When You’re Healing From Trauma: Joel 2:25

Love your Legacy Devotional ~ By Tay

Opening Prayer

Jesus, so many years feel lost.

Years the pain took. Years I cannot get back. I have done the math and it breaks my heart. Would You do something with the lost years?

I am asking You for restoration.

Amen.

Scripture

Reflection

Picture a garden after the slugs have been through it.

You planted with hope. You watered, you waited, you watched the first green shoots push up. Then one morning you walk out and it is gone. Eaten to the stems. All that work, all that waiting, devoured in the dark while you slept. That is what lost years feel like. You did everything right and something still ate them.

Joel was speaking to people who knew that exact feeling, except their garden was their whole livelihood. Swarm after swarm of locusts had stripped the land bare. Years of harvest, gone. Into that emptiness, God says the most astonishing thing: “I will repay you for the years.”

Not some of the years. The years. All of them.

Now read carefully, because the wording matters. God does not say, “I will give you back the same years.” You cannot re-live 2019. He says, “I will repay you.” Repayment is not rewinding. It is redeeming. He takes the empty space where the harvest should have been and fills it with something that makes the loss not the end of the story.

Nothing is too lost for God to redeem.

Here is the part that takes faith. The locusts in Joel’s day were, in a mysterious way, part of God’s own dealing with His people. The verse even calls them “my great army.” That is hard to sit with. It does not mean God causes your trauma or that your pain was His plan. It means He is so sovereign that even the devouring things end up serving His restoration. The thing that ate your years becomes the thing He repays you for. Nothing is wasted. Not even this.

What does repayment look like? Sometimes it looks like joy returning to places you thought were dead. Sometimes it looks like using your story to heal someone else, which is a harvest the locusts could never have eaten. Sometimes it looks like a peace so deep it could only have grown in soil that was once stripped bare.

You have done the math and the years do not add up. Hand Him the ledger. He is better at math than grief is, and His answer is always the same: I will repay.

Journaling

1. What years feel eaten to you, and what did the locusts take?

   You might start with something like: my twenties feel gone to survival mode, and I never got to just be young.

2. What is the difference for you between getting the years back and being repaid for them?

   It might be something small and gentle, like: getting them back is impossible, but repayment feels like He can still make it count.

3. Where have you already seen a small repayment, a green shoot in the stripped garden?

   You could gently say: my pain helped a friend feel less alone last month, and that felt like a harvest.

Closing Prayer

Jesus, my Restorer,

Thank You for the promise of repayment. Thank You that no year is too eaten, no season too stripped, for You to redeem. I hand You the ledger of lost years.

Repay me, Lord. Make the empty places fruitful again.

Amen.

Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

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