Our Story
Finding Wholeness in a World of Judgment
Navigating logistics within reentry is challenging and demoralizing, especially when we don’t have the necessary orientation to the internal landscape.
Table of Contents:
The Mission
To empower justice-involved individuals in remembering self-sufficiency through education and practice centered on God’s perspective, cultivating healing, inspiration, and peace.
Our Vision
We envision a world where God’s love embraces everyone on their journey, where no one is left out of experiencing a God-given life.
The Return Home Philosophy
We know of God’s ability to contact and establish a relationship with anyone. Our understanding is that nothing is without God, even if we may have forgotten Him in the process of being human.
By providing education on spiritual health, we are allowing a “zooming out” to occur, to remember God’s perspective on the internal landscape of our thoughts and emotions.
Remembering and recognizing Him within any moment is the process through which we heal all of our relationships. No longer are we believing that our thoughts and emotions are accurate at interpreting the world.
Lived Experience
Transforming the inner landscape through devoted practice to meet the demands of the external world post-incarceration requires a special set of skills. We’ve discovered that those skills are accumulated by a variety of factors influencing each individual’s life.
Devotion to this internal world was a choice with the desire to find lasting peace and freedom. It’s not something that can be found in an evidence-based peer reviewed article. Rather, it’s discovered through a continual cultivation of an experiment: What is it like to have an internal relationship with God?
We respect no hierarchy, as we understand God’s perspective of equality. No one is here to prove someone is “better than”. Our goal is to share enough information and education to empower others to the same healing presence we’ve found in the process of God.
About the Founder, Zachary Stirewalt
Zachary was locked up for murder in 2012. He believed the directive to have come from God, and navigated through the criminally insane psychiatric system after being declared Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity. He vowed to discover what mental and emotional freedom was, as he noticed physical freedom came but mental and emotional liberation felt impossible.
Zachary has written a blog post detailing his journey in claiming responsibility and finding the process that Return Home embodies.
Zachary went through a criminally insane psychiatric system which reported to a judge who made the final decisions surrounding his movement. After two long-term psychiatric facilities, he began what’s called “conditional release”, where round-the-clock supervision was required to ensure multiple factors, including basic living skills, medication management, and desistance from crime.
After progressing through this step-down conditional release system, Zachary was able to go back to school full time. This was assisted by EIPD, formerly known as Vocational Rehabilitation Services. Instead of getting a job post-graduation, Zachary chose to move into a camper to feel his emotions for the first time in his life. He spent about 9 months dedicated to meditation, relaxation, and exploring body sensations.
Selling the camper in 2024, he packed his car with all of the essentials, and took off on a 9-month cross-country road-trip. The objective was to wake up in the morning, ask where to go, and wait on an answer. He was guided around the country and has many miraculous stories to share from this exploration.
Upon returning to North Carolina, Zachary embraced traditional homelessness, and navigated the challenges that come with housing and employment discrimination. Thankfully he doesn’t have a criminal background, but his name is very Googleable, creating strange situations like having to prove stability to landlords and frustrations with denial for employment opportunities.
It is through entering the discomfort of homelessness that Zachary was able to find the connection with God that he needed. Inspiration for his business, ideas for blog posts, and creative ways of navigating the world began to flood into his experience. Gone are the days of thinking the struggle should win over God’s perspective, as the testimony is too strong to believe He would refuse to provide another miracle.
Purpose within Meditation
Meditation became Zachary’s daily practice in 2019 while attempting to find mental and emotional freedom. For many years this internal journey was without God. Over the last half-decade, he noticed that “the mind” couldn’t do it all for itself. Slowly the Christian framework he was raised with began to make sense in a new and unconventional way. Zachary’s personal relationship with God began to flourish, a vastly different experience from his “God directed” crime in 2012.
Through allowing the process of God to un-scramble his mind and body, it was revealed that the mind or ego attached itself to the label “god” in an attempt to protect itself. This discernment has allowed a newfound peace to take root, allowing Zachary to learn God’s process.
Zachary’s favorite part of God’s process to explore is how we can hold “problems” so they become creative solutions. It’s almost as if God has to introduce a problem for the divine solution to be presented. This completely inverses the need for our involvement in a process we could never logically understand. It’s also why Zachary sits in meditation so much, because God prefers to be the center of focus.