I was born into a middle-class family and my parents were primary school teachers.

Due to my mother’s excellence as a teacher, I excelled in primary school, scoring very well in the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) and eventually earning a place in a prestigious secondary school in Singapore.

It looked like I had it made. Family, friends, friends of family and even some of my primary school teachers talked up my PSLE achievements and placement in an elite school, to the point I started to believe the hype myself.

Assured that I was in good hands in a good place, my parents became less present and spent large chunks of time at work. It thus became the norm for me to come home to an empty house and take care of myself most of the time.

The first look

Deep inside, I was not in a good place. I was anything but secure.

The many ‘why’s about my facial birthmark (which I shared about here) and the unanswered questions about my existence still persisted, amplified now with the onset of puberty and the bewildering experience of being suddenly undistinguished in a school full of distinguished students, with my sole (unwanted) distinction being an obvious facial birthmark.  

Left to my own devices for much of the time, I visited my maternal grandmother frequently. She had taken care of me from young until I was in kindergarten, and her home became a home away from home of sorts.

As a young boy, I had an innate curiosity and liked to open cupboards and drawers to see what was inside them. On one of these visits to my grandmother’s home, I found soft-core pornographic magazines stashed in a cupboard, left behind by an adult relative.

There was no Internet then, no books I had read or could find to know more. Sex was a topic my parents had never broached with me either. In any case, seeing nude women in a magazine awakened something in me.

It was lust.

I was ensnared, but because of the potential shame and embarrassment of it all, I kept it well hidden.

Following this, the years in secondary school and junior college came with disappointments. Year on year, my grades fell. The fragile construct of any self-esteem based on my past achievements fell apart.

I fell apart.

A step deeper into the darkness

There was a glimmer of light in junior college when a classmate invited me to her church.

There, I came to know what Jesus had done for me. There, God became more personable to me than ever before. With renewed hope that there was meaning to my life, I accepted Jesus into my heart.

However, my lust and penchant for viewing pornography did not go away with my decision to accept Christ.

Continuing in the same church that I had accepted Christ in, I found myself serving in its youth ministry around the time I finished serving my National Service in the army. Within a two-year period or so, I was made a leader of a youth cell group, then a leader of leaders.

During this time, I became attracted to another youth leader. She also looked after other leaders, and we were in the same tertiary institute pursuing teacher training. 

I began to believe that she could be “The One”, the life partner whom God was providing for me. I fell hard for her.

As things turned out, she said ‘no’.

I fell so hard and grew so angry with God that I threw it all away  – my ministry, studies and future – in a sustained bout of anger and depression. 

In my distressed state, and knowing only one temporal salve for my pain and wounds, I took one more step into the darkness.

I entered Geylang and lost my virginity there. I was in my 20s.

It did not stop there. There were visits to illicit massage parlours and return visits to Geylang. There would also be whole days on end that I would spend in my room viewing pornography and acting out in it.

Started a relationship with a prostitute

Then I ran off to the state of Tasmania in Australia for undergraduate studies in a totally different field. I did well at first, but the root issues remained. I got into relationships, I cohabited and got my heart broken again.

Returning to Singapore, I found work and eventually got into a relationship with a girl from church. Again, the relationship didn’t work out. And again, in my pain, I went down the route I had always known – back to the brothels and the illicit sex.

This time, I went even further.

I began a relationship with a prostitute from Thailand and would travel regularly to see her. That, too, did not work out, and I was left empty and depressed again.

As a famous song goes, I was looking for love in all the wrong places. These pursuits were always going to be fleeting and temporal anyway. I did not know any better, yet it was all I had known, that temporary salve.

From 2007, I trudged from place to place, from church to church. I rejected every well-meaning father figure who tried to get close to me.

I became a pariah, a misfit, an outcast.

Discovering God’s love for the worst of sinners

From 2007, a few things started to happen. Firstly, God began showing me that I was seeing Him through a faulty theological lens.

As I read the books of the prophets, I saw that even though Israel was unfaithful to God and had turned away from Him to other gods and nations, God remained faithful to Israel on account of His own promise and covenant.

I began to understand, intellectually at least, that His was an unfailing love, even for me in all my unfaithfulness.

Yet, even in the light of this, I still harboured a great disappointment with God and myself.

Secondly, God began to connect me with people who revealed more of His heart to me. The first two people were a married couple, M and L, whom I met through a prayer ministry.

In late-2010, God called M and L to Geylang to start a physical healing outreach. They invited me to join them. I was hesitant at first to be part of this, even more so because the place was Geylang.

But having lost so much already, I had nothing much to lose anymore. Having come out of another cycle of failure and depression, I joined them. However, I felt like a hypocrite to do God’s work in a place where I had fallen so far.

Though I joined the outreach, I believed that I would never be of use to God again, and that I would not see Him heal anyone when I prayed for them.

To my confoundment, I was wrong.

Men who had just come out of brothels would be healed when we prayed for them. Some of them would be astounded. I was, too, for He began to show me just how deep and wide His love was for the worst of sinners and greatest of pretenders, including me.

And so, in the very streets where I had ventured so carelessly into darkness, and where I had lost something so precious, the light of God’s love began to pierce my heart.

It was a revelation that went beyond almost every religious notion and qualm I had. And it wasn’t so much (or even anything) about me doing God’s work, but about Him working on my heart, making me His workmanship.

I spent three years in the outreach.

Encountering the Father’s Heart

Despite turning away from illicit sex activities, the struggle with lust and pornography continued. When I met my wife and we were to be married, I believed marriage would be the solution to my addiction.

But it did not take long for that assumption to be disproved.

There were challenges with our newborn son, challenges with in-laws, and our childhood wounds and unhealed insecurities began to show. We were unhappy and quarreled a lot. Divorce was brought up more than once.

Invariably, I turned to pornography again.

The turning point occurred in early-2021. At the end of myself as a man, husband and father, and dead tired of the same old cycles and sitting broken on the floor during a church service, I encountered the Father heart of God.

Until now, it had been glimpses and drops. Here, it was a waterfall – a waterfall of His love, washing away every muck and unworthy thought I had of Him and myself that I had accumulated over a lifetime.

He revealed Himself as my Father and revealed that He had always seen me as His beloved son. And in every encounter since, He has been changing the way I see Him and myself.

For the first time in my life, I began to heal deeply – slowly at first, but eventually coming to an understanding of how beloved I am as a son in His house.

A year or two later, I realised something: Images of scantily clad women no longer elicited any response from me. Where once I had to fight mentally and pray furiously to keep away from pornography, there was no more desire.

Even in instances when ads showing salacious material popped up and caught me off-guard, I discovered that the images had lost their hold on me.

What held me now was our Father’s heart, and the joy of always being connected to Him as His beloved son in Christ.

He sets the lonely in families 

From 2022, a few other things happened.

One, I joined a spiritual community where I learned to connect deeper to my Father’s heart.

Two, I became a stay-at-home father and became part of a fledging group of stay-home fathers that has now grown to include more fathers in various different seasons of fatherhood.

Being with other godly fathers has helped Timothy stay the course in purity.

Both communities became an extension of God’s family to and for me. Where for most of my life I was lonely and disconnected, in these communities, I was seen and known, warts, dark backstory and all – and embraced.

Three, God also drew my wife on a journey deeper into His heart. He opened doors for her to explore dance and art, things she had an interest in when she was young.

Through all these, He knitted our hearts together as husband and wife. We no longer get triggered over the minor things we used to, nor quarrel or worry over the many things that previously weighed upon our hearts.

Back to the same places, as a different man

Last year, when Jason Wong established the Father’s House, a place of worship and prayer, in Geylang, I saw the Father’s hand in it.

The location is right at the head of Geylang, and it was in the unit opposite the church that was our sending and prayer base for the street outreach I was part of many years ago.

Our Father was making clear His heart message: He was calling home every prodigal son who had lost his way in places such as Geylang, calling us back from the wastelands into His house, into His embrace.

In January this year, the Christian men and fathers of the fathering community I am part of met for the first time at the Father’s House to worship and take communion, and to rededicate ourselves and our families to God.

The very next day, my wife, son and I flew off to Thailand to join up with another spiritual community’s annual retreat.

Timothy with his wife and son.

On the flight, it hit me.

Two days in a row, Geylang and Thailand. God brought me back to the places I had once lost myself – but this time, I was found, healed and planted in a family and community.

God can make all things new 

Faithless, fornicator, coward, idolator, liar, detestable.

If Revelation 21:8 were a checklist, I would have checked all or most of these. It would have been easy to condemn me to hell and damnation. I did. And according to my theological lens back then, I believed God did too.

I believed I was done and God was done with me. But He wasn’t and He isn’t done with me yet, nor with you.

I know why I am writing this, and I know who I am writing to: It is to the men, the sons and the fathers, who are mired in the same things that had enthralled me for so long.

You have stayed stuck in the cycle of shame and guilt and see no light. But I tell you, God is neither ashamed of you nor afraid of your sins.

He would gladly meet you where you are, regardless of how far away you have run. He gladly wants to show you His heart for you.

I once only saw darkness. Now I see the light of His face and His gaze full of love.

As He did for me, He can do the same for you.

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