A while back, in what turned out to be the last stretch of my life as a believing Latter-day Saint, I repaired an old rocking chair.
At the same time, in one of life’s less subtle coincidences, I was preparing a talk for church. The assigned subject was restoration — the capital-R kind, the claim at the center of the faith I grew up in: that something original and true had been lost from the earth and then brought back. I stood at a workbench with a broken chair in front of me and a talk about restoration due, and the chair started quietly arguing with the talk.
The chair won. This post is about what it said.
What does real restoration actually mean?
Real restoration is not returning a thing to an imagined original state. It means confronting the damage honestly, understanding what caused it, keeping what is still sound, and letting the repaired thing be different from what it was. That is true of furniture, and it is true of people: healing is not going backward. It is becoming whole enough to be new.
You have to confront the damage first
Here is the first thing an actual repair teaches you: you cannot fix what you refuse to look at. Before anything gets stronger, you have to sit with the piece and take honest inventory — what failed, why it failed, what load it was asked to carry that it was never built for. The temptation is always to skip this part. Glue the visible crack, touch up the finish, get the thing back in the corner where it belongs before anyone notices it was broken.
That’s not restoration. That’s concealment with extra steps, and the chair will fail again in the same place, because the cause is still living in the wood.
I also found that some of the mending the chair had received before wasn’t true to the piece — patched with what was handy rather than what belonged, repairs that held for a season and quietly made things worse. Doing it right meant undoing some of what had been done in the name of fixing. Sit with that sentence a minute. I certainly had to.
The parts that were sound, I kept. That matters just as much. Restoration is not demolition; most of the chair was good wood, and the work was in telling the difference — what holds, what doesn’t, what was original and what was someone else’s expedient patch. If you want the shorter, furniture-free version of that idea, it’s the same one I wrote about in making room for growth: you can’t build on ground you won’t examine.
The talk I gave while I wasn’t sure I believed the premise
Meanwhile, the talk sat on my desk, and I’ll tell you honestly what it was like to write it: I was speaking about restoration inside a framework I was privately no longer sure I believed. I didn’t want to stand up and recite claims I couldn’t stand behind, and I didn’t want to perform a certainty I didn’t have. What I wanted — what I dug for — was something in the assignment I could say truthfully.
The chair gave it to me. Because the version of restoration I’d inherited meant something like: go back. Return to the approved earlier form. Treat the rupture as the whole problem and the past as the whole solution. Undo the damage so thoroughly it might never have happened.
And there I was, hands full of evidence that this is not how anything is actually made whole. The chair was not going to become the chair it had been. It was going to become a chair that had been broken and honestly repaired — stronger where it had been carefully mended, and different, permanently, from the original. The repair was not a failure of restoration. The repair was the restoration.
I stood up and gave a talk about restoration as healing — as confronting damage and becoming whole — and I meant every word of it, which is more than I could have said for the conventional version. It may have been the most honest thing I ever said from that pulpit, and I said it while quietly coming apart from the institution I said it in. I’ve learned since that this is what courage usually looks like: not a grand exit, just acting before you feel certain, one true sentence at a time.
Starting over is becoming new, not going back
I didn’t know it at the workbench, but I was describing my own next years to myself.
Because the world I was leaving had a definition of restoration for people, too, and it was the same one it had for doctrine: return. If you drift, come back. If you question, repent your way to the person you were before the questions. Healing meant reverting — to the approved form, the earlier self, the version of you that fit the corner you’d always stood in. Change itself was treated as the damage.
My life since has demonstrated the opposite, about as thoroughly as a life can. There was no going back to the woman from before the questions — not because she was wrong or broken, but because she was made of the same wood I’m made of, and the wood had been through things. What healing actually required was the workbench process: look honestly at what broke and why. Keep what’s sound — and so much was sound: the seriousness about goodness, the loyalty, the love of the sacred, the work ethic. Undo a few old repairs that were never true to the piece. And then let the mended thing be what it now is, instead of grieving that it isn’t what it was.
That last step is the one nobody warns you about. The chair doesn’t apologize for its mended joints. It just holds you. I wrote the beginnings of this idea into the first post I ever published here, before I’d told you where the shrinking was learned; this is the longer truth underneath it. And if you’re in your own early workbench days, start smaller than feels meaningful — small steps really do create big shifts. Nobody restores a chair in one afternoon. Nobody restores a person that way either.
Questions about starting over
Why is “just go back to how things were” bad advice after a big life change?
Because the earlier version of you was the person the change happened to. Going back means re-entering the exact conditions that produced the break, with the added weight of pretending it never happened. Honest repair runs the other way: understand what failed and why, keep what’s sound, and let yourself be genuinely different afterward. Reversal isn’t healing. It’s concealment.
How do you know what to keep when you’re rebuilding your life?
Test each piece the way you’d test old wood: does it still hold weight? Values like honesty, kindness, and commitment usually do — they were never the broken part. What tends to fail the test are the patches someone else added: rules you absorbed without consent, fear wearing the costume of virtue. Keep what bears load. Release what only ever bore appearances.
Can you honor your past without returning to it?
Yes — in fact I’d argue that’s the only way to honor it. My former self isn’t an enemy or an embarrassment; she’s the original material everything since was built from. Honoring her means keeping what she got right and telling the truth about what hurt her, not impersonating her. A repaired chair honors the original by still standing, not by hiding its mends.
I used to think restoration meant getting back to what God intended before anything went wrong — before I went wrong. Now I think restoration might mean becoming whole enough that I no longer need to pretend nothing ever broke. The chair still rocks. Not like it did when it was new — like it does now, which is steadier. Some days I think that’s the most doctrinally sound sentence I know.
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