Reintegration implies restoration—to return and fit back into position
Reintegration
Finally, your husband is home from deployment. Life can get back to normal. Right? But what is normal after experiencing deployment separation? How does a military family reintegrate?
Reintegration implies restoration—to return and fit back into position. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Yet a study of literature on reintegration yields a spectrum of information that highlights extremes of how to go about the process. You can find the simple lists of “do these five things and everything will be good” to “your soldier will return a completely different person plagued with PTSD.” Both are a possibility, but in reality most military families fall somewhere in the middle of these extremes.
The buzzword for military families in recent years is resilience. Resilience is the ability to bounce back after challenging or traumatic circumstances. Resilient military families find ways to rebuild and repair the areas of a relationship that deployment may have weakened or damaged.
A Helping Hand
Scripture provides powerful examples of resilience through the lives of Ezra and Nehemiah. These men led redeployments of the nation of Israel after the nation experienced seventy years of captivity. God called them to aid in the reintegration of a people who endured the trauma of exile. They returned home and found buildings to repair and relationships to restore.
During this thirty-day journey of hope, we will travel with Ezra and Nehemiah as God used them to rebuild a sense of community and purpose to the nation. Their journey home included many things military families experience during the period of reintegration following a deployment.
As you go through each day’s waypoint, don’t forget to begin with the prayer from Psalm 119:18: Lord, “Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.”
Welcome to the journey!
