Giving Back the Years

I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the great locust, the grasshopper, and the caterpillar, my great army, which I sent among you. (Joel 2:25, WEB)

One of the cruelest weights of a long addiction is the accounting of what it has cost you. The wasted years, the relationships strained or lost, the time and trust and innocence you can never get back and cannot stop tallying in the quiet hours. You can be genuinely forgiven and still grieve the wreckage, still feel that too much has been eaten away for the rest to matter now. Through Joel, God speaks to a people whose fields had been stripped bare by wave after wave of locusts, left with nothing but bare stalks, and he says, I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten.

He does not merely promise forgiveness for the past. He promises restoration of what the past destroyed, which is a larger and harder-to-believe thing. It means the years the sin consumed are not written off as a loss you will carry to your grave; God is able to give back, to bring fruit out of ground that looked permanently ruined and abandoned. He has a way of working the field that everyone else had already given up on.

This will not always look like getting the exact thing back in the exact shape it was. But it means your history of failure is not the final word on what your life can still yield. The God who forgives is also the God who rebuilds, and he is not intimidated or discouraged by how many seasons the locusts managed to take. He has raised crops from worse ground than yours. The very stretch of your life you are most tempted to write off, the years you would erase if you could, may be the ground he grows the most from, because a man who has been to the bottom and back has something to give another man still down there.

Father, I grieve the years this has cost me. Thank you that you restore what was eaten away. Do what only you can do with the ruined ground, and grow something from it.