Is there more to life than this?

Every Step of the Way: Mike's Story

I am originally from Chilliwack, B.C. where I grew up in a Christian home and from Grades 4-12 I attended a Christian School. Although I had been raised with all the Christian values and beliefs I never really understood them and had never committed my life to God.

2 Years after Highschool I was hired by the RCMP. Consequently, I left home and moved to Montreal for French Language training. I lived with a French family for the next 7 months and went to school every day to learn French. I started attending a local Alliance Church, but I was also spending a lot of time with my new co-workers in my French Course. I only went to church on the occasion, but I seldom missed a week where I was not out partying, going to bars and nightclubs and getting drunk.

At the end of the 7 months, I moved to Regina where I had my basic police training. While there the course was very demanding and our lives were extremely busy. Although I still found opportunities to party on the occasional weekend, not once did I attend church and my relationship with God continued to fall apart.

Once my training was completed, I moved to my first posting. I was transferred to Rossland, B.C., which is a small ski town of 3500 people in South Eastern B.C. When I arrived there I quickly made friends with my co-workers and developed a relationship with a local girl. For the first two years, I seldom went to church and my relationship with my non-Christian girlfriend continued to grow. Through this relationship my walk with God continued to fall apart, as I continued partying and became sexually active. Several times, I broke off the relationship because I knew that I had to get my life back on track. My girlfriend would agree to go to church at these times and we would get back together. This would last only a short time and we would fall back into our old ways. After the two years, I finally realized that I had to stop and get my life together. I was only able to do this through the support of the youth pastor at the local Alliance church, and the encouragement and direction of one of my girlfriend's coworkers, who was also a Christian. I broke our relationship off permanently and refocused my life on God, recommitting my life to Him. This became very difficult though because I had few Christian friends, and the local church was very small and did not have any people of my age group attending it. I knew that for my relationship with God to build and for me to get involved in the church again, I had to move to a larger city, and I started to pray for this.

In the spring of 1996, I started to have a large number of problems with two youths that lived in Rossland. I was dealing with these two youths, who were twin brothers, through work on a regular basis. They were involved in alcohol and drug use, and were doing break and enters and thefts in the city. One night in the spring I saw the one brother with a case of beer. I attempted to seize it from him because he was under age and he ran into a house party. Once inside the party his friends blocked the door for him and would not let me in, as he was yelling and swearing at me from behind them. I left him alone and watched the party from a distance. Later that evening I went home for the night, to find my pickup truck burning in my driveway. The front half of the truck was severely damaged, and the fire was just burning out. In the box of the pickup, there was a large pool of gasoline that had not caught on fire. If this had started to burn, the truck would have been destroyed. My house also would also have caught on fire, as the truck was parked right beside it. We were not able to prove who had lit the fire at the time but I believed it was the brother from the party, because he was the only person I had dealt with that night. As a result of this I contacted the RCMP staffing section and requested a transfer. I asked to go to any large community in B.C. They called me back several days later and stated that I could transfer to Hudson Hope, Telegraph Creek, or Sandspit. These three cities have less than a thousand people and only have one or two police officers in them. As I did not want to go to another small town, I refused the offers. Over the summer, the problems with the two brothers continued to grow. One night I tried to arrest one for being drunk in a public place. He was outside a party with a group of friends. I asked them to go inside as they were trespassing. The others in the group all went inside right away, however he refused and stood in the middle of the street yelling and swearing at me. While I was arresting him I was jumped by two of his friends and had to fight all of them off, worried for my life. The other brother was caught one night stealing the Canadian flag from the flagpole at the police detachment. They were both placed on conditions through the courts to abide by a curfew and not to consume any alcohol or drugs. They were arrested many times for continually breaching these conditions. In the middle of August, while I was out of town on holidays, the two brothers went to a party. This party was located near a hydroelectric dam. The one brother was high on cocaine and jumped off the dam into the water over 100 feet below. When he hit the water he was knocked unconscious and was trapped under an underwater ledge, where he drowned. That same night the other brother was walking around Rossland with spray paint. He was writing profanities about me on signs and on the roads around the town. The window was smashed on my pickup truck that was parked in my driveway. He had decided to blame me for his brother's death, even though I had not been anywhere near the area. I was gone from town for a month for training in September. During that time, the window on my truck was broken again. I returned to work in October, and one night I received a report that he had run away from home. I patrolled the area looking for him, and located him at about 2:00 a.m. I did not talk to him because I was concerned about aggravating him again. I called his parents and advised him of where he was, and they arranged to take care of him. The next morning I woke up to go to work and I found out that during the night, he had again visited my house. He had placed a five-gallon pail of gas under the police truck parked on the road, removed the gas cap from the truck and lit the gas on fire. The fire damaged the side of the truck, the bucket of gas melted, and the gas ran down the road and my neighbor's truck caught fire. He also broke the window on my pickup truck again. My supervisor located him later that day and he was arrested and interviewed. His parents were present during the interview where he admitted to lighting the fire, and he also admitted that his brother had lit my truck on fire that spring. He was charged with lighting the fire and he was placed on more court conditions.

I left town again for several weeks for knee surgery at the end of October. I returned to Rossland on November 10, 1996. That night while I was sleeping, I heard a noise, which sounded like it was coming from inside my house. It was 3:00 a.m. I thought at the time that the noise was the wind outside and I went back to sleep. At around 5:00 a.m. the same noise woke me up again. This time I was certain that it was not the wind and went downstairs to check where the noise was coming from. When I looked out the window, I saw the brother crawling out of my basement and run down the road. Because my knee was still recovering, I was not able to chase him. I went outside to the window he crawled out of and on the ground beside the window, I found a 12" fish filleting knife. He had come to my house to kill me! I could not believe it. When I heard the noise the first time, he was crawling into my basement and had grabbed the furnace ducts. He had been in my basement for 3 hours, trying to find his way upstairs so that he could kill me in my sleep. When I heard the noise the second time, he had grabbed the ducting again to crawl out of the basement. Thankfully, the basement of this house did not have stairs connecting it to the main floor and there was no way to get upstairs.

He was arrested later that morning for break and enter, with intent to commit murder, and was sent to court. He was ordered to go for a psychiatric assessment at the local hospital, through his court order. Because of this assessment, he was lodged in the psychiatric ward of the hospital for three months. When my supervisors in Nelson were advised of the situation, they immediately took steps to remove me from Rossland. Because of the threat to my life, I was to be reposted to a new location where he would not be able to find me. I was escorted to my house under police protection to recover some essentials and I then spent the next six weeks living in a hotel. Because of the circumstances surrounding my move, I was able to choose any location that I wanted to move to, within British Columbia. I talked to my youth pastor in Rossland and he described the Alliance Church in Kamloops to me. He told me that it was a large church with an active and growing youth ministry. I already had close friends living in Kamloops, and it was only 2 /12 hours drive to Chilliwack, where my family lived. For these reasons, I decided to ask to come to Kamloops, and my request was given to me.

God had answered my prayers. Not only was I able to go to a large city, I was able to go to the city of my choice. I based my decision on what would best glorify God, and where I could work for him. Shortly after settling into Kamloops, I became a youth leader in the church and my relationship with God was solidified. He has since continued to bless me in Kamloops by giving me an awesome life partner.

This time was definitely the most stressful part of my life, and it is still hard to imagine someone hating me so much that they truly wanted me dead. God used these circumstances though to strengthen my relationship with him and as I look back on it now I can see that God was with me every step of the way. God has been faithful to me and I will continue to be faithful to him. I could not imagine my life without God as the focus.

What about you? Do you feel like you've tried everything and there's nowhere else to turn? It doesn't have to be that way. Click here to find out how you can have peace and fulfilment through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Mike lives in Kamloops, B.C. He attends the Kamloops Alliance Church and volunteers as the youth leader and youth missions coordinator. Mike has been a RCMP officer for 7 years, the last three of which have been in Kamloops. Do you have a question about Mike's relationship with God? Click here to email Mike at mtraas@direct.ca

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