Restored

At the end of 2005 I had the chance to travel to Northern Sudan to visit with some friends who were doing a great work in that country.  While there, I was amazed at the beauty of the country and of her people.  Sure it was dusty and brown everywhere, but along the Nile River there were stretches of lush green teeming with life.

I took hundreds of digital pictures while in Sudan and many I put on a Power Point presentation while the rest were in a folder on my old computer.  Unfortunately, that old computer bit the dust a couple of years ago and before it bid it's final adieu I transferred as much over to a new computer as I could (and I bought a portable hard drive to prevent further losses).  Shortly after that incident, I was looking through some of my pictures on the computer and I couldn't find my pictures from Sudan.  It appeared that they were a casualty of the computer crash.  Hundreds of memories gone forever.

This morning I was looking through some documents on my computer when I noticed that I still had the Power Point of some of the pictures I had made of Sudan.  I transferred these to my Mac and then was able to export them to my hard drive so now I have at least some of my Sudan pictures saved.  I was more than excited that I was able to restore these pictures that I thought were lost forever.

There are many ways to describe the work that Christ does in the life of those He redeems - renew, restore, transform, rescue.  2 Corinthians 5:17 reminds us that in Christ we become new creations, with the old being passed and the new having come.  In Christ we are restored.  All things have become new.  The old life the we used to live has been crucified with Christ (Romans 6:6) and we have become restored to a new way of life.

My pictures were lost but now they are found.  When I thought that they were hopelessly lost I found them and they were restored to me.  The same is true for us.  Without Christ we are hopelessly lost but in Jesus Christ, in all His grace and glory, we are restored to the Father in the relationship that we were originally created to enjoy.