I lost years to that relationship. I don't know how else to say it. Good years. Years in my thirties when I should have been building something — a community, a sense of self, a life I actually chose. Instead I was surviving. Shrinking. Holding my breath. Waiting for the version of him I'd married to come back.
And when it was over, one of the things that gutted me most wasn't the pain of leaving. It was the inventory. Looking at everything the years had cost me. Friends I'd pulled away from to keep the peace. Opportunities I hadn't taken because he'd made me doubt myself. The woman I was at twenty-eight, before all of it, and the distance between her and who I'd become.
For a long time I couldn't even grieve it properly, because grief felt like self-pity. Like looking backward when I was supposed to be grateful to be free.
Then I read Joel 2:25.
The Verse That Cracked Me Open
"I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent among you." — Joel 2:25
This verse is God speaking to a people who have watched everything be consumed. The context is an actual locust plague — an agricultural devastation that wiped out crops, stripped trees, and left communities with nothing. It was the kind of loss that looked total. Irreversible. The kind you look at and wonder how you come back from this.
And God says: I will restore the years the locust ate — God brings beauty from ashes, and nothing is wasted.
Not I will help you forget them. Not I will give you something different. Not Start fresh, as if this didn't happen.
Restore. The actual years. The actual loss.
The Specific Cruelty of Years
There's something particularly heavy about losing years to abuse. It's not just what happened — it's what didn't happen. The becoming that got interrupted. The relationships you didn't build because you were too exhausted or too controlled. The confidence you should have accumulated by now that got stripped instead.
I've talked to women in their forties who grieve their thirties, women in their fifties who grieve their forties. Women who look at other women their age — women who don't carry this — and feel something they can't quite name. Not jealousy exactly. Grief for a version of themselves that never got to exist.
That grief is legitimate. It is not self-pity. It is an honest accounting of what was taken.
And God is not asking you to pretend it wasn't taken.
Sitting in the Grief Before the Promise
I want to be careful here, because I think Christians sometimes weaponize restoration promises against grief. As in: Don't mourn, He's going to restore it. Why are you sad when the promise is right there?
That is not how God works, and it's not what Joel 2:25 teaches.
Look at where the promise sits. It comes in the middle of lament — in the middle of a people naming their loss, pouring out their grief before God, and not being told to stop. The locust imagery is brutal. God doesn't soften it. He names the scale of the destruction before He names the restoration.
Grief is not the opposite of faith. Grief is what honest people do in the face of real loss. And God honors it by not rushing past it.
If you need to spend time in the accounting — in the honest reckoning with what was taken — that is not a failure of faith. That is the very thing that makes restoration mean something.
What Restoration Actually Looks Like
I don't think restoration means God will give you back the literal years. I think it means something harder and more beautiful: that nothing you lost is wasted in His economy — your story becomes someone else's way out in His economy.
The years you spent surviving taught you things about yourself you wouldn't have learned otherwise. The compassion you have for other women in pain was forged in that fire. The depth of your faith — when it comes — will have a weight to it that easy years don't produce.
That is not spin. It is not it was all worth it — because some things should never have happened, and God isn't asking you to call them good. But He is saying: I can work with this. Even this.
Restoration doesn't erase the years the locust ate. It redeems them.
The Promise Is Personal
Here is what I want you to take from Joel 2:25: God is not speaking in generalities. He is speaking to a specific people about a specific loss, and He is making a specific promise.
He knows what your locust ate. He knows the exact inventory. The relationships, the milestones, the version of you that got taken apart. He is not looking at some aggregate of your pain and making a broad promise about things getting better.
He is saying: Those specific years. I see them. And I am going to restore what was taken.
You are allowed to grieve the years. You are also allowed to hold the promise. Both are real. Both belong to you.
If you want to do this healing work inside a community that understands exactly this kind of grief — the slow, quiet grief of years lost to what was done to us — I'd love for you to join us in The Prodigal Path membership. Women who get it. Scripture-anchored. The kind of safe space that helps the grief move the way it needs to.
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