Reclaiming Our Children: A Blog About Healing After Abortion

I received a phone call today regarding our last post abortion men's day retreat. It was an amazing day and over and over we have been contacted with how God touched and changed the lives of these men.

I know there has been some buzz out there about whether men should have their own day or be mixed with the women. While it is fine to have them together and certainly there are advantages to that, having done both in our "Entering Canaan" retreats , we found, without a doubt, that even if you do things together, there should definitely be a place where men can meet alone.

As a result of that, Fr Mariusz Koch, CFR, Fr George Stewart, and I, began the men's days with the help of some of the men who had gone through our regular "Entering Canaan" retreats.

While some may argue it is beneficial to the women to hear the men, we felt the men's day is specifically for the men's healing, not for the healing of those around them. It needs to be a place where they can speak of all their offenses without fear of offending…a place where they do not feel a need to protect, and yes, a place where they can cry, if they so need, with other men who understand and are suffering the same pain.

Men who were involved in our ministry for years, and then, once we started our men's days switched over, introduced us to a completely new side of them.

Again, while it is good and even necessary to bring them together at some point, we have found men need their own place to speak and grieve and have been confirmed in this by God, over and over every time we do a day.

Our next day will be on May 1st, 2010