What to Do About the Time You Feel You Wasted

Haddie Zaherman was the kind of teenager that youth

pastors point to. She wore her WWJD bracelets stacked up her

arm. Christian rock was the only music allowed on her stereo and

she led Bible studies and burned to do everything right for God.

Then she fell for a boy named Chris. He was headed for the

mission field and loved Jesus with the same intensity she had.

Together, they set out to be the most on-fire Christians in the

room, guarding every rule and especially the ones about purity.

By her early 20s, something had changed. The fire she had worked

so hard to keep burning had turned into exhaustion and anger.

She married young and unprepared and she started to come apart.

We'll come back to where Addie ended. But first,

welcome to Daily Devotions for Busy Lives. I'm Bart Leger.

Here's what I've watched in ministry. I've listened to

people, good people, add up years of their lives and then

call them a waste. Maybe a woman who gave a decade to a man who

tore her down in every way or hurt her. A man who climbed a

career ladder for 20 years, then looked around and knew he'd been

on the wrong ladder the whole time.

Sometimes it's just the ache of time you loved and lost. Time

you'd give anything to have back. I've learned to take that grief

pretty seriously because God does. Maybe you've done the math

yourself. You look back on a stretch of your life and see

wasted years. The time you sank into a relationship that damaged

you or a career you chased that turned out to be the wrong one.

And a lot of the time, there's no big sin to confess. Just the

grief of years you can't return and you can't redo. That's its

own kind of loss. God has a word for exactly this and it comes

from an unlikely place. A prophet named Joel writing to

farmers who had lost everything to a plague of locusts. Listen

to Joel 2.25. The Lord says, I will give you back what you lost

to the swarming locust, the hopping locust, the stripping

locust, and the cutting locust. It was I who sent this great

destroying army against you. Picture what those farmers had

lost. Locusts came in in waves and ate everything. The crops

and the seed they'd saved. Not one bad afternoon, but years of

work going into the mouths of insects. That's the loss God's

speaking to. And notice he doesn't pretend it away. He

doesn't tell them it wasn't so bad or that the years didn't

count. He calls it for what it was, a great destroying army.

And then he makes a promise no one could make. I will give you

back the years the locust ate. He's promising to restore the

years themselves and make them count for something. Only God

can do that. Only God can do that. You and I can't reach back

into the past and refill it. God can take the emptiest stretch of

your life and grow something out of it that couldn't have grown

any other way.

That's what happened to Addie.

That's what happened to Addie. Addie nearly lost it all. She

has written that she almost washed out of church and out of

her marriage on a sea of tequila and depression. The years she

spent trying to perform her faith left her empty and angry.

Her story kept going. Slowly, Addie found her way back to

Jesus and back to the ordinary, imperfect people of the church.

She traded a faith built on looking on fire for one she

could live in. The years she thought she had wasted became

the very thing she now writes about so other people can find

their way back too. The years she thought she'd thrown away

became the work she's known for now. The wasted years got more

than forgiven. They got repurposed. God took the stretch

she was most ashamed of and turned it into help for people

walking the same road. That's Joel 225 in a life. He gave her

back the years the locust ate. Here's today's challenge. Think

about the years you've been calling wasted. Admit them to

God. The relationship or the wrong turn you'd take back if

you could. Don't minimize the loss and don't let it be the end

of the sentence. Ask him to do the Joel 225 thing, to give

those years back to you by making them count now in how you

love people and point them to Jesus. redeem them to start.

Father, some of us are grieving years we can't get back, and

we've been calling them a waste. Thank you that you don't wave

the loss away and that you've promised to restore the years

the locust have eaten. Take the stretches we regret, the wrong

turns and the empty years, and make them count for something in

us and through us. We can't rewind our lives. We're asking

you to redeem them. In Jesus' name, amen. If daily devotions

for busy lives has become a part of your day, make sure you're

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dailydevotionsforbusylives.com slash follow. I'd love to have

you along. Thanks for joining me on Daily Devotions for Busy

Lives. Remember, you can't rewind the years you lost, but

the God of Joel 2.25 can redeem them, and He has never handed a

ruined thing He can't use. Come back next time for more

encouragement to help you live grounded in God's truth. Until

then, God bless and have a great day.