December 17th, 2007
When God Pushed Me Off My Dirtbike
Excerpt from Ch. 15 of “Astonishing Grace to the Chief of All Fools” (Page 135)
Isaiah 50:10-11 “Who among you fears the Lord and obeys the word of his servant? Let him who walks in the dark, who has no light, trust in the name of the Lord and rely on his God. But now, all you who light fires and provide yourselves with flaming torches, go, walk in the light of your fires and of the torches you have set ablaze. This is what you shall receive from my hand: You will lie down in torment.”
Ironically, I myself, was about to lie down in torment.
December 17th, 2007
I was lying face down in the dirt, groaning out loud in terrible pain, yet barely able to breath. The wind was knocked out of me, and just as I was coming back to reality and processing what had just happened. I could hear my six-year-old son Tyler running towards me and yelling, “Daddy…daddy, are you ok?” I tried to be brave for him, and to not let him know how badly I was hurt, but I knew I was in bad shape and I was not going to just get up and walk away from this on my own. I managed to grumble out, “Daddy had a bad accident son…tell uncle Corvin (my best friend at the time), to call an ambulance.”
Within moments, the ambulance arrived, and they carefully picked me up off the ground, loaded me into the back on a stretcher, and started cutting off my motocross gear. On the way to the hospital, one of the paramedics saw that my breathing was very rapid and shallow, and with a stern voice he said, “Mr. Chriswell, I need you to calm yourself down and to take some slow deep breaths for me, or you are going to hyperventilate.” Fear, pain, and anxiety all cause panicky breathing, which can then lead to all sorts of other troubles.
What a strange irony that moment is to look back on. Perhaps if I would have had spiritual eyes and ears to see and hear back then, I might have heard the Lord speaking into my heart before the accident, “Michael, I need you to calm yourself down and to stop running here and there. You need to learn to rest in me or you are going to spiritually hyperventilate.” Mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, I was living in a constant state of anxiety and my breathing in of the Word and Spirit of God was very shallow because I was totally trusting in myself. When we as Christians do not actively trust in the Lord, then life is dependent on us and that’s a good time to be filled with much panic and anxiety, but not when you learn to trust God.
Matthew 11:28-30 "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. (29) Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. (30) For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."
To me it seemed like a freak accident. It had been the very last lap before we packed up and went home from another great day of riding our dirt bikes. I decided to ride one last lap standing up the whole way around, which I would do for practicing balance in our deep Florida sugar sand. I came around a corner which I’d been around countless times, but I had drifted in the sand too far to the right and a thick vine on a large brush area caught on my right handlebar as I was under full acceleration. I was whipped and ejected over the handlebars like I had been shot out of a cannon. I went flying and landed about 20 feet away with my left side taking the full impact face down into the ground. Shortly after the ambulance reached the hospital, the x-rays showed I had broken my left collar bone into three pieces and I had three broken ribs.
Keri showed up at the hospital, in complete disgust, treating me like I had just done some terrible evil. Although we had a part-time nanny, all she could think about was how she was going to have to take care of the children while I healed. She wouldn’t even touch me, and her eyes were filled with hate towards me as I lay there in agony.
To this day, I describe that day as the day, “God pushed me off my dirt bike.” This was the beginning of him intervening in my life to start the process of really frustrating my plans and breaking me. He had already been boxing me in by the squeezing of my circumstances. Now, He had just thrown in a forced period of painful time-out, which was going to help me to feel the squeeze of my own helplessness even more.
I was about to learn just how weak myself and my false gods really were. My dirt bike, which had become my main idol and outlet for stress release, was not going to be able to do anything for me over the next three months, and because the entire company was dependent on me, everything was being delayed, including our income! Just as Father had planned, I became miserable sitting around in that bed, not only from the physical pain of broken bones, but also from the increasing contempt Keri was showing me.
Isaiah 38:12-15 Like a shepherd's tent my house has been pulled down and taken from me. … I waited patiently till dawn, but like a lion he broke all my bones; day and night you made an end of me. (14) I cried…I moaned like a mourning dove. My eyes grew weak as I looked to the heavens. I am troubled; O Lord, come to my aid!" (15) But what can I say? He has spoken to me, and he himself has done this. I will walk humbly all my years because of this anguish of my soul.
Job 5:17-18 "Blessed is the man whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. (18) For he wounds, but he also binds up; he injures, but his hands also heal.
Within days of the accident, I made a detailed list of all the things I needed to do to once and for all get back to our original vision, where the only projects we created were of my sales training and the Keypoint project. We let all other potential clients know that we could no longer serve them, because we had changed our business model.
The broken bones and contempt from Keri were just the beginning of my pain. I had delayed going to the Orthopedic doctor, instead, laying around and hoping my collar bone would heal on its own. It was healing, but with a bad deformity. Upon x-rays at the doctor, he exclaimed, “Why in the world did you wait for two weeks to come see me…now we are going to have to re-break it.” I was scheduled for surgery the next week, where they re-broke the collar bone and plated it with hardware and screws. This put me back in bed again, so I could recover a second time. While recovering this time, the bottom fell out of the one basket I had just put all my eggs into. The Mormon owners of Keypoint confessed they had ran out of money, whereupon it soon came to light that they had been lying to us and to potential investors.
I knew they had been looking for a large investor for many months. However, when they approached the investors, they were all reluctant to fund their company because the investors realized that I was not a part owner in their company, even though I was the main ingredient in their pie. I owned the technology, the production company, I was the camera talent, and I was writing most of the content. The investors realized that if anything happened to me, or if I left, the whole project would be bust.
Finally, it made sense to me why Keypoint had made such a desperate and inappropriate attempt to buy a controlling ownership of my Kickstart Productions company. Months earlier, they had created a brochure, lying to potential investors, telling them that I was indeed a minority partner/owner in their company.
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back and the blow that left me totally mentally paralyzed. I no longer had any mental energy to try to save myself. I sat around as if enveloped in some sort of a fog. We had about $150,000 in the bank, and some monthly receivables, but not nearly enough to cover the $50k a month in expenses.
With the loss of Keypoint and having turned away from much of our other prospective customers, I knew there was not enough income for me to maintain the company for long. I was so upset about the idea of having to let my beloved employees go, and I was so afraid to admit to everyone that I had failed again. The only thing left for me to do in my condition was to go into denial, believing that perhaps God would intervene at the last minute and save it all, but I myself had nothing left in me to fight or start over. Keri and I both decided not to tell the employees until we knew for certain that the end had come.
While the ship was slowly sinking, I looked at our accounting and realized that about $250k of our nearly $700k in annual revenue that year, had all come from my sales training programs. I quickly surmised that even God didn’t intervene with a miracle and save us, that we could still live quite well just working from home. If we had no employees and no overhead and we just focused on selling my online sales training and private labels of our training system for other online content providers, we could do very well.
By February of 2008, I had run out of the $150k in revenue and the end had come. I sat everyone down and told them the whole story about what had happened and why I had delayed telling them. Everyone was sad, but it was especially hard for my production manager, whom had been with us from the very start and whom I dearly loved and respected. He took it all very personal and was deeply hurt by it. I don’t think he ever forgave me for it, and our relationship was never the same after that.
We surrendered our class A office space, sold all our office furnishings, and moved our servers and the rest of the business into our home. Suddenly, with no overhead, we found ourselves doing quite well financially, with about $13k in monthly revenue still coming in from our ongoing license fees.
The 2008 credit crisis was well underway and the terribly overpriced real estate bubble in Florida was beginning to pop and many people were feeling the effects even indirectly. One day we received a knock on the door from a representative of the bank who held the mortgage on the large house we were renting. We were informed that the owners had been keeping our rent money each month, known as “rent skimming” and not paying their mortgage. They told us the house was in foreclosure and we had perhaps 20 days to get all our possessions out of the house, or we could be in danger of having everything in the house, including all of our business servers and equipment, confiscated permanently by the bank.
We took the warning seriously and made a mad dash to find a new place to live. We weren’t able to buy yet because we didn’t have a huge down payment anymore, and also because the bubble still hadn’t popped. Instead, we found a beautiful home with a gorgeous pool area, in a nice gated community, that we decided to do a lease/purchase option on. The home was stunning and was valued right at a million dollars. It was on a 2-acre lot, with a wooded backyard that led to a private lake. The swimming pool area was $150,000 and looked like you were at the Ritz Carlton. The home was over 4,000 sq. feet and had a 12-seat movie theater on the second floor. Our three oldest children, Tyler, Chelsea, and Nathan just loved the house and the pool area. They were so excited, and I felt so happy to be moving my family into this amazing house after all the stress we had been under for so long. The owner of the home was a believer in Christ and successful builder in town. He had purchased the home after he went through a divorce but was now selling the home because he and his wife reconciled and got re-married. We both had a lot in common through business experiences and he treated us very graciously. He even found out about my sales training and hired me to come in and do some sales training for his entire team.
After all the stress we had been through with the business, the house felt like an oasis for us, a dream come true. Keri became so happy, and immediately began treating me so much better, when she knew we were going to be moving into this house. We moved in and within months, it was like we had a completely different life and marriage. Incidentally, just months after we moved out of the previous house, we got a call from a friend that our old house was on the news. The house was struck by lightning over my son Tyler’s room and had caught on fire. We saw that as even more confirmation God had indeed been blessing and moving us. Everything I had been hoping for and dreaming for and working for was finally falling into place.
The three oldest children were attending a wonderful private Christian school, Keri was doing all our accounting again, and we were both enjoying working together from this amazing home, with a slimmed down and very simplified business model. I was always home to help her with the children and she was able to come and go anytime, as she needed. Our entire relationship changed, and she started becoming supportive of everything I did, my relationship with my best friend, my dirt bike riding, my relationship with the children, including me getting the three oldest dirt bikes, and she met my desire to do weekly date nights and morning coffee talks with just she and I and the Bible. She even went to a few Supercross races with me and my best friend. She also started doing triathlons and running races and me and the children would go and watch her. She was finally pleasant and happy, and that in turn made me very happy. To my great surprise, she even became much more affectionate and was now regularly interested in physical intimacy.
She had become like a totally different person, and by the end of 2008 we even started planning another business idea together, where we would do small conferences at exotic locations, to help people find and discover their unique life purpose. It became the absolute best year of our entire fourteen-and-a-half-year marriage. I found what I had been hoping for so long, and I think I lived everyday stuck somewhere between amazement and denial because she had changed so much. We spent so much time with our children and we did such fun things with them. We were finally like the perfect family you see on the church Billboards driving down the road, only we were the ones who had to overcame hell to get to that place. One time, I asked her how our marriage was doing on a scale of 1 to 10, and she replied with a confident 10. I could not imagine this person saying something like this, for all those years previous. Another time, she randomly came up to me as I was walking across the living room, stopped me in my tracks, gave me a big hug and a kiss and then told me she was so proud of me and delighted to be my wife. The wife I had married would never do something like that. It felt like God had given me a new wife and a new life. All that hard work felt like it finally paid off.
From as early back as I can remember, I had dreamed of being one of those couples who were still walking hand in hand down the beach, at 80 years old, more in love then, than the day we got married. For the previous 13 years of marriage, that seemed impossible. But, now, based on what we experienced in our marriage in 2008, I was now convinced that dream would one day come true. I was more in love with Keri than I had ever been before. We had been through so much hell and overcome so much adversity, that we became an inspiration to several people in their marriage. Keri and I even talked about starting to do marriage courses to help others to achieve what we had finally found by persevering.