Connecting the Dots

(Written Sunday morning on the flight from Atlanta to Portland)

Before I get home and shift this blog to a better telling of the Zambian stories....I have one more bit of my personal story I want to write as I fly the last leg of my trip home.

The day after I blogged about the Honda in Choma, I was telling the story to my teammates in the back of the Landrover as we rambled through the African bush. As I finished, without skipping a beat, both women listening to my story looked straight at me and said.....restoration.

Restoration?!?!!

In my very first days home from the hospital five years ago, I spent a scrambled brain day at the neighbor's quiet house because loud construction was happening at ours. On her refrigerator was this:

With the logic of my life completely wrecked, I greedily grabbed at that bit of hope.  The neighbor lady gave me that fridge magnet and it's been hanging where I can see it every day since. 

Restoration.

Ironically, because of my WaterAfrica website work, the picture of my wrecked car lands in my photo editor chronologically by date next to pictures from Lake Grove Presbyterian Church pictures from a Zambia Go Team trip. These pictures fall nearly side by side:

 

 
Five years later, as I upload pictures from my trip, these pictures fall nearly side by side:

  

 

It hasn't been an easy journey. But as I quoted head injury survivor, PJ Long, on my facebook page recently, "I am starting to think that healing is not the same thing as curing. Maybe healing does not mean becoming free of symptoms, or restoring to a previous state of being. It may mean something else entirely."

Broken Jar............

II Corinthians 4:

 But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.