What to Do About the Time You Feel You Wasted

Some Christians look back on a stretch of their lives and see wasted years. Time sunk into a relationship that damaged you. A career you chased that turned out to be the wrong one. A lot of the time there's no big sin to confess, just the grief of years you can't return and can't redo. That's its own kind of loss, and it deserves to be named. Bart has watched people, good people, add up years of their lives and call them a waste, and he's learned to take that grief seriously, because God does.This episode opens with Addie Zierman, a teenager youth pastors pointed to, stacked WWJD bracelets up her arm and burning to do everything right for God. She and a boy named Chris set out to be the most on-fire Christians in the room. By her early 20s the fire had turned into exhaustion and anger. She married young and unprepared, and she started to come apart.God speaks to that kind of loss from an unlikely place. Joel wrote to farmers who had lost everything to a plague of locusts, insects that came in waves and ate the crops and the seed, years of work gone. Joel 2:25 records God's promise: "I will give you back what you lost to the swarming locusts, the hopping locusts, the stripping locusts, and the cutting locusts." Notice He doesn't pretend the loss away or tell them it wasn't so bad. He calls it what it was, a great destroying army, and then He promises to give the years back.That is the difference between rewinding and redeeming. Rewinding would erase the years, and no one gets to do that. Redeeming takes those years, locusts and all, and puts them to work for good. You can't reach 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. The years weren't wasted after all. They were seed for a harvest you couldn't see yet.That's what happened to Addie. Slowly she found her way back to Jesus and to the ordinary, imperfect people of the church. She traded a faith built on looking on fire for one she could live in, and the years she thought she'd thrown away became the work she's known for now, so other people can find their way back too. The wasted years got more than forgiven. They got repurposed.BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:Why some regret is grief over lost time, with no moral failure attachedWhat Joel 2:25 promises about the years the locusts ateThe difference between rewinding your past and letting God redeem itYou can't rewind the years you lost. The God of Joel 2:25 can redeem them, and He is never handed a ruined thing He can't use.Share This Episode:https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/297Need Prayer? Leave me a voicemail:https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemailWant to keep these devotions coming? Please consider supporting this podcast.https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/Rate and Reviewhttps://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/reviews/new/Connect with BartFacebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylivesWebsite: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.comFeeling spiritually drained? Start here. Download your free copy of my eBook Making Time for Jesus here: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/subscribe.