Giving Back the Years

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. You can be forgiven and still grieve the wreckage, still feel that too much has been eaten away to matter now. Through Joel, God speaks to a people whose fields had been stripped bare by locusts, 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. That is a larger thing. It means the years the sin consumed are not simply written off as lost; God is able to give back, to bring fruit out of ground that looked permanently ruined. He specializes in the field everyone had given up on.

This will not always look like getting the exact thing back. But it means your history of failure is not the final word on what your life can yield. The God who forgives is also the God who rebuilds, and he is not intimidated by how many seasons the locusts took.

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.