EDMOND—Gunshots rang out, piercing the still California night. And Oscar Wilson ran for his life. That night changed everything: from his athletics to getting up in the morning to his relationship with God.
It was a Friday evening in June 2007. Wilson had just spent two hours after football practice lifting weights and doing drills. Exhausted, he went straight home to relax. That’s when some of his teammates called him up.
“Hey, you want to come with us to this party?” Wilson recalls them asking. “You only have to be there for a couple minutes.”
His reply: “No, I’ve got some chili fries I’m about to eat.”
He wasn’t the partying type, but his teammates were, and they were persistent. He gave in, quickly dressing in a robe and shorts so he could quickly swing by the party.
When he arrived, Wilson found out there was a $7 cover charge. So he and one of his friends walked away from the house. Just then, a silver Nissan Altima rolled up. They didn’t pay much attention—till a barrage of bullets came shooting out of it.
He ran. In the frantic attempt to escape, he tripped and fell in the street. Wilson stayed down, hoping the shooters would run out of ammunition. The gunshots finally stopped and the car sped away, Wilson did not get back up.
“I tried to pick myself up, and I realized I couldn’t move my legs,” Wilson recalls.
Only one bullet found its target. But that piece of lead punctured Wilson’s spine, paralyzing his lower body and abdominal region.
Wilson passed out on the black top. Before he knew it, he was in the hospital, waiting for the doctor to deliver the news.
“For a while there, I was waiting for the doctor to say if I was incomplete or complete,” Wilson says.
He had suffered a complete spinal cord injury, meaning he had no chance to walk again. Surgery to remove the bullet from his spine had a 50/50 chance of being fatal. Wilson declined it, and the bullet remains lodged in his fifth thoracic vertebra to this day.
With the pulling of a single trigger, Wilson lost his prospect to take the field on his sport’s biggest stage: the National Football League. While lying in his hospital bed, he looked back at his promising football career, which had been suddenly, irrevocably terminated.
Wilson had competed in basketball, wrestling and track during his high school days. But the sport he took most seriously was football, perhaps due to his rough-and-tumble interactions with his six older brothers.
As a freshman at Victor Valley Junior College, Wilson arrived early and stayed late for almost every football practice. During one of those practices, a scout from the prestigious Kansas University Jayhawks football program visited Wilson’s team to observe drills and give the players some advice in football, career and life. Number 38, the outside linebacker, soon caught his eye.
“Once I got connected with him, that’s when all these doors flew open to go to the next level,” Wilson says of the scout, who was impressed with Wilson’s quickness, agility and ball-hawking skills during 7-on-7 drills.
The KU scout helped Wilson plan his football future: After two years at Victor Valley, he would transfer to Cal State Fullerton for two more years, then move on to the University of Southern California, a college football hotbed that frequently produces professional players.
But none of that would be happening now. Back in his hospital bed, Wilson says he suddenly had other things on his mind. He asked himself, “What is my purpose? Why? What is mankind here for?”
After a year of rehabilitation and fighting through a trying time, a “growing stage” as he characterizes it, Wilson began an earnest search for answers to bigger questions than how to get into the nfl. If his mission to go pro could be shot down in a split second, then there must be more to life than football, he thought.
About a week into his search for truth, Wilson stumbled across one of Herbert W. Armstrong’s World Tomorrow television programs online. He was looking for material about Sunday worship, but Mr. Armstrong advocated Sabbath observance instead. Growing up, Wilson had attended Pentecostal church services. Mr. Armstrong’s message was a sharp contrast.
“I’ve been lied to about everything my whole life,” Wilson remembers thinking after hearing Mr. Armstrong speak.
Wilson typed “Herbert Armstrong,” into an Internet search engine. His eyes stopped on a link at the top of the webpage. It said “Philadelphia Church of God.” “pcg caught my attention for some reason,” Wilson says. “Every book I saw stood out to me.”
For two years, he requested and devoured all the literature he could find on theTrumpet.com. Handicapped and out of a job, he had plenty of time for reading, he says.
It took a while to work up the courage to call the pcg for a ministerial visit, but Wilson did it after those two years. But after his first visit in his home with Preaching Elder Gareth Fraser and Local Church Elder Tim Mazza, it took only two months for them to invite him to services. Now, 31/2 years later, the 25-year-old not only attends services but gives opening and closing prayers, works on the sound crew and serves as vice president of the Southern California East Spokesman Club.
Brethren in Wilson’s home congregation in Yucaipa seem to always notice and comment about how happy he is. He says it’s because, even though he has lost feeling in much of his body, he has gained meaning and purpose in his life.
Despite setbacks like snapping his femur during a massage and physical therapy session two months ago, Wilson somehow sees the bright side. “I couldn’t even feel it,” he says.
Easy tasks for the average person are difficult for Wilson, but he doesn’t mind. Getting pants on, climbing in and out of cars, and entering narrow doorways in his power wheelchair can be tedious. Also, he can’t tell if he’s full, since his abdomen has no feeling, so he must carefully monitor how much he eats.
Wilson spends his days studying, reading, watching documentaries and taking web design classes that will hopefully help him start a business one day.
Wilson knows he missed out on what might’ve been a lucrative career accompanied by fame, but to him, being a drive-by victim was worth it. “I’d rather be where I am today,” he says. “The future’s real bright.”