The restoration of all things

There is a difference between a thing thrown away and a thing restored, and a master restorer knows it in her hands. Before her on the easel is a painting half ruined, the canvas cracked across, one corner blistered and brown where fire once licked it, the colors dimmed under decades of grime. A careless person would discard it. She does not. Inch by inch, with solvents and steady patience, she lifts the soot, fills the cracks, brings the buried colors back, until the very same painting, the one that was nearly lost, is whole again, more itself than it had been in years. From the throne at the end of all things comes a word shaped exactly like her work: Behold, I make all things new. Read it slowly, because the wording matters. Not all new things, as if the old were trash to be swapped for replacements. All things new, the very things, healed. Peter gave it a name when he preached it in the temple courts: the restoration of all things, promised by the prophets from of old. This is a God who does not discard. He restores.

Maybe a quiet fear has settled in you that your losses are simply gone, scrapped, beyond any recovery. The throne speaks a different word over them: I make all things new. Hear the precision of it. Not all new things, as though your story were trash to be thrown out and a stranger's handed back in its place. All things new, the very things, restored, the way a master heals a damaged painting instead of binning it. Peter called it the restoration of all things, the thing the prophets had been promising all along. So the God on the throne is not in the business of discarding. He gathers up even your upheaval, the cracked and the scorched and the grieved, and works it toward newness. What was real, and was lost, is not written off. It is being restored. That does not mean nothing was painful, or that the damage was nothing; the painting really was burned. It means the damage does not get the final word over what God intends to make new.