A passage of scripture I used to cling to was found in Joel 2:25
I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten
I first heard it out of context in a testimony video my church produced. A man who felt like he had wasted so much of his life apart from God tearfully quoted the verse with the conviction that it was true for him today. That somehow, someway, the years that he believed he wasted would be restored in some manner. This wasn't a literal picture of a longer life, but rather a metaphor for fuller years to come.
I would weep over this verse. In my depression, in my anguish, I would hold fast to the idea that the time I am losing will be restored with fullness by God. This hope that I clung to I think is best articulated by lyrics from Say You Will by Jess Ray
Will You return what was stolen?
Will You not come and revive us again?
Will we reap what we have sown in tears?
Will you restore the wasted years?
I wanted my tears to mean something. I was desperate for it. I wanted my tears of obedience to grow as joy for the harvest, a bountiful yield I would one day reap. Even today, this part of the song is the easiest way to bring me to tears. Because I had so much unconsummated hope, because my pain was so acutely present, because I could feel myself losing days, weeks, months to depression.
I don't know when exactly I put Joel 2:25 in its full context, inside the story of Israel at the time of Joel -- this was a specific promise from God to his people. When I read Joel, I started to doubt whether or not this verse could really be applied to my life today. The truth is I needed the hope it offered too much to admit to myself that it wasn't a promise made to me. I told myself that since all scripture reveals God's never changing character, the fact that he would do this for his people then means he would do it for his people now. And maybe that's true. But now I think there probably were other factors at play and it certainly wasn't a promise made to me.
I saw a tiktok today that gave me language to represent how I feel now that hauntingly (at least for me) carries the verbiage of the above passages
The quote is from The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin
She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet.
She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil.
She went in pain, because she was free.
What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty.
Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake.
It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.
The road goes upwards towards the light
But the laden traveler may never reach the end of it
Say to me that the years your locusts destroyed will be restored. Tell me now that I will reap joy from the tears I have sown.
I weep now for the years spent in bondage to a useless evil. What exactly that was -- Christianity, the prohibition on homosexuality, evangelical fundamentalism, Jesus, the bible -- I do not know exactly. I'm still figuring that out.
