How a self-described ‘piece of waste’ found value in God

By Milo Haskour –

Jaime Ting’s problems started at home with overly critical parents who, no matter what he said, would always correct him and suggest a better way of doing things.

“They were very critical of me,” Jaime says on the Barak Project video.

If everything he did turned out wrong, why try to be good? Jaime didn’t care for school or have dreams for his life.

On top of that, he was socially awkward. His clothes weren’t cool, his allergies made his nose drip, and he wiped it on his sweatshirt. “I felt like an outcast,” he says.

Jaime responded to the antipathy by rebelling. He vandalized the bathroom by scribbling cuss words on the walls and urinating on the floor. He threw bricks through glass windows of shops.

“I hate the school,” he yelled in the hallways. He cheated on tests, stuffing formulas on a piece of paper inside his eraser’s plastic casing. He called women teachers “sir” and men teachers “ma’am.”

“I was becoming a primal animal,” he says. “I was just a freak. I was like a monkey or a dog.”

The only thing he liked was skateboarding. He wanted to go pro.

He heard the kids bubbling over about the s-word and decided to find out for himself what a naked woman looked like. Late at night, he sneaked downstairs and turned on the computer. That fateful night was the beginning of a scourge in his life.

Porn wasn’t his only computer addiction. He also video-gamed incessantly. One night, his brother, awakened by the loud clicking on the keyboard, came downstairs.

“Yo, what are you doing?” he asked.

“Whatever,” he retorted. He didn’t care.

His parents saw he was troubled and recommended he go to a Bible camp over the summer. He skipped sessions. When he did stay in the Bible study, he kept a stoic face. He played deaf.

“God is whatever,” he thought. “Like has he done anything in my life? No.”

Nothing happened at that first summer camp. But the next year, he was so lonely, depressed and suicidal that he decided to give God the benefit of the doubt.

“My life was so low, I thought let me just try,” Jaime narrates. “The conference was a good opportunity to give Jesus a chance.”

In the dorm one night, his friend came in and encouraged him to read the Bible.

“I literally never opened it voluntarily,” he admits. “I’d never read it for myself.”

His buddy gave him a green highlighter and started him in the Beatitudes in Matthew.

“I had nothing else better to do,” he remembers. “I was probably slapping my smelly foot on the ground. I was probably scratching my bum or smelling my armpit.”

So he turned through the pages thoughtfully that night. Slowly, he changed from being put off by the Bible to impressed. “There were all these signs. It’s crazy. You can’t explain these things,” he says.

He surrendered his life to Jesus and began to serve him excitedly. Throughout high school, he alternated between seasons of fervently praying and reading his Bible and seasons of falling back into the clutches of online lust.

In college he explored other worldviews and began to waver in his faith. Breakthrough came, however, one day when he was praying on a rock next to the river.

“I poured my heart out to God,” he says. “I told him my desires, my thoughts, everything. I prayed about knowing God.

He saw a sign in the skies.

“I’m not going to say what it was. Let’s just leave it at I was overcome with emotion,” Jaime says. “I mourned and cried tears of weakness and of joy. My words can’t describe fully what happened to me, but he made himself known to me.”

And that’s how a “piece of waste” became somebody valued, loved, cherished in the eyes of God.

Today, Jaime ministers through his social media and continues serving Jesus with his buddies.

To learn more about a personal relationship with Jesus, click here

Related content: skateboard missionary, Christian Hosoi, prankster JiDion, Boonk Gang.

About this writer: Milo Haskour studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy near the San Fernando Valley.