Updated : 21/09//2003

There Is No Love Like God’s Love
By S. Thiruchelvam

I am the youngest in a family of five and come from a nominal Christian home in Kuala Lumpur. From a young age, I was exposed to Christian values but gambling runs in the family as a form of recreation.

I remember a missionary who used to visit us and whenever we heard a knock on the door we would quickly clear all evidence of gambling and acted innocent when we invited her in.

That was the Christianity I was practicing. Though I attended church, I didn’t know God. Though I had a Bible, I never knew the God of the Bible.

In the early 1970s, my family shifted to Bangsar, KL and it was there that I first got involved in drugs. It started with marijuana and then I progressed to heroin.

My parents sent me to the hospital for detoxification and it was a time when I underwent through severe withdrawal sypmtons. The suffering was so terrible that I wanted to jump from the hospital window.

After the treatment was over, I was released from hospital but soon returned to drugs again. This time I was sent to a rehabilitation centre in Penang where the treatment method was based on a punishing physical regime. Inmates were beaten up to discourage them from returning to the habit. Yet the tough discipline approach didn’t work and many inmates still returned to their old habits after their release. I found out later that only God could heal a sick soul.

I was sent for psychiatric counselling after my release from the centre. The psychiatrist recommended that I should get away from the environment. It didn’t work. Next was visiting a bomoh. The bomoh threatened me that if I continued with my habit and blood would ooze from my nose, mouth and ears, if I don’t stop drug-taking. It was an empty threat.

I eventually ended up in Singapore. But though I removed myself from a place I couldn’t remove my habit from myself. Drugs continued to control my life.

I would lie, cheat, steal, borrow or do anything, just to have my drug supply. I was once caught for shoplifting once by a security guard in a shopping mall but was released when I played on his sympathy with a sob story about my family.

My mother returned to God because of my problem. One day she arranged for me to attend a meeting at the Salvation Army headquarters in Singapore during which I heard testimonies from six ex-convicts from Changi Prison about how God had saved them.

A man at the meeting asked me whether I wanted to know Jesus. I whispered to God: “If you are real, show me.”

I then followed him in saying “the sinners prayers” and immediately after that I was filled with joy and I began to weep. That was my first encounter with God.

I returned to Kuala Lumpur determined now to begin a new life with God’s help and I enrolled in a Christian rehabilitation center.

I left the center after two years of rehabilitation and a job as a clerk with a salary of only RM200. It was a struggle to survive. In the 1980s, I applied to be a car salesman in a major car dealership in Kuala Lumpur and my income increased manifold. Then I started doing other small businesses and eventually got married in 1983.

I then went into the real estate business. When I sold my first house, I was encouraged to apply for a real estate agent’s licence. The problem was I had only sold one house and can claim no experience, a requirement for obtaining the licence. Someone advised me to lie about my experience but I refused. Instead I told the licensing board the truth and was given a licence based only on the recommendation of the buyer of the first house I had sold!

I started the real estate agency Reapfield Properties during the 1985-86 recessions. Just to pay the monthly office rent of RM550 was a struggle as I had hardly any capital to start with. But God was faithful and continued to bless. In 1987, I entered into a partnership and came out in 1989 to resume the business on my own together with my wife. The company now has six offices in the country and with 200 staff/agents under its banner.

God is good! He rescued me from life’s garbage dump and gave me a new lease of life, transformed my character, renewed my thought life, changed my attitudes, instilled discipline, showered me with His love and showed me His Amazing Grace. He not only rescued me from physical destruction and eternal damnation but He also blessed me with a wonderful family. He is the God of the total package. There is no life so bad that He is not willing to save. Surely, only a true and living God can do what He has done for me.

My late father believed all gods are but one except in different forms and he exposed all his children to different religions from an early age. However, for me, Christianity somehow had the greatest attraction.

I lived near a church then and was always drawn to go inside and pray. God saw this longing for Him and I came to know Jesus in 1969 through the Christian Union of High School, Klang. I was the first Christian in my family.

When I left school in 1972, my first job was in freight forwarding. The job then was very demanding and working round-the-clock became the norm. With such a demanding routine, I soon had little time left for God. My attendance at church became inconsistent as I climbed up the corporate ladder. As God receded from my life, I began to trust more and more in my own ability to succeed. Success and worldly pleasures became my gods.

However, the `good’ life soon came tumbling down. The German company I was working for ceased operations when the Germans pulled out their interests from Malaysia owing to the recession then.

Thank God for good Christian friends like the Christian brother who came to my rescue by providing the capital for me to set up a freight forwarding company. Unfortunately, the venture failed and I was once again drifting. But I was too blind to see that God’s mercy was still over me. My pride and the hurt I had received from some friends kept me from God. Instead of turning to God, I turned to mediums and charms to ward off evil and to bring good fortune.

Thank God for my wife’s steadfast faith in Him. Although she was a much younger Christian than I, she refused to get involved in the so-called cleansing ceremonies suggested by mediums to ward off evil.

The deeper I got involved in the occult practices, the worse my life became. At a particularly desperate time, I even went to a graveyard with some friends at midnight to dig up a fresh grave to obtain a piece of the coffin. This was to be used as a good luck charm to get four-digit numbers. When that didn’t work out, I started drinking to drown my sorrows.

To a drunkard who sees no hope in life, red traffic lights can mean `go’ because he is contemplating suicide. On three occasions I had thought of going through the red lights when I was drunk. My wife was always amazed at how I could drive home in my condition without killing myself or someone else. But even in my madness, God was watching over me.

During one drinking session, in my drunkenness I tried to attack a friend with a chopper over a small argument. I only knew of my crazy behaviour when friends told me of the incident the next day. I was shocked at what I had done and it was only God’s mercy that had prevented a tragedy.

I cried to God, “Why is this happening to me?”

And in that quiet moment, I heard Him speak in my spirit, “You are very precious to me. Come home, my son.”

I started to weep and asked for the peace of God to come upon me. Something happened then though at that time I wasn’t sure what it actually was.

One day while I was sleeping, my second son, who was then three-and-half years old, came up to me and asked whether he could pray for me. He said his Sunday School teacher had taught him to lay hands on the sick and pray for them.

That really shook me up. I immediately told my wife that we needed to go back to church.

Thank God for making it possible through a sister of mine who had good friends at the Klang Baptist Church. Even though she was not attending church then, she and her friends prayed for divine intervention for me and my family. Even my mother, who is not a Christian, insisted that I returned to church because she felt I was a better person when I was attending church.

It isn’t easy for a backslidden Christian to return to church. I thought my wife and I would be treated like outcasts.

We decided to go to the Klang Baptist Church as that was where my children were attending Sunday School. We asked God to make our visit a pleasant and comfortable one but our plan was to enter only after the service had started and leave as soon as the service had ended.

That Sunday we arrived late as planned. As we entered, I recognised the church pastor as a former schoolmate whom was my Christian Union treasurer. We knew God had answered our prayer when we were told that he was actually the pastor. With his caring heart, we knew that the pastor was the kind of person we needed to help us recover from our spiritual wounds and to re-build our lives.

However, even after I had returned to God, I was getting nowhere as far as employment was concerned. My pastor advised that I switch from freight forwarding, which I had been involved for fourteen years, to a totally different line. This was hard to swallow and I thought that the pastor was crazy to even make such a suggestion. But God’s ways are not our ways.

Then something happened that would lead me to that totally different line of work.

The mother of one of my friends passed away in India and he did not know how to bring back her remains. Some friends referred me to him because of my experience in this area. After the funeral, this person offered me a job as administrator for his security services business. Since I had no other option, I accepted the job despite the meagre pay and total lack of experience in this line (which is usually operated by ex-police personnel).

My main task was to set up the administrative structure, marketing and even day-to-day operations. I had developed a good network of contacts from my freight forwarding days and this helped me to secure 24 clients within three months when I was only required to bring in ten.

Unfortunately, our relationship turned sour and I left.

Once again, I was jobless. I was angry with God and I complained bitterly about the unfairness of it all.

The day after I had left the job, a friend took me out for lunch and during our conversation, he said he knew someone who could help me to obtain a licence to operate a security services company. The following day, he called to say that the licence had been approved for business in Selangor and the Federal Territory. All I had to do was to get the capital to start the business.

But I was financially at rock bottom. Where was I to get the capital? Faced with such a dilemma, I complained bitterly to God again: “You put everything on the platter for me but what can I do without the money to set up the business?”

But God was good despite my lack of faith. A brother-in-law and two friends, one of whom is still my partner today, provided the money to kick-start the business. And this is the business the Lord has blessed me with until today.

Security services company licences are usually given only to former high-ranking police officers yet I was given the opportunity to enter the business without any experience in the police force. It is surely the hand of Almighty God to whom nothing is impossible. We now employ nearly 400 personnel.

In looking back at my life since becoming a Christian at that young age, I am amazed at His amazing grace. He has not only provided so abundantly in finance but also in saving my life from physical harm twice.

In 1994 I was stabbed in the abdomen and left bleeding profusely on the road in what could have been a robbery attempt. Thank God the other pastor in the church, who is a lady, was with me and because of her medical background (dentist), was able to administer first aid till help came from a stranger who rushed me to the hospital. I believe God sent that stranger to save my life. Thank God I survived with only a laceration of the intestines.

God again spared my life in 2000 when I had a heart attack while in Vietnam on a mission trip. I didn’t realize then it was a heart attack until I returned home five days later. Eventually I had to undergo angioplasty on a 90 per cent blocked artery. God had preserved my life for five days until I came home as it was not possible to have the surgery in Vietnam

Surely, His banner over me is love. Even when I turned my back on Him his love never ceased. When I desperately needed a financial breakthrough, he was there to provide it. Surely, there is none like Him and there is none who loves as He loves. Praise be to God, my rock, my pillar of refuge and strength and my ever present help in trouble.