“I will repay you for the years that the swarming locust ate, the young locust, the destroying locust, and the devouring locust—my great army that I sent against you.” (Joel 2:25 CSB)
Devotional
I’ll admit I sometimes do a kind of math I probably shouldn’t. Adding up the years that went sideways. Wondering where things would be if different choices had been made, or if things outside anyone’s control had gone another way. Maybe you know that math too. The decade lost to an addiction, or the long season when God felt like a stranger.
Joel’s first readers knew exactly what lost years looked like. Wave after wave of locusts had stripped their land bare. Fields and vineyards, gone. A harvest takes a full year to grow, so a plague like that ate more than one season. It ate years.
Joel is honest that God allowed it. He even calls the locusts “my great army.” That’s hard to read, and it doesn’t mean every loss in our lives is a punishment. In Joel’s day the devastation became a call to come home, and the words just before this promise are full of tenderness. Come back, God says. I am gracious and compassionate.
Then comes the promise. “I will repay you for the years.” Not only the crops. The years. We can’t relive lost time, and God doesn’t pretend we can. But he is able to restore in ways that make up for what was taken. Sometimes it’s a harvest so full it covers the shortfall. Sometimes it’s a depth of grace in us that only those years could have grown.
If you’re grieving time you can’t get back, it isn’t too late for you with him. The God who repays is already at work.
Reflection
I carry some regret about time I can’t recover. It’s easy to believe those years are simply gone, written off for good. This verse tells me God sees them, and he is a God who repays. I want to hand him my lost years instead of rehearsing them.
Prayer
Father, some of us are grieving years we can’t get back. You know what was lost, and you know how much it still hurts. Thank you that you are a God who restores and repays. Help us trust you with the time we have left.