A New Start

I was talking to my roommate from last year about how I wanted to start this blog. Before I even had finished the word blog, she said, "Oh! You mean the re-everything blog that we talked about last year?"

Clearly this has been on my mind for a while.

I've been working on a post explaining the philosophy behind the blog, but it's taking longer than I expected. So here's the bare-bones explanation:

We were created in God's image, and thus we were made creative.  It's really pretty simple.  Many people before me have observed the correlation and seen the ways in which our creations can be God glorifying.  Tolkien, for instance, believed that his writing was a form of worship--- that the time he spent shaping and crafting Middle Earth was an expression of the deo imago within himself.  God first encounters His people as a Creator, and Tolkien recognized that part of being made in the image of God is being creators ourselves.

Unlike God, we cannot create ex-nihilo, but within His creation, we can sub-create along with Him and make pieces for His glory.  Under His lordship and in submission to His leading, our sub-creation can be beautiful and worshipful and glorious to the Lord.

I've always been intrigued by that idea, probably because I have an affinity for art.  But something that I have seen in myself and so many others is not just the desire and ability to create--- I see the love of RESTORATION.


God is not just our Creator.  Through His sacrifice on the cross, Christ is our Redeemer and Restorer.  He revives us from the death of sin and renews us in our weakness.  Someday He will resurrect His church and recreate the earth without the curse of sin.

God is making us new and more beautiful than we were before. He is transforming us by His Spirit into the image of His Son. That's incredible!

And while it's hardly the same in terms of glory, I think that He has also given His people, the church, the same desire to renew and recreate.  His children have different passions for restoring different things--- houses, furniture, ineffective legislation, the environment, broken communities, thrift store finds.  It's in God's nature to spot something "useless" and make it into something precious and valuable.  And it's in mine.

This summer, I want to just use this space to reflect on the change that the Lord has done in my own mess of a life while also featuring some restoration projects, past and present.  I can't promise that it will be fascinating, but I hope it'll be fun.


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