The Word Restore in My House

The dining table is out in the garage under a bed sheet. That is the first thing anybody notices when they come in and it is the thing nobody says. Where the table stood there is a bed with rails and a motor. Where the couch was there is a chair with a headrest and a strap. The front room has a smell now, clean and faintly medical, that goes when you open the windows and comes back by lunch. The alarm is set for five forty, because the morning takes ninety minutes and the ride comes at a quarter past seven.

Her son is twenty six. Three years ago a bar came loose on a scaffold and the fall took the parts of him that hold a body upright. He knows her. That is what people ask first, and the answer is yes, he knows her, he laughs at exactly the two things he always laughed at, and in the mornings he says her name with the vowels a little long, the way he did when he was small and wanted something. What he cannot do is get himself out of that bed. That part belongs to her now. She counts to three out loud, the same three every morning, and she lifts.

At church they are kind. Genuinely kind, and she would say so first. A woman pressed a card into her hand in the parking lot that said she was believing for a full restoration, with a verse on the front in gold lettering, and she meant every syllable of it. A man told her, on the steps, that God is going to give him back. She said thank you. She meant the thank you as well. Then she drove home, set the alarm for five forty, and did not say the sentence that was standing in the middle of her chest, which is: I do not think that is what is happening, and I am the one in the room.

She is not angry with the woman in the parking lot. She is tired in a very particular way, the way you get tired when a word keeps arriving in your house meaning something other than what your house contains. Restore. Everybody uses it. Nobody uses it about her. They use it about him, in a shape she has stopped being able to picture, and she hears it and thinks about the strap, and the count of three, and how strong her back has had to get.

Maybe your house has a word like that in it. Maybe it is your son, or your mother, or a marriage, or a body that used to do what you told it. And you have learned to receive the sentence kindly and go home and do the lift, and somewhere under the tiredness there is a fear you have never said out loud: that you are the one person in this whole thing who has stopped believing. You are not the faithless one in your own house. It is written in Daniel 3:18 that three men said but if not, out loud, to a king with a furnace already lit, and God kept that sentence in the book instead of editing it, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been holding you at five forty every morning while other people hold the word.

The bravest sentence in the book

Read the order of what those three men said, because the order is the whole thing.

If that is the case, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us from your hand, O king.Daniel 3:17

Able first. No hedging, no lowering of the ceiling, no polite religious shrinking of what He is able to do. They put His ability on the table in front of a man who owned a furnace. And then, before the king could answer, they said the other half.

But if not, let it be known to you, O king, that we do not serve your gods, nor will we worship the gold image which you have set up.Daniel 3:18

But if not. Three words that get preached as though they were the doubt in the story, when they are the opposite. Doubt would have been unsure about the able. These men were not unsure about the able for one second. What they refused to do was tell God what able had to look like on the day. They would not bind His decision to their rescue, and that refusal is the reason the sentence reads as courage and not as bargaining.

You have the right to say but if not out loud in your own front room, and not one grain of it counts against you. That is not my opinion, it is written in Daniel 3:18 and preserved in the book with the furnace still burning in the next line, and it is His Spirit who gives a tired person the nerve to be honest with God instead of performing for Him.

What the word restore is actually doing in your house

Now the honest part, and this site would be worthless if it flinched here.

Restored is not replaced. In your house that is not a consolation prize, it is the only sentence in the room that tells the truth. Replaced would mean somebody hands you back the life you had before the scaffold, with the table in the dining room and your son coming through the door at six with his boots in his hand. Nobody can hand you that. And a copy of him would not be him; a copy would be a stranger wearing his name and it is not what you are asking for and it is not what God does.

Restored means God is putting back into a person what was taken out of them. That is what the word does everywhere it appears. And here is the part nobody said in the parking lot: the person He is restoring, right now, today, in that house, is you. Not as a downgrade. Not as the small version because the big one is off the table. You are a person too, and you have been eaten down to the ground for three years, and He knows the difference between the two of you and He has not confused it.

You are the one being restored in that house, and that is not the consolation version of the promise. It is written in 2 Corinthians 4:16 that the inward man is renewed day by day while the outward man wears out, and it is the same Spirit doing that renewing at five forty in a room that smells of soap, in a woman who is convinced she has run out.

And the woman with the gold lettering is not the enemy of this page. She was reaching for the largest thing she knew how to say to somebody she loves, and she was not wrong about the able. Nobody here is arguing with the able. The only thing being taken off her card is the part where you have to picture the outcome for her, out of a room she has never had to stand in at five forty.