On Restoration
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul.”
-Psalm 23: 1-3
One of my favorite New Year practices is to pick a one word theme to guide my year. In 2020, my theme is “restore.” Thus far into the year, I have been reflecting on the meaning of restoration, and what it means specifically to me.
I first thought of the restoration process undertaken for a masterful work of art. For an old painting, for example, restoration isn’t about replacing the painting in the frame — it’s touching it up. Lovingly and painstakingly filling in the cracks and chips in the lacquer without damaging the original. Glossing over it once more to make the painting shine again. Increasing the painting’s existing value. Maybe replacing the busted old frame with a fresh, shiny one, giving the painting new surroundings, if you will. But it’s not taking the masterpiece back to a blank canvas and starting from scratch. Lord knows there are times when starting from scratch is the way forward, but that’s not this season. The painting already IS; it’s already here; it already exists.
/rəˈstôr/
verb
return (someone or something) to a former condition, place, or position.
repair or renovate (a building, work of art, etc.) so as to return it to its original condition.
To me, restoration is about motion back, but it’s not motion backwards. Restoration is a returning, a coming home, a redemption of the good, while not necessarily an exact retracing of one’s steps. It’s an arrival back to where one began, this time equipped with new tools to navigate differently. It’s not a wholesale regression to a previous state of being, but a circling back and adding on, and therefore a place that is new and not new at the same time.
Right now, restoration in my life looks like a healing of my own relationship to discipline, pushing myself, and my own work ethic. I am learning what it’s like to lovingly push myself without harshness, balancing my desire to achieve with love for my way of being and self-compassion. I know it’s possible to see return to an original condition that is maintained in balance with everything else I have in my life these days. I also think that restoration will look like revisiting places in my life, sometimes literally, that I was not equipped to deal with when I first passed through. The places themselves may not have changed, or may have, but I know for a fact I have.
“Sometimes you meet yourself on the road before you have a chance to learn the appropriate greeting. Faced with your own possibilities, the hard part is knowing a speech is not required. All you have to say is yes.”
-Pearl Cleage
And I think there are some areas of restoration in my life that will entirely surprise me. I don’t fully know what ground I may have ceded as lost over the past few years. There are dreams I have given up as impossible that may soon become reality. My life as it is now was literally unimaginable to me just 5 short years ago. I won’t pretend to know what new things are coming my way, but thanks to Pearl, I know that all that is required of me is that I say yes. Part of the magic of the journey is being open to the unexpected along the way, and I think that will require a restoration of my faith. There are things coming my way that I won’t be able to predict, but I’m ready to step forward and meet them.