Restoried

There's a word that keeps coming to my mind: restoried. 

Not restored but restoried. I think I was introduced to it by the Lectio 365 Bible app a while back. It's not that God gives you back what you lost. He rewrites the story.

We mess up. We call ourselves failures, write ourselves off as irredeemable. But that's not how he sees us. As we've been packing up, moving home, and trying to settle in, I've been sitting with the difference between being restored and being restoried. Restored just gives you back what was. Restoried hands you something new.

We've moved home but it's not the same. It's the same house. Same city. Probably the same friends, the same church. But, in a very real way, we are starting over.

I hope I've shared this with the family more than once, because my initial instinct was to think we're just going back. But Pocahontas had it right (yes, the Disney version): "you can't step in the same river twice." We've been gone two years. People moved away. People moved in. Nothing slots back into place like we never left. It won't be normal. It won't be the same.

So as we've prepared to return home, I've found a new word: we're starting afresh. That's helped, because I am walking on the same sidewalk. Sleeping in the same house, and even on the same mattress tonight as two years ago (so very comfortable. I've missed it). But if my focus was to return — to get back to our old way of life, our old community — I'm chasing something that's already gone. I'm chasing nostalgia, or a memory. If I choose to start afresh instead, I get options. I can pick back up the things that were good, healing, worth keeping. And I can also let some things go, just because I did them before doesn't mean I have to again. I can stay open to God saying, "I have something different." He can re-story my life.

I found this line from the app as they quote John Koessler: "Sabbath forms rest, by which we are not so much restored as restoried." One of the prayers that came with it:

Father, restory us today. We stand at the crossroads and ask for the ancient paths (Jeremiah 6:16). Root us in the faith of our fathers and mothers, as we engage your word today. Jesus, maker of tables and teller of stories, create in us a new imagination, we pray. Invoke in us greater celebration, and grant to us new language with which to sow your eternal word into a tired world.

When I sit with that, I can let go of the old story — the old home, the old community, the old way I looked at life — and reach for something healthier. Something new. I'm open, not closed off.

A new story frees you from all the old entanglements. You stop feeling like you have to do it the way you did it before, just because that's how it's always been done. You get to imagine instead. Explore. Restorying changes us. Not just what happens next, but who we are and how we see ourselves.