Christmas used to be a time of panic buying for Benjamin Tan, 47.

He was not buying gifts for family and friends. He was not taking advantage of year-end sales for himself. He was hoarding drugs.

“During the holidays – Christmas, Chinese New Year – the price of drugs would always go up,” he told Salt&Light in Mandarin.

“If you don’t buy and keep the drugs before Christmas, when the urge to take drugs hits you during the festive season, you would have to pay a lot to satisfy your habit.”

That was Tan’s earliest memory of Christmas.

Christmas like no other

These days, Christmas is still a busy season for Tan. But, instead of buying drugs, he is busy baking and selling honey-baked hams. Since halfway house Breakthrough Missions started its sale of Christmas hams in 2007, he has been the man in charge.

Breakthrough Missions is a drug rehabilitation half-way house for men who want to be free from addiction. The Gospel-based ministry offers a free three-year stay-in programme and can accommodate up to 70 residents.

On ordinary days, Tan runs Breakthrough Missions’ kitchen, shopping for and preparing meals for up to 80 people each day, twice a day.

Come Christmas, he has the added responsibility of baking up to 200 hams for sale and delivering them with his team of six.

“Before Covid, there would be many orders leading up to Christmas because churches order from us to celebrate. This year, it’s quieter because churches can’t have large gatherings anymore.”

The seasonal service is among other regular services provided by Breakthrough Missions including car washing, book binding and embossing, framing, landscaping and foot reflexology. The ministry also runs a café, gift store, furniture shop and nursery.

“Because we provide our rehabilitation programme for free and we are a non-profit organisation, we offer different services to make money to finance our operations.

“It’s also good for the men to have meaningful work. They get to acquire skills, be responsible and learn to have positive work ethics,” explained Tan.

Lessons from ham

The Christmas ham idea began nearly 15 years ago when a former hotel chef brought a honey-baked ham to Breakthrough Missions as a treat.

“I had never had Christmas ham before. I asked him, ‘What is this?’ He told me this is what people eat at Christmas.”

The man then taught Tan how to bake the ham so he could prepare it for the residents. The idea to bake hams for sale during Christmas followed quickly.

But their first Christmas sale was slow-going and not entirely a success. “We only had three to four orders. And people took pictures of our ham to complain about it.”

According to the recipe, the ham had to be marinated and baked. The juices from the bake are then collected to make an accompanying sauce.

“We took the marinade instead and served it as a sauce. So, it wasn’t cooked enough! But we accepted their complaints and learnt from it.”

There were also complaints about how the hams were packaged.

“We knew people wanted their hams hot. So, we placed them into boxes directly out of the oven. That’s wrong because then condensation forms on the inside of the box.

“When our customers opened the box, the moisture had made the crisp outer skin of the ham fall off. Our hams looked awful! So, we had to learn from that as well.”

Gradually, the team perfected their skill and the orders started flowing. “It’s all by word-of-mouth.”

Terrifying fall

Tan knows something about learning from mistakes and changing for the better. Before he started working for Breakthrough Missions, he was one of their residents.

“I was in the grip of drugs for 16 years,” Tan told Salt&Light.

His was a happy childhood until his father passed away from lung cancer when he was 12. His mother had to work to care for seven children. The family moved out of the cosy kampung home Tan had grown up in and into an HDB flat.

“I ended up mixing with the wrong company. I joined a gang. I was looking for a place to belong, to feel accepted.”

He began smoking, got into fights frequently and eventually dropped out of school. At 16, he was offered a pill by a friend. He took it without thinking, not knowing that it was LSD, a potent hallucinogen.

That single pill would lead to experiments with other drugs and then to years of addiction to heroin.

“Heroin is not easy to shake off. You keep going back to it. A lot of the brothers who were addicted to heroin have the same experience.”

In 1994, while under the influence of drugs, Tan went into a frenzy and attacked his family with a knife. His sister-in-law was hurt. The police were called.

“In my drug-fuelled haze, I tried to run away and jumped six floors down.”

Miraculously, Tan survived.

But he broke both legs and was in a coma for four days. He was just 21. Because of that fall, his right leg was badly damaged. Tan would forever walk with a limp.

“I did regret it. But it wasn’t enough to get me to give up drugs.”

Neither was his mother’s disappointment enough to make him kick the habit, nor the fact that his siblings wanted nothing to do with him.

His drug habit would also land him in prison four times. The last time, he was also sentenced to three years for selling fake goods.

Awakening in a jail cell

It was during that last prison term that Tan “woke up”.

“I thought to myself, ‘Will this be how my life would be, always ending up in prison?’ But I didn’t know how to get out of it.”

Then, he recalled what a nurse once told him. He had met her during his hospital stay after his six-storey fall.

“She shared the Gospel with me and kept saying that Jesus loves me. But I didn’t know who this Jesus was then and I didn’t listen to her.

“The Holy Spirit was the One who brought her words to my mind again.”

God had rescued his body once. God was about to rescue his soul.

Moved by the thought that God loved him and was waiting for him to respond, Tan prayed that very night and asked for God to forgive him.

The next day, he started reading the Bible.

“I couldn’t read very well but I kept reading the Bible anyway. At first, I didn’t understand what I was reading. I would look up the meaning of the words in the dictionary.

“In prison, I became known as the one who carried a Bible and a dictionary.”

In time, Tan understood more of what he read and the verse that encouraged him the most was John 8:12.

“The verse says that if I follow God, I wouldn’t have to walk in darkness. I realised why I kept going back to drugs. It wasn’t just that the habit was hard to shake, although it is.

“But actually, every time you go to prison, there is no access to drugs. So, technically, you are considered clean of drugs.

“The problem is that once you get out, you will go back to drugs because there is a hole in your life and you are using drugs to fill it.

“That hole can only be filled by God. Only God can change you.”

Healing at last

While in search of a way to change his life outside of the prison walls, Tan found out about Breakthrough Missions.

“It was their 20^th anniversary and I saw their magazine while in prison. I told my older sister, ‘When I get out, I want to go there.’”

The day of his release in October 2004, someone from Breakthrough Missions came to pick him up to begin his three-year rehabilitation programme.

“That first time out of prison, I was at Breakthrough Missions and they were playing a Christian song. I don’t know why but it moved me so much, I cried. My tears just flowed.”

Two months later, Tan celebrated his first Christmas as a free man – free from prison, free from drugs, free from sin.

“It was very different from my days in drugs. That Christmas, all I felt was peace in my heart.”

He was finally experiencing what it meant to have God with him. Two years in, Tan got baptised at Kam Yan Methodist Church. His older sister attended his baptism.

When he graduated from the rehabilitation programme, he found a job with Breakthrough Missions and it was through that that he met his wife, Carol. She was a medical social worker who worked with the ex-offenders living there.

The couple now has two children, a five-year-old daughter who “can recite Psalms 23 word for word” and a two-year-old son.

“I paid a great price because of drugs. But God redeemed me. He restored my life and my relationship with my family.”

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This is the second story in our Christmas series: God with Us. READ THE “GOD WITH US” STORIES BELOW and check back for more stories every day till Christmas!

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