When I thought about the new heavens and new earth, I imagined that I would no longer feel sadness over the rape. I wouldn’t be tempted to seek comfort through fantasy. I wouldn’t relate to others from a place of fear.

What captivated me most from Isaiah 65:17, though, was that the former things “shall not be remembered or come into mind.” When Jesus returns, I won’t even think about the rape. I won’t remember it. I won’t even think about remembering it!

Learning about Jesus’ desire to draw near to me by His Spirit and through His Word changed the way I approached reading the Bible.

During the dark days of grief over the assault, I opened the Bible, longing to understand why God had allowed this terrible thing to happen to me. I often felt like I was met with silence. Restore helped me to understand that Jesus’ offered up His presence freely to me in the midst of my suffering.

Instead of looking to the Bible for answers as to why, I began to read Scripture through the lens of comfort. All over the pages of my Bible were promises of renewal and hope.

I had always thought the goal of spiritual warfare was to persuade God’s people to do bad things. While Satan certainly is in the business of leading God’s people into sin, Restore was helping me to understand an even more perverse goal of the enemy. He is daily trying to cause me to doubt God’s love for me.

It has been his goal since the beginning. 

I felt the force of these lies during the early months of my pregnancy. I was plagued with fear about potentially losing the baby. Every twinge or ache caused panic to ripple through my body.

Why did God create me? “God made you, because he loves you and wants you to enjoy communion with him.” That one sentence dramatically changed the way I viewed the assault.

Prior to and during Restore, I was obsessed with God’s role in our suffering. If God was good and powerful, why hadn’t He stopped the rape? That question began to haunt me. I felt tempted to believe Satan’s whispering lies. Perhaps God wasn’t good or powerful. 

But everything changed if God created me specifically for loving communion with Him.