Return to Me!

By Glenn Rosenbaum

As the first major arctic winter weather storm wreaked havoc over the majority of North America, veterans and first responders from all over the country endured the storms’ travel challenges to make it to the first men’s Recovery Program for 2024 at Junction, Texas.

Upon arrival, we could see from the countenance on these men’s faces the years-upon-years of trauma and life challenges that they had endured in the journey of their lives. Their trauma-weathered faces appeared so hardened and cold that one would have the initial fleeting thought that our life changing program may have in fact arrived too late to provide any real life-saving help. 

Thankfully, the experienced staff and team leaders at our program this week knew that a thought like that is absolutely wrong, and that what these men would be given and taught this week had the power and promise to not only soften countenances like these, but also would launch them into the necessary legacy changing and soul healing these men needed.

As our seasoned and trained team leaders engaged these men throughout the week, we could tell that the storms of the enemy had created an opportunity for these men to be tempted and deceived. Regrettably, wrong decisions in each participant’s life were made. Resulting in these men finding themselves lying with the deceitfulness of the world. 

With those wrong decisions came the contamination of guilt and shame that can bring a man to truly believe that his future is eternally cold, dark, and hopeless.  A frozen wasteland so cold that no seeable form of life or relationship could ever exist.  In the Old Testament, in the book of Jeremiah, we can read about a group of people in a very similar state known as the nation of Israel.

The people of the nation of Israel also struggled with their own story of trauma and contamination. In fact, they found themselves so backslidden and “their land” so profusely polluted with the world’s harlotries and wickedness that their future also appeared similarly eternally cold and dark.    

Praisefully, just as God sought the national of Israel and would bring them to repentance, God similarly pursued these men at our session.

In Jeramiah 3:1 it says: “’But you have played the harlot with many lovers; Yet return to Me,’ says the LORD.” 

Like Jeremiah to the nation of Israel, our team would go and proclaim similar words and truths towards these hardened warriors.  Pleas similar to ones like this: repent and return,

“says the LORD; ‘I will not cause My anger to fall on you. For I am merciful,’ says the LORD; ‘I will not remain angry forever.  Only acknowledge your iniquity, that you have transgressed against the LORD your God,’” (Jer 3:12-13). 

Throughout the week, our servants’ efforts to make these men sensible of their own state and sharing God’s promised seed of hope, God would work his tender mercy in the hearts of these men.  God would, one-by-one, bring these men to repentance, and as He promised, he would receive them again into favor.