God Is Not Done With Your Story

Summer at the Movies | Monday Reflection | Week 4

"I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten." — Joel 2:25

Sunday you heard about a group of people who ended up somewhere they never planned, rebuilding something they thought was finished, discovering that the chapter they assumed was the last one was actually the setup for something they had not imagined yet.

Most of us have a version of that story. Years that felt wasted. A season that cost more than it produced. A stretch of time we look back on and feel the ache of what was lost or squandered or simply hard in ways that left a mark. We have quietly written those years off as the price of getting to where we are now.

But Joel says repay. God is not just moving you past the lost years. He is moving you through them. The locust years are not a gap in your story that God is politely ignoring. They are part of the material He is working with.

Here is the Monday question. What year are you still writing off? What season are you still treating as evidence that you are behind, that you missed something, that the best version of your story required a different path than the one you actually walked?

God repays. That means He takes the loss seriously enough to account for it. The years are not gone. They are being redeemed. And what He makes from them will surprise you if you stop treating them as the reason things cannot be different now.

Your story is not behind schedule. It is still being written.