Years Restored
I love looking back at my writing during the worst of it and seeing God’s hand in my life all the while. Here’s an article I wrote back in 2015. My divorce had only been final for a few months, so I was on the up and up in terms of healing goes. My hope is that these words will encourage you wherever you’re at!
Morning after morning, I would wake up thinking that my life had become some sort of never-ending bad dream. I couldn’t remember happy emotions or moments of laughter. I only existed in my anxious state. Pressure on my chest, worry on my mind, and tears in my eyes. Time went by and moments would visit that resembled good, but the underlying circumstances were still suffocating. Doubt of God’s goodness and Truth crept in. The surface of my life seemed to blare over the whisper of God’s promises.
God has always reached my soul best through His words. One of God’s greatest gifts to His people is the way He reveals his promises. God’s healing power manifests in so many incredible ways, but my being connects most to His words. I am a big word person. It’s my love language, my gifting, and a lot of my relation to this crazy world we live in. It’s no wonder that God gets to me most through His words. During the worst moments of my life, God’s promises would show up in word form. They felt so far from true, I could barely comprehend them. Yet deep down I knew they were true.
One promise that would show up like clock work was, Joel 2:25. It just kept on keeping on. If you aren’t familiar with this verse, and more specifically this chapter, give it a read. Verse 25 says, “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten—the great locust and the young locust, the other locusts and the locust swarm[b]—my great army that I sent among you.” The version of the verse in New King James uses the word, restore in place of repay. “And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.” I believed God when He told me this, but my belief had a skeptic undertone. The locusts were eating up every part of my life. Leaving me with nothing. And there God was acknowledging that yes, the locusts were destroying and that yes, He had plans of restoring these very years. In the moment, all I saw was locust after locust.
The remainder of the chapter only gets more rich, “26 You will have plenty to eat, until you are full, and you will praise the name of the Lord your God, who has worked wonders for you; never again will my people be shamed. 27 Then you will know that I am in Israel, that I am the Lord your God, and that there is no other; never again will my people be shamed. 28 “And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. 29 Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days. 30 I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and billows of smoke. 31 The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. 32 And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved; for on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be deliverance, as the Lord has said, even among the survivors whom the Lord calls.’”
The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate tragedy and the purification of God’s people through suffering. Judah, the setting for the book, is devastated by an overwhelming takeover of locusts. This invasion destroys everything—the fields of grain, the vineyards, the gardens and the trees. Joel symbolically describes the locusts as a marching human army and views all of this as divine judgment coming against the nation for her sins. The book is highlighted by two major events. One is the invasion of locusts and the other the outpouring of the Spirit. Destruction and then restoration. Gets me every time.
Whenever the Old Testament speaks of judgment for sin, whether individual or national sin, the advent of Jesus Christ is foreshadowed. The prophets of the Old Testament continually warned Israel to repent, but even when they did, their repentance was limited. Their temple sacrifices were but a shadow of the ultimate sacrifice, offered once for all time, which would come at the cross. Joel tells us that God’s ultimate judgment, which falls on the Day of the Lord, will be “great and terrible. Who can endure it?” The answer is that we, on our own, can never endure such a moment. But with our faith placed in Christ can endure anything.
The most compelling part of God’s promises is when you sit back and watch them revealed. When you can see God’s hand in a promise that was at one point just a nice idea, it’s a real treat. Most recently, my mornings do not greet me with anxiety and disbelief, but with moments of God’s faithfulness. I am overwhelmed with clarity of just how much He protected me from what the locusts had destroyed. The whispers I heard are being shouted from the rooftops. Patience is rough when the locusts are destroying every facet of your life, but God’s promises are always true. Isaiah 55:11 says, “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.” My prayer is that if you’re waiting for God to repay you for those years that were destroyed, you’ll take heart in my story. The years were long, but God’s restoration was worth the wait.