Pastor of Door Christian Center in San Diego led cops on wild chase when he was sinner

Right there in the back of the patrol car, Robert Michiels slipped out of the handcuffs, unthreaded his shoelace, tied the two laces together, hung them from the coat hook, inserted his head and attempted to hang himself.

“I felt my life slip away.” Robert says on a Virginia Beach Potter’s House podcast. “I watched my life flash before me rapid fire in little clips. Everything, from the time I went fishing with my dad and my brother, opening presents on Christmas, climbing up on the roof, riding our bikes, skating in the neighborhood.”

Then a loud voice from Heaven pronounced an imperious command.

“Stop.”

So he did.

Instead of committing suicide and ending his drug-addicted misery, Robert Michiels, then 20, went to jail and got saved. Today he is a pastor.

The North Phoenix native was the kid your parents warned you to stay away from. He liked to get into trouble and quickly fell into drugs by age 15.

But after drugs reduced him to homelessness. Not even his mother would receive him that night when he called her in desperation, wanting to get off the streets. Robert doesn’t blame her; he had stolen from her the previous time to support his habit.

At the end of his rope, he formed the plan to commit suicide. But first he would get high one last time.

To scrape money together, he stole a pickup truck so he could resell the tires. They were worth a fortune, but Robert offloaded them for $50 each to a guy who paid cash and didn’t care about their provenance.

But when he was stealing the first one, people shouted and he had to drive off, cursing his luck that he’d only gotten one. As he roared off, a trucker pursued him, talking to the cops as he followed.

Eventually, Robert got cornered. He got out of the pickup and shouted at the trucker: “Don’t be a hero, expletive, expletive, expletive.”

Robert slammed his truck in gear and drove straight at the trailer cab. He slammed into it, leaving it damaged. He drove off.

Then the first police car showed up. Robert drove wildly through the industrial area which had scattered open fields. The first cop car became several and eventually “the whole Phoenix police department,” Robert says.

Robert careened through a muddy field that splattered mud on his windshield. He couldn’t wipe the windshield clean, so he rolled down his side window and leaned out to see where he was going.

He never doubted that he would get away. For the whole 22-minute pursuit, he was smoking his crack pipe.

Then he slammed into a pole. He woke up with the engine pushed into him; he smelled of radiator fluid. He credits his limp, drugged up body for his survival. He gathered himself, pulled himself out of the truck and ran down an embankment, into… Read the rest: The Door Christian Center in San Diego

Crushed by stress and hate, cops have nowhere to turn except Jesus

Gruesome crimes that cannot be “unseen” sometimes weigh down on and break the heart of police officers who got into law enforcement with enthusiasm and idealism.

Without a “Biblical mindset,” the men and women in blue turn to anger, alcohol and divorce at higher frequencies than almost any other group in society, says Paul Lee, executive director of the Fellowship of Christian Peace Officers (FCPO).

Police have a divorce rate of 75 percent and a domestic abuse rate of 40 percent, the FCPO website says.

“If you have the scriptures behind you and you have a firm foundation, then you know that lost people are acting like lost people,” Lee says. “Today we have lost people and lost cops out on the streets clashing and acting like lost people while Satan claps his hands together with glee.”

The FCPO’s 250 local chapters reach out to the nation’s 1.1 million local, state and national enforcement officers with the Gospel from a perspective that cops can understand.

Lee accepted Jesus into his heart in 1995 — after 17 years of handling the stress of police work in his own strength. He immediately joined the Chattanooga chapter of FCPO and was hooked to their Bible studies and discipleship support group.

“Once I realized I had this whole new family that loved me, I was sold,” Lee says. “We began to read scriptures and learn to apply the scripture on the streets, which was a challenge. If you’re not reading the Bible, you don’t know what to do.”

Many officers don’t have the advantage of growing up in a Christian home, Lee says.

Raised in church, Lee left God and began working in law enforcement. After years of apprehending criminals and witnessing unimaginable monstrosities on the cruel streets, Lee descended into an abyss of anger, distrustful cynicism and heavy drinking.

He divorced his wife.

“Being a police officer and seeing all the evil and trying to deal with that evil in my own strength, I had become calloused,” he remembers. “I felt nothing. I hated everybody. Nobody told you the truth.”

When his mother died, he thought over his life. In the shower before her funeral, Lee remembered her dedication to Christ and reflected on his own prodigality.

“I knew the life I was living was totally wrong. I had faulted God for 20 years. But the death of my mother totally broke me and brought me to the lowest point in my life.” Lee says. “My life was passing before my eyes like a bad B-movie. I was crying uncontrollably.”

In the shower, Lee said three things to the Lord: “I give up. I surrender. and continue reading about Police PSTD and Jesus.

Framed man forgives corrupt cop, becomes friend after Jesus moves in his life

In prison, Jameel “Zuki” McGee vowed revenge on the cop who framed him unjustly.

“I made a goal for myself in prison to harm the officer whenever I got out,” Jameel says in an “I am second” video. “I was deeply hurt by everything that happened.”

But three things softened his simmering rage: He found out that he had become a father. Second, the corrupt cop got saved. Third, Jameel started reading his Bible in the cell.

Today, Jameel McGee, wrongly convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, and former corrupt cop Andrew Collins are friends and brothers in Christ thanks to an unusual outpouring of grace and forgiveness.

Years after the fateful false accusation, years after being released from jail before schedule, Jameel happened to see the formerly crooked cop who stole years out of his life. Jameel was with his son and so was Andrew.

Jameel was quick to forgive. Evil was overturned by grace.

Andrew Collins had a rough home life. Growing up in Benton Harbor City, Michigan, he decided to become a cop because a police officer, summoned to his parent’s home, brought peace during one particularly acute domestic dispute. Little Andrew associated heroism with the cop.

“I remember thinking from that point on, that’s what I want to do with the rest of my life,” Andrew says.

He started police work with high ideals. But eventually, his sense of justice crumbled and the old evil upbringing began to exercise a bizarre control over his professional course.

Jameel McGee also grew up in tough circumstances.

“Mom used to kick the crap out of us,” says Jameel, the youngest of six. Dad left the picture early on. “Violence became a part of my nature.”

Their lives became intertwined in February of 2006 when Officer Andrew, on the narcotics beat for four months, acted on a tip and was looking for a crack dealer. The car matched the description, but the suspect did not.

Then Jameel walked out of the grocery store with milk and groceries. Because he nearly matched the description, Andrew moved in.

“Where’s the dope?” he barked at Jameel.

“What?” Jameel responded. “What dope?”

Andrew, who was plain clothes, pulled his badge. Jameel, who had been confused by the confrontation, suddenly realized that something had gone terribly wrong.

“This is for real,” he thought.

Cops are rewarded for arrests and convictions. Andrew decided that Jameel was his suspect and made the arrest. He wrote in his report that he found dope on him. That was a lie. Jameel was charged with possession with intent to distribute. Andrew fudged facts, knowing this would secure a conviction in court. He didn’t really think much about the possibility that he nabbed the wrong guy.

This is what Andrew had come to. The old ideals of heroism has succumbed to the dirty work of busting guys without regard for the means. Sadly, his conscience didn’t bother him.

Andrew’s life had descended into utter corruption, and there was no way out… until he got caught.

“Two years after I met Jameel, I got caught with crack, heroin and marijuana in my office,” Andrew says. “I got caught on a Tuesday. I thought about killing myself on Wednesday.

“I couldn’t see coming back from this.”

Fortunately, his wife was a Christian, and at her urging, Andrew went to see her pastor. He confessed everything. Read the rest of crooked cop and framed man.

Special ops marine, MMA fighter fights for his marriage

“You killed me.”

As a police officer, Chad Robichaux once had to grapple with and overpower a man barricaded in his home in a domestic dispute. When the man struggled for Robichaux’s gun, the officer fired at him six times as the man’s children and wife screamed hysterically.

It wasn’t the only time Robichaux was traumatized in his use of deadly force. The MMA champion also killed as a Special Operations Force Recon Marine during eight tours of duty in Afghanistan.

The killing left his mind and heart a wreck, his marriage a shambles, and his soul a wasteland. If it weren’t for the intervention of a Christian man who invested in him and nurtured him back to psychological health, Robichaux might have ended his life like so many of the PTSD victims he tries to help through his Mighty Oaks Wounded Warrior Foundation.

Robichaux recounts the horrors of waging war on evil both in America and abroad in an I am Second video.

When he arrived on the scene of the domestic dispute, there were 30 people standing around outside the house.

The wife was screaming, and the man had barricaded himself in the back bedroom with his gun. Robichaux and his partner entered the house and began searching from room to room. They found the man and demanded he drop his gun. He refused to comply, so Chad moved to disarm him with force.

“I step towards him and I grab the barrel of his rifle and I pushed it away from me and I kicked him in the groin,” he remembers. “When I kicked him the second time he grabbed my hand. I realized at that point that I had to save myself and my partner. I shot six times.”

His partner hit him with another five bullets, and the suspect crumpled to his knees.

He looked at Chad: “You killed me.”

Of course, the violence was justified and necessary, but still Robichaux couldn’t just forget the images of blood all over him. He couldn’t shake the fact that he had ended a life at close range. He couldn’t forget the screams of the family.

“I just wanted someone to tell me that it was okay because I had just killed this guy in front of his family and it was something I thought I would have a hard time with but I did.”

His wife was no help. She just thought it was all part of a day’s work. He really needed someone to affirm him, but instead he felt rejection.

Shortly after that incident, he returned to active duty as a marine following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

He was added to the Joint Special Operations Command. He deployed to Afghanistan with much excitement.

“Wow I can’t believe all this training to do this, you know, be a force recon marine to do these things and I’m here it’s real like right outside somewhere in the dark is the bad guy.”

He knew the terrorists were evil, but still he wasn’t prepared to see the full horror of mayhem done to other human beings.

“You can’t make sense of it,” he says. “You can’t process it”

In the process of fighting evil, evil entered his own heart. He became a hateful killing machine.

“I was out of control and I didn’t feel bad about it”

He built a wall between himself and his family but he didn’t understand why. “Maybe to protect them from me” Read the rest of Chad Robichaux Christian.