“Dorcas has a beautiful soul which emanates love and compassion for people,” said Paul of his wife of 28 years. They are pictured with their sons and daughter-in-law.
Paul used what he had studied in Philosophy in his reading of the Bible. It helped him to break down issues and understand them.
“Every day, I had a new revelation of who God is and who Jesus is.
“I told God, ‘I am going to take Your Word for all that it is. You tell me what to do, I will do it 100%. Because depression, addiction — You delivered me from them’.”
And so the man who had once prided himself on the power of his mind and his ability to reason told God: “You blessed me with a mind. Let me use it for Your glory.”
After inviting Jesus into his life, Paul (pictured at a rural church in Sri Lanka) talked about God wherever he went. He and Dorcas became pastors at New Life Community Church in Singapore together in 2011.
Over time, God led Paul to see that it was more logical to accept miracles as from Him than not.
“On a mission trip in Cambodia, there was a kid who was born blind in one eye. He was prayed for and his eyes turned till his pupil came back and he could see. How do you explain that?” Paul asked.
“We had this lady in church. She had breast cancer and the MRI showed that the cancer had spread through her whole body, her nervous system and blood.
“After we prayed for her, she was totally clear. I have the MRI. It blows your mind,” he said.
“When I was an atheist, I would have said it is unexplained. I would be perfectly fine with it from a philosophical standpoint because we don’t know everything.
“Now I look back and think it is quite stupid not to admit it is a miracle of God,” he said
A version of this story first appeared in Salt&Light.
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