Finding Jesus Through the Fog of Separation or DivorceSample

He redeems and restores.

If I could describe the year my marriage ended in one word it would be ‘lost’. I had lost my hopes, my dreams and I felt I had lost the chance to live a full life in God. What do ‘lost years’ look like for us? Lost years seem to be the years that you can’t get back. Years where the fruit you thought was going to come in life was devoured by someone else's sin or our own sin. I had plans for the future, but I feared the coming years may be empty.

I thought my life was stained, marked, and discarded forever. I started to wonder, had I exhausted the patience of God, would God still have time to look at me and bless me with a hope and a future. Could God give me back those lost years? 

The prophet Joel describes the suffering of the Israelites when they turned away from God.  A plague of locusts that have devoured the land, consumed all the crops that the people and their animals depended on. When the Israelites chose to come back to the Lord, God promised to not only deliver the people from this plague and famine but to give to them all that they would have had during that time. 

Dear sister, like the Israelites we too can turn back to God in repentance. We can turn back with the faith that God will restore what was lost during the suffering that came from the sin of others or our own. God wants us all to bring our sin and shame to Him, so we can be redeemed and restored.

 God will turn our past suffering into weapons for His glory, and like this passage from Joel, the time we’ve lost to shame and darkness will be restored to us. God will restore what was lost. In my own life, God has brought me joy, and a new hope.

When God redeems and restores, the enemy is defeated by our testimony and shame will no longer be our companion. 

Reflect 

When we turn to Him, we find abundant blessings that more than compensate for what has been lost. His grace always abounds.