Hi, I’m Aimee, and I’ll be honest: writing my restoration story has been difficult. It’s ironic—I’m an author and blogger, as well as a speaker, artist, and teacher who, now in midlife, has eons of experience in testimony, communicating, and accompanying. But I’ve realized that the classic story model of “trauma/crisis/rescue/resolution” is not only reductive, it’s not even really true.
Let me explain with an HGTV metaphor. One thing about me: I love home design. As a kid, I saved birthday and Christmas money to buy matching decor for my shared bedroom with my sister. I spent countless hours rearranging that room and trying to talk my parents into letting me rearrange the rest of the house too.
I grew up the first half of my childhood in a trailer, but even there I could see beauty that hadn’t quite materialized. I mean almost literally see it—like an internal version of whatever app Joanna Gaines is always using to show people where she’s going to put a huge island. It felt like seeing beauty that already existed but just needed to be called forth.
After decades of shared bedrooms and dorms and apartments and rentals and ten years of marriage, I finally found my chance to renovate a house of my own. A Craigslist ad caught my eye one day: a ramshackle house in a perfect neighborhood, one we’d never imagined we could live in because of the housing prices. But luckily the Craigslist house was so rundown that we could afford it (ha).
The house had character that made my heart sing. I saw the beauty shimmering just beyond the mess and I longed to free it, to see it realized.
Who buys a house from Craigslist? Us, it turns out. Somehow, I persuaded my very reluctant husband that it had “good bones” that just needed “white paint” and a “really good scrubbing.” You know,all the HGTV transformation buzzwords.
After closing, we immediately commenced with the scrubbing and white paint. But we quickly discovered that white paint couldn’t hide the crazy checkerboard paneling on every wall (and ceiling!), and that those good bones sat atop a faulty foundation.
We worked hard and tried to live through it. We brewed coffee in the living room and washed dishes in the bathtub as the kitchen was torn apart. We slept with our kids in one queen bed for weeks while the floors were sanded. We moved every single piece of furniture in and out of the house twice when various projects required it.
I felt discouraged and disillusioned, not at the difficulty, but at how it seemed that the stupid house was never done being broken. We’d paint a wall of paneling, only to find that the paint didn’t stick. We’d pull off the paneling only to find that the plaster behind it needed repair. We’d pull off the plaster only to find that the studs had rotted. And sometimes, projects had to be repeated multiple times. We leveled the foundation three times. We retextured drywall. We sanded and painted cabinets oh, I don’t know, ten thousand times? The house was much harder to fix than we expected, and often felt like it just wouldn’t stay fixed.
As the years passed, we learned with sweat and tears (and so many rotisserie chicken dinners) that this is just the way of old houses. All that character comes with needs. And coaxing forth beauty from ashes (er, rotted studs) is a work never finished.
I tried to transform the house with a naivete born of oversimplified, selectively edited HGTV episodes. For much of my life, I tried to do the same with my own heart: fix and transform it once and for all. I have learned that, like an old house, our hearts are never quite done being broken. We’re never going to stay fixed. And God isn’t after that, anyway. I’ve learned that God sees our beauty shimmering beyond and beneath and swirled together with our brokenness. Healing isn’t painting over the mess but going all the way to the studs. Healing is seeing the beauty that’s already there and freeing it.
I was a deeply sensitive and contemplative child who missed nothing. I absorbed every whisper or offhand look, and in the soft folds of my inner life, they became insecurities and doubts and fears. My young heart quickly struggled not to submerge beneath a thousand drops.
As I grew, major wounds opened. I felt at once responsible for everyone’s happiness, but invisible myself. I struggled to verbalize my own needs and hurts. Shy and bookish, I seemed always just outside the gang of sporty kids in my neighborhood. One day a kid told me, “Nobody likes you. We only play with you because our moms make us.” A sharp arrow shot through my heart: Nobody likes you. Nobody likes you.
I accepted the lie as an obvious truth, but I didn’t know why nobody liked me. As I entered adolescence, I experimented with trying to “be” someone else. I pretended to like music that I didn’t; I tried to use language that I thought sounded cool; I said I hated classes that I actually loved. One day a guy looked me up and down in a totally new way and tossed out an objectifying comment. Still shy, sensitive, absorbing everything, and still convinced nobody liked me, something clicked: my body was a currency. Maybe, if I could perfect it, I could use beauty to purchase love. I embarked upon destructive dating relationships that only magnified my pain.
Throughout high school and college, I also fell increasingly more deeply into the deadly seduction of eating disorders. Like all disorders, anorexia and bulimia never once fulfilled their supposed promises to give me control and relief; they only consumed more and more of my life.
I was profoundly blessed with good parents and good people around me, so I knew healing was possible. But even into young adulthood, I thought of healing as a finish line; once you attained it, you closed the door on your pain and moved far away. Part of that misconception came from the standard 45-minute testimony circuit I had been exposed to many times. Speakers always seemed to have a tidy story of trauma, crisis, rescue, resolution. I thought once and for all transformation was the goal.
But like an old house, I found myself broken in layers. Like an old house, I seemed to be never done being broken.
My healing came slowly, painstakingly, in trickles more than floods. There was no single retreat or conference or talk or event—no episode—that transformed my heart once and for all. Instead, healing came tediously and so much less definitively than I wanted (and still want). God worked through friendships, spiritual directors, therapists, mission work, my eventual marriage and motherhood, and most of all, the sacraments.
Healing of insecurity, loneliness, anorexia, bulimia, despair: they’re more like victories of battle rather than war. I’ve learned that even if a fierce struggle has been tamed, these are some areas of tenderness I’ll probably carry my whole life. But this is what defines restoration: ongoing, loving care to bring forth the true beauty that already exists. Clearing away the heavy debris of anxiety, insecurity, trauma, abuse, disorder, addiction—whatever buries who we really are.
And the truth is that authentic healing never finishes in this life. Authentic healing isn’t about transformation at all. Transformation changes one thing into something different. Healing is not about changing us or erasing our wounds, but rather about the restoration of who, deep down, we have been all along.
I often think of Jesus’ promise, “Behold, I make all things new” (Rev 21:5). He didn’t say, “I make all new things.” There is a profound distinction.
God does not waste our suffering. Our pain, our past, every piece of our stories matters to Him. He won’t cover it up or erase it or pretend it wasn’t real. But He will make it new.
Somehow, some day, somehow. Slowly, repeatedly. Day after day. The way the sun redefines night into day, over and over again: He makes all things new.
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