God is in the Restoration Business

John Osborne

The other day my wife and I went to dinner with what we thought was a free meal using a gift certificate that someone had given us.  It didn’t quite work out as planned.  No, the gift certificate wasn’t a fraud nor did it lack money on it.  The gift certificate that was supposed to be in my wife’s purse never made it to the restaurant.  

After owning up to the possibility that I had something to do with the gift certificate missing and enjoying a full price meal at the dinner establishment, the hunt for what happened began when we made it back home.

For what was a legit reason, I happened to be in my wife’s purse retrieving an insurance card the day before.  Thinking I would be helpful, I took it upon myself to clean out her purse of what I thought was a mess of receipts and other items.  Oops!  That turned out to be a mistake!  I had organized it and threw things away that didn’t need to be saved.  I had shredded receipts, and little did I know at the time that one of the “receipts” that I happened to shred was the gift certificate.  How did we find that out?  Well, we searched the kitchen garbage to no avail.  Yuck!  This left the shredder as the only other option.  Knowing that the gift certificate was on brown paper, it became rather obvious what had happened.  Do you know how hard it is to put together a puzzle without the picture?  To reassemble cross cut pieces of paper that don’t fit perfectly together?  We haven’t been successful yet.

As I think about this story I am reminded of our own lives.  We can find ourselves having gone through the shredder.  Sometimes it happens by the choices that we have made, yet at other times it is at the hands of others or through exterior circumstances.  We can look at our lives and think that there is no way to make sense of it all.

However, God is in the restoration business.  The Psalmist writes,

1 Praise the LORD, my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name.  4 who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, (Psalm 103:1,4)

He can take all the pieces of our lives and reassemble them into something beautiful.  He has the ability to restore us to complete wholeness or to use our pieces to make a new masterpiece.  There is the possibility that we are left with some scars, but they can be used as a testimony to others of the miraculous power of God.