Day 21 of Her New Beginning: 31 Days of Healing, Identity, Renewal and Purpose
Scripture: Joel 2:25 KJV
“And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten…”
There is something particularly painful about looking back and feeling that you lost time. Money can sometimes be earned again. Possessions can be replaced. Another opportunity may come. But years feel different because we cannot turn the calendar backwards. A woman can look at her life and quietly wonder, What would my life look like if I had known then what I know now? What if I had made a different decision? What if I had left earlier, started earlier, listened earlier or believed in myself sooner?
Sometimes the years were lost through our own choices. At other times, circumstances we could not control interrupted the life we thought we would have. Perhaps you spent years in an environment that drained you, invested yourself in people who did not value what you carried, postponed something because fear kept saying you were not ready, or spent a season simply surviving when you thought you should have been building.
Regret can make the past look enormous.
Then God says something almost unbelievable in Joel 2:25: “I will restore to you the years.”
Notice that He does not merely say He will restore what was eaten. He speaks about the years connected to the loss. That is a remarkable picture of redemption because years are something human beings cannot manufacture.
You cannot create another 2019. You cannot order three replacement years online and ask for express delivery. Once time has passed, naturally speaking, it is gone. Yet God speaks into something we consider unrecoverable and says, “I will restore.”
Restoration Is Greater Than Rewinding the Clock
When we hear the word restoration, we sometimes imagine God putting everything back exactly as it was. But biblical restoration is often greater than returning to an earlier condition.
God does not need to rewind your calendar to redeem your years.
He can bring such fruitfulness, wisdom, healing and purpose into what remains that the years behind you lose their power to define the years ahead of you. What took ten years from you does not have to control the next ten.
This is important because some women are waiting to feel as though the past never happened before they believe they have been restored. But God can redeem something without erasing the history of it. The scar may remain while the wound is healed. The memory may remain while the pain loses its authority. You may remember what happened without continuing to live there.
Joseph could not recover the years he spent as a slave and prisoner. God did not send him backwards and give him another teenage life. Instead, God brought him into such extraordinary purpose that the painful years became part of a story much larger than the pit.
Joseph eventually told his brothers in Genesis 50:20, “But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good.”
The evil did not become good. God brought good out of what was meant for evil.
That is redemption.
Regret Can Become Another Locust
There are things we should regret because regret can lead us to repentance, wisdom and change. If I made a wrong decision, maturity does not require me to pretend it was right. I can acknowledge it, repent where necessary, receive God’s forgiveness and learn from it.
The danger begins when regret becomes our permanent address.
If yesterday took five years from you and you spend the next five years grieving the first five, the loss has doubled.
Sometimes the locust has stopped eating, but regret continues the meal.
Paul understood the importance of refusing to live backward. Philippians 3:13 says, “forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before.” Paul certainly remembered his history. He could speak about it in detail. So forgetting did not mean developing spiritual amnesia. It meant refusing to allow what was behind him to control his pursuit of what God had placed before him.
There are lessons behind you, but your assignment is not behind you.
You cannot change the decision you made ten years ago, but you can decide what wisdom gained from it will produce today. You cannot recover every opportunity you missed, but you can stop allowing the memory of missed opportunities to make you miss the one standing in front of you now.
God Is Not Nervous About Your Age
One of the lies attached to lost years is the fear that it is now too late.
Too late to begin.
Too late to study.
Too late to build.
Too late to discover purpose.
Too late to become the woman you should have become years ago.
But Scripture is filled with people whose lives refuse to fit our preferred timetable. Moses was eighty years old when he stood before Pharaoh. Abraham and Sarah encountered promise at an age when natural reasoning had already closed the file. Caleb was eighty-five when he said in Joshua 14:12, “Now therefore give me this mountain.”
Apparently, Heaven does not panic over birthdays the way we sometimes do.
There is wisdom in recognising seasons, and we should never use faith to deny reality. Yet we must also refuse to turn age into a prison God never built.
Perhaps you are not late. Perhaps you are simply standing at the beginning of something that did not arrive according to your original schedule.
God is not looking at your life saying, “If only she had started five years ago, I could have done something.”
He knew every year before you lived it.
Restoration Can Come in Unexpected Forms
Sometimes restoration means God gives another opportunity. Sometimes He restores something we thought was completely lost. But restoration can also come in forms we did not expect.
The years you spent struggling may become wisdom that protects another woman from making the same mistakes. The season that broke your heart may develop compassion that makes people feel safe around you. The years you thought were wasted may have taught you discernment, patience and strength that you could not have received from a classroom.
This does not mean we romanticise pain. Some things should never have happened. Some experiences were genuinely damaging, and we do not have to call darkness light in order to believe in redemption.
What we can say is that darkness does not get the final word when God enters the story.
Romans 8:28 tells us, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God.” It does not say all things are good. It says God is able to work through them toward His purpose.
That means even the chapter you wish you could tear out of your story can be surrendered to the Author.
Steward the Years in Front of You
There comes a point when restoration requires us to stop staring only at what is gone and recognise what remains.
You are still here.
There is still breath in your body. There are still prayers to pray, things to learn, people to love, ideas to develop, places to serve and moments of joy you have not yet experienced.
Do not become so occupied with the woman you could have been that you neglect the woman God is forming now.
Perhaps you should have started earlier. Start now.
Perhaps you should have learned that lesson sooner. Use it now.
Perhaps you stayed somewhere longer than you should have. Thank God for the wisdom and walk differently now.
Perhaps fear delayed you. Do not give fear another year as compensation.
There is something powerful about a woman who stops fighting with the calendar and begins stewarding the time in her hands.
Psalm 90:12 says, “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” We cannot control how many years are behind us, but we can ask God for wisdom concerning the days still before us.
Your Future Is Not Empty
Joel’s promise of restoration was given in the context of devastating loss, yet the chapter moves from devastation toward abundance, satisfaction and the presence of God among His people. The locust was not allowed to become the final picture.
Neither should loss become the final picture of your life.
God may restore differently from the way you imagined. He may not recreate every opportunity or return every person. But He knows how to bring fruit out of seasons that appeared barren. He knows how to compress lessons, open unexpected doors and cause the wisdom of yesterday to serve the purpose of tomorrow.
So release the argument you have been having with your past. You cannot go back and become the woman you were supposed to be then, but you can surrender yourself to God and become the woman He is calling you to be now.
The God who says, “I will restore to you the years,” is not intimidated by what has already passed.
There is still life ahead of you, and there is still enough future for God to surprise you.
Prayer
Father, I give You the years I cannot recover by my own strength. I surrender every regret, delay, wrong decision, missed opportunity and painful season that has kept my heart looking backward. Where repentance is needed, give me humility to repent. Where healing is needed, heal me. Where wisdom has been gained, teach me to use it well. Redeem what I thought was wasted and help me steward the days that remain with faith, courage and joy. I trust You with my past, my present and my future. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Today’s Declaration
My past will not imprison my future. God is able to restore the years and redeem what I thought was wasted. I refuse to give regret more of the time that remains. I will carry the wisdom of yesterday without living in yesterday. My age, delays and detours do not place me beyond the purposes of God. There is still fruitfulness ahead of me, there is still purpose in my life, and God is not finished with my story. I am a Wonder Model Woman.
