Zach Luu’s life has been filled with hard knocks.

The 30-year-old Singaporean of Indonesian-Japanese descent grew up in a broken home.

“The day my mother found out about my father’s affair, we heard things crashing and being thrown everywhere. It ended when the police took my father away in handcuffs,” he recalled.

When he and his brothers came out of their rooms the next morning, everything seemed normal.

His mother had spent the night wiping blood off the floor and tidying the home. It was her attempt to remove any trace of the night’s happenings.

But while she could scrub every corner of the house, she could not reach Zach’s heart. That night had changed the 10-year-old.

Soon, anger and violence took root in his heart.

Shouldering his family’s debt

When Zach was 13, he found out his father was deep in debt. Loansharks, unable to locate the older man, had resorted to coming after Zach.

“I’ll never forget the day we came home from school to find our house stripped, splattered with red paint and with a pig’s head hanging by a red string on our front gate. My seven-year-old brother was crying. I remember telling him, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll figure this out,'” Zach said.

So, when a friend told him there was a way to make fast money, he grabbed the opportunity.

A drug supplier asked him to transport drugs in his schoolbag from a factory to a shopping mall. The task was simple: Exchange bags with someone else and walk away.

“In the middle of our swap, two policemen walked by on patrol. But we were in our school uniforms, just two boys hanging out. They kept walking,” he remembered.

As payment, he was given several wads of cash amounting to S$25,000.

In less than seven months, Zach managed to pay off his father’s debt. He remembers the exact amount to this day: S$215,881.16.

“Drug suppliers look for young boys from broken homes because one, if we get caught, we’re tried in a juvenile court, and two, at that age, we’re trainable and malleable,” he shared. “It was easy money, and I got deeper into it.”

By 15 years old, he was an alcoholic and a heavy drug user, known among friends as a “walking joint”, not only because of his drug connections, but also because his clothes constantly reeked of weed.

A deadly brawl

Gripped by these vices, Zach developed a violent streak – one that would soon threaten to destroy him.

“It was at a kopitiam (food court). Someone made a rude remark to my friend. I lost my temper and a fistfight ensued. The other patrons started running, chairs were flying. It was ugly,” he recalled.

Then, someone pulled out a knife and the fight turned deadly. When the police arrived, Zach fled and tossed his bloody clothes in a different neighbourhood.

The next day in class, he was arrested.

“I found out three people had died in that fight. The police told me my DNA had been found on the knife used in the stabbing of two victims, but I wasn’t carrying a knife,” he said.

Later, he learnt that he had been framed by another gang member who had taken his kitchen knife and planted it at the scene.

Young Zach was charged with manslaughter and first-degree murder.

“My lawyer at the time advised me to contribute finances – I’d earned a lot through vice – towards a government-run program supporting people in need. He said it would help my case, so I agreed,” Zach remembered.

However, while awaiting trial and out of lock-up on good behaviour, he came across five boys beating up his brother in an alley.

Unable to control himself, he turned violent. Three ended up in the hospital, and Zach was thrown into solitary confinement.

The teacher who believed in him

The only person who visited him was a teacher from his secondary school. 

A gruff, elderly man with a heart for his students, Mr A was an experienced educator who had given up promotions to administrative positions simply because he wanted to be on the ground with his students.

He had been Zach’s first experience of fatherly love. After every class, Mr A used to ask Zach to pull up a chair and sit by his desk. “How are you doing?” was his trademark question. With kindness in his voice, he would encourage the young boy to believe there was good in him, study hard and live respectably.

Despite his repeated run-ins with the law, Mr A never stopped believing that Zach could turn over a new leaf. During his visit to Zach in prison, he encouraged the teen to believe that he could change, and that his life experiences could be used to help others one day.

“He said that I could become a beacon of light,” Zach remembers soberly.

The seed of the Gospel

In solitary confinement, Zach was allowed to choose a book to read. “Somehow, I asked for the Bible and received the Gospel of Matthew,” he said.

Before his time in prison, Zach had embarked on a journey in search of truth and had read a variety of religious texts. But the Gospel of Matthew stood out to him.

“I found clarity in one common denominator between Matthew and me: We both had done many vile and malicious things – things no normal person would do, things we would both be disgusted by and judge others for,” he said.

The theme of grace interwoven throughout the book kept him reading. For the first time, he became interested in this Man named Jesus.

A seed was planted in his broken heart, but he did not give his life to Christ then.

At his first hearing soon after, Zach learnt that the prosecution was hoping to drag out his case until he could be tried as an adult, then send him to the gallows.

Uncooperative and belligerent, he was passed from lawyer to lawyer until one suddenly insisted on taking on his case. The lawyer fought hard for him. Miraculously, Zach was released on bail after a year.

However, a few months after his release, Mr A passed away from stomach cancer. Zach fell back into drugs, got into trouble and was thrown once again into solitary confinement.

A trail of ‘Matthews’

While many gave up on him, Zach’s lawyer never left his side.

“One day, I asked him why he stuck with me. He told me that when I had contributed to the government-run aid program, the funds were used to help pay off his student loans. His name was Matthew,” Zach recalled.

By then, Zach was 17. His persistent abuse of drugs and alcohol had ravaged his body. He was dangerously underweight and on the verge of organ failure.

One night, he blacked out and was rushed to the hospital. A doctor sat him down and said bluntly: “You are dying. If you don’t change your lifestyle, you won’t make it.”

That doctor, Dr Tan, became deeply invested in Zach’s recovery. Only later did Zach learn why.

“As it turned out, the same aid program I gave to had helped pay for Dr Tan’s younger sister’s medical bills. God was saving me over and over again,” he said, his voice full of wonder.

After completing his 17-month sentence, which had been reduced due to insufficient evidence, Zach made a firm decision to turn his life around. He enrolled in vocational school and entered rehab several times.

In rehab, he met Nigel, a fellow recovering addict.

“We became like brothers. We even found jobs together. Our boss was a forward-thinking woman who didn’t care about our pasts but only who we were becoming,” he said.

One night, Nigel called Zach out for a long, late-night chat. They spoke until 3am.

“A few hours later, his sister found him unresponsive at home. He had overdosed,” Zach shared quietly. “I should have seen the signs. That night, he thanked me for being the one person who saw the best in him.

“His middle name? Matthew.”

At Nigel’s Christian funeral, Zach felt a familiar nudge toward the Gospel. But it would take another four years before he finally surrendered his life to Jesus.

“Jesus became real”

When he was 22, he met Aria on a dating app.

Aria, whom he wed a year later, recounted: “I was working at a law firm when we matched. I found out he stays really close to my office, so one Saturday night after work I said we could meet up if he could be at my building in five minutes.”

Zach jumped out of bed, bid a hasty goodbye to his brother and ran all the way. He made it.

Their first date lasted over 48 hours. “We walked the city, saw the sunrise from Marina Bay Sands, breakfast, movie, lunch, roti canai, watched the sunset, chilled by the Singapore River, we did it all!”

As their relationship progressed, Aria invited him to explore churches in Singapore with her. She had been intrigued by Christianity after coming across online sermons by Protestant churches that spoke of a personal, loving God.

“I asked Zach to follow me to church, just to explore and see what it’s all about. As we kept going, we began to experience the love of Jesus in real ways. We began to see His hand upon our lives,” she said.

For Zach, the events in his life were finally connecting. He saw how the Lord had been with him every step of the way, how he had placed strategic people in the right place at the right time. It moved him.

“It all began to make sense to me,” added Zach. “Jesus became real.”

A transformed life

Indeed, Jesus had been calling Zach since he was a hopeless, broken 15-year-old holding the Bible in his solitary cell.

Earlier this year, the young man, who has put his life of crime and vice firmly behind him, publicly declared his faith through water baptism.

“For me, it speaks volumes that Jesus, sinless and perfect, was water baptised. He set an example for all of us,” he said thoughtfully.

“I wanted to proclaim that Jesus is my Lord and Saviour, but more importantly, follow His example of obedience. What kind of follower would I be if I didn’t follow Him wholeheartedly?”

As Zach reflects on his life, he humbly recognises the grace of God at every step of the way, and how He brought the right people at the right time to point him to Jesus.

From the tax collector of old to a young lawyer and friend-turned-brother, Zach knows that every person has been a ‘Matthew’, which means ‘gift from God’.

Now a father of two, he is actively serving in his local church and passionate about God, His Word and being plugged into a community of believers.

“My life motto is: God will always pull us through. Hold (things) loosely and let God deal with it. I have learnt not to take matters into my own hands, thinking that I can do it myself. He saved my life many times over. I can trust Him.”

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