When Michael first came to the Milwaukee Rescue Mission, most people would have said his problems were drugs and alcohol. Looking back, Michael knows those were just symptoms of something far deeper. “Ultimately it came down to me being selfish,” he explains. “Proverbs 3:5-6 shows that we need to give God the keys to our life and let Him drive. We try to drive ourselves, but it doesn’t take long before we hit a brick wall.”

Michael’s Brick Wall
 

Michael worked as a youth counselor, and his wife was a social worker. They’d just bought their first house, and the future looked bright...until Michael got caught up in the “party scene” and started spending his nights and weekends with a rowdy group of “friends.”

 

Michael hit his brick wall when his wife charged him with domestic violence because of his verbal abuse and got a restraining order against him. Suddenly, he had no wife and no home, and he just didn’t know what to do next. A friend suggested MRM.

 

The Big Picture
 

Although he enrolled in our program, Michael wasn’t ready to take it seriously at first. “[I thought] I didn’t need a program,” he says. “I was spiritually bankrupt. It’s like the Bible says in 1 Corinthians 13, I thought like a child and I acted like a child. I thought I knew something, but I didn’t know anything.”

 

But as the months passed and Michael saw other lives changing around him, he began to appreciate the services you support so faithfully. “The program challenged my integrity. The reality hit me that I caused the problems I had. I started to get the big picture.”

The Real Man
 

It wasn’t easy. “It made me feel like less of a man to accept the things I’ve done,” he admits. He needed help to see that “a real man respects his wife, doesn’t party every night, pays his own bills, and a real man is someone who lives under the authority of God.”

 

Michael knows his quest to be a real man won’t end with his graduation from MRM. “The graduation is just a small part of my life,” he says earnestly. “I realize that in five or ten years I will still need to work through this.” But because you care, he’s equipped with the tools he’ll need to keep moving forward for the rest of his life. Thank you for giving Michael and others like him the opportunity to grow up emotionally and become the men God wants them to be!