Lift Your Eyes Up and Be Restored

My word for 2015 is restore. I’ve talked a lot about transitioning and changing this past year, and about my realizations of needing to slow things down. That’s why I feel the focus should be on restoring myself.

The dictionary definition of the word restore is as follows: “To bring back into existence, use, or the like: Reestablish. To bring back to a state of health, soundness, or vigor.”

Sitting in church yesterday, my sister gave her testimony for the tenth time or so. It’s a hard thing to share even though it’s been almost three years since Rick’s passing, and nearly 8 years since her stroke. Still, my sister knows that she has something to share that will inspire, relate to and touch others. She sat bravely through the video tribute, which included clips of Rick giving his sermon on Sundays and a snippet of a Christmas morning when my twin nephews received their first bikes from “Santa.” Their faces were priceless and they kept calling out, “Daddy, look!”

After the video was over, Pastor Elwin of New Hope Metro called my sister and the boys up on stage. He asked her general questions: What’s next? How do you handle each day? And she answered each with great poise and control. There was not a dry eye in church that day. We proceeded to take communion and Pastor Elwin asked us to write what we’d like to leave behind in 2014, in anticipation for the new year. We were to then tear the paper up and throw it away, symbolizing our decision to leave whatever we had written down in the past and move forward with a clean slate. That is what we all wait for, isn’t it?

As humans we are bound to make mistakes and although we start every year with the intentions of doing things right, we fail. By the end of the year we are begging for that new slate, and no matter how much we fail each year, we always have hope to do better the next time around.

For me, with my newly cleaned track record, I would like to restore what has been broken inside myself for a long time now. On my paper I wrote down doubt, lack of confidence and fear. For a while I had lost the love I had for myself. I had strayed so far from the path that I started to live continuously in guilt, only furthering the animosity I had. When you can’t love yourself, you let others treat you the same way. I want to mend what has been torn apart by conviction and begin to grow in love with myself once again. As narcissistic as that may sound, I truly believe that when you have self-awareness, you are able to assess what goes on around you with a much clearer perspective, giving you empathy and compassion for others.

I also believe that having recently closed a few chapters in my life (or my old life) there has been a feeling of lightness, like a weight has actually been lifted off of me. That is why I don’t like to leave things stewing for too long, I’d like to clear my conscience and avoid the extra emotional stress. Sometimes though, these things cannot be helped and we have to come to peace with situations even if they are unfinished. I’m glad that before the year is over I was able to do that for some of the relationships that were still left opened.

*Regret does not help in the restoration process.

Lastly, I would like to restore my relationship with God. I know that a lot of the reason I have been distant is because of shame. I know that I’ve put a lot of things before Him and at some point I continued to revel in it because I felt I had already disappointed Him so much. One thing always comes back to me though: When we pray, the pastor will usually say, “Let us bow our heads,” and everyone closes their eyes and lowers their heads towards the floor. In the bible, Jesus always says, “lift your eyes up to God” or “look up towards heaven.” I think God wants us to fear Him but to also raise up our chins to face Him with all of our imperfections and guilt, to show Him that we are willing and accepting for Him to transform us, for Him to forgive us.

So, in 2015, I will look up to God offering everything from 2014 to Him, asking for His forgiveness and for the chance to be restored.