Hello everyone! Welcome to the Grace of Redemption, where we tell stories of different people whose lives were transformed by their encounters with Jesus Christ.  Today, we’re telling the story of Lazarus Lim Sing Sing, who went from complete despair to living a life filled with hope.

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It was January 1992, and 27 year-old Sing Sing was having an LSD fix, but it did not give him the ecstatic sensations he desired, so he bought a can of superglue to sniff, and also consumed an alcoholic drink.  This “cocktail” had the desired effect, and Sing Sing was soon feeling intense euphoria, ecstasy, and pleasure, but he also lost his common sense.  He climbed through the window of his 15^th floor apartment and jumped off, landing with a loud thud on top of a car, causing it to cave in from the impact before rolling to the ground.  He was rushed to the hospital unconscious.

When he regained consciousness 2 months later, he found that he could not move his legs.  He will never forget how crushed and shattered he felt the moment he realized what this meant.  

His mangled body was almost completely covered with long scars and scabs, marks of the many surgical operations he’d gone through.  Altogether, his body sustained 7 major bone fractures, including his arms and legs.  His spine was also affected.  His stomach had been operated on, and an opening was made near his throat.  Miraculously, his head was uninjured.

As he lay on the hospital bed, Sing Sing told himself all that he’d gone through were only dreams.  Those dreams were full of sorrow, pain, and despair.  He wished he could just keep sleeping, and not have to wake up to live through what he’d dreamed.

During the 10 long months of his hospital stay, he lay on the bed with his broken body, and a deep sense of dejection and loneliness, and cried out, “Why didn’t the doctors let me die?  Why?”  His life was empty and deplorable even when his legs were normal.  How would he continue living now that he was paralyzed?  He was in utter despair, and longed to die.

Sing Sing’s tormented and afflicted face was unnerving to those around him, and they shunned him.  Since none of his family or friends visited him, he felt very forsaken.  “Do you know that I am now in the hospital, feeling tortured and in great pain?  Are you casting me off?  Oh…I’m all torn up…”  Did he still have a family to look forward to?

Sing Sing had a complicated family background.  His father was a secret society member who had been jailed numerous times, while his mother was addicted to gambling, and the couple did not get along with each other.  He was brought up by his doting grandmother, but he was envious of other children who had parents who weren’t absent.  He felt worse during the Chinese New Year when families had reunion dinners while he shared a lonely dinner with his grandmother.  He began to blame his fate for his miserable life, and felt anguished and wretched.

His lowly-educated grandmother did not know how to guide Sing Sing during his growing-up years, and he did poorly in primary school, having to repeat two years of studies.  Although he got into secondary school, he had lost interest in studying, and decided to quit school early to look for work.  Then he began keeping bad company, and longed to be like his new friends.  Under their influence, he began to smoke, drink, gamble, sniff glue, and consume marijuana, and even LSD.

His grandmother died when he was 17, and he felt even more desolate.  How was he to continue living now that he had lost the relative who was closest to him?  He also didn’t have a home he could call his own.  Adding to his woes, he committed robbery one day while he was under the influence of LSD and was arrested, then sentenced to 2 years in jail and 6 strokes of the cane.

Sing Sing was released from prison in 1990, but by then he’d learned how to be a loan shark from veteran gangsters whom he befriended in jail.  He went into the loan sharking business, and he also began to frequent nightclubs like his gangster friends.  He soon became tired of depending on his friends for lodging, and decided to look for his long-lost father.  

Providentially, he found his father, and the two had a short time of reunion.  The father didn’t know that his son was already enslaved to drugs for several years.  Both of Sing Sing’s parents died soon afterward, and he didn’t know where to find his sisters.  That was when he felt everyone had deserted him and that he was truly alone in the world.  

He was consumed by loneliness, and turned to drugs to help him get through his wearisome days.  He was in this drugged state when he leaped out of his apartment window, plunged 15 floors, and ended up paralyzed from the waist down.

At this point in his life, Sing Sing felt completely hopeless, and once mumbled sluggishly, “Drugs destroyed my life…”  But his story didn’t end here.  On the next episode of Grace of Redemption, we’ll hear the rest of Sing Sing’s story, and see how Jesus changed his life in amazing ways.  We look forward to having you join us again next time on Global Reachout!