“After doing Christian counseling for 40 years, this is the most unusual and powerful story I’ve ever heard. It just totally amazed me!” — Norma Grey, Christian Counseling Director - Orlando, FL Dear suffering brother or sister in Christ, My name is Michael Chriswell. This is a remarkable true story of finding God's grace and overcoming the biggest of messes that we can make in our life, and/or the most painful suffering that the devil or others can throw at us. Subjects in this emotional true story include: Dysfunctional childhood, sexual abuse, bullying, divorce, loss of family, loss of home, loss of possessions, loving money, being torn between God and success, business failure, bankruptcy, parental alienation, betrayal, adultery, loss of career, slander, rejection from friends, post abortion trauma, emotional abuse, total loss of dignity and suicidal thoughts, etc.? If you are suffering in any way as a Christian, you will be greatly encouraged by this very unique story that has already encouraged and even saved many people's lives before ever appearing on YouTube. This video tells the story of my finally achieving what most of us call the "good life". I was married with five children, living in a million-dollar home with all the toys, the travel, a successful business, and I was even being called the next "Zig Ziglar" (motivational speaker), by some. I was living my dreams, or so I thought. After years of practicing the advice of success gurus, I overcame my very ugly childhood and proved I could "make something of myself". By 2007, my small biz income was $700k and growing at 300% annually. By early 2008, I seemed to have reached the top of my game, but behind my smile was a growing sense of tension—I had no peace. I had become a believer in Jesus Christ back in 1989, but with no one to disciple me, I continued living the way I'd always known. After I got married, I got more involved in church and then became a busy body “Christian” doing all the churchy stuff. At the same time, I was striving for success in the business world, and after one gigantic failure, I finally hit “the big time”. And even though I looked like God's little "comeback kid", there was a strong tension beginning to build deep in my soul. While my business was growing, so was my desire for God and I kept sensing, "You are making progress, but in the wrong direction." I had been relying on success like a false god and was deriving the majority of my identity and acceptance from it. On October 30th 2009, the tension reached an 18-month high point. I got on my knees, cried out to God and completely surrendered everything to Him. Nine months later (to the day), after attempting to tell the testimony of our unusual abortion story, it completely blew up in my face and my wife snapped, divorced me, and took our five children. I literally lost everything. Then it got even worse. As I began to trust and obey God in ways that didn’t fit with human reasoning, most of my family and friends turned against me. I even ended up homeless for a season. God was all I had. All alone and broken, I sought Him with all of my heart, spending three years and thousands of hours studying the Bible and going on long prayer walks in the woods. I begged God to show me His ways and He began guiding me in astonishing ways. One of the first things He began to teach me was the principle of trusting and obeying Him. Initially, as you will see in the story, He did a miraculous parting of the RED SEA for me, in response to my obeying one of the more difficult teachings of Christ (Mat 5:39). Soon, I began to wonder what was possible if I obeyed all of the teachings of Jesus. I spent the next 18 months, studying, organizing and obeying them. The more I obeyed, the more of His presence and fruit I began to see in my life. It was absolutely incredible! Today, my relationship with Him is truly indescribable, even when I’m suffering through hardship (1 Jn 2:5) and I know that I have still only scratched the surface. I’ve been to the bottom of the pit and Jesus went with me, every single step of the way. Today, I have such joy, peace, hope and a contentment unlike anything I have ever known, even when I thought I "had it all". God removed the idols from my life and the things I acquired outside of His will. He then helped me to find my ALL in Him alone. Eventually He even gave me some wonderful promises about the desires of my heart for the second half of my life. One of those desires is to Help you find your very own LIFE TO THE FULL, in Jesus! After you watch the story, subscribe at http://RelentlessHeart.com for some very encouraging updates and for practical teaching on how to fully abide in Christ and live with life to the FULL. Ending Song Credit: "Americana" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/