I remember a few summers ago the news was filled with predictions that all greenery in the Chicago area would disappear because the cascades were coming. Well as of yesterday things still look green so I guess the birds downloaded the Open Table app and went to town.
Locusts akin to those critters like to get together. A desert locust swarm can pack 60 million locusts into less than half a square mile and stretch to 460 square miles in size. When the book of Joel talks about the locust, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, and how they've ripped the heart out the people of Judah, you know it's describing every farmer's worst nightmare. Each locust can eat its weight in plants in 24 hours, so a full-size locust swarm could eat 423 million pounds of plants a day. A whole year of crops, a whole community's livelihood, and a whole nation's survival can be devoured in minutes.
Stay with that locust storm for a moment. I'm not thinking necessarily of the kind that destroys crops and petrifies farmers. I'm thinking of a lawyer in Libertyville who lost a large hotel in a financial deal. He felt his rights had been painfully and criminally taken from him. He would come into church and rant about how unfair it was. I tried to say that often things are unfair or immoral but not necessarily illegal. He would hear none of it.
Year after year he chased his case threw the courts, having to see it tossed out, from one appeal after another. I don't think he ever realized how much this case had completely taken over his life.
His wife who eventually had to leave him for the sake of self and family said, "It feels like so many lost years. All those years," she said over and over. "I'll never get those years back." She felt robbed of a whole section of her life. She felt that their yesterdays had all disappeared into a hole. Even now, nothing could be said about those times - as those years were so covered in shame and shrouded in regret and ring-fenced with grief and misery that they couldn't even be shared with any but the most trusted confidante.
Maybe you're in a story like that. There may well have been a locust swarm in Judah in the fifth-century that ruined farm land and left the people starving. But for the prophet Joel, I read the swarm of locusts as a metaphor for the invading armies that had swarmed into the land of Israel in the preceding centuries, laying waste to the cities and plundering the countryside and leaving the children of God in utter despair.
And this is where the power of the metaphor really kicks in. God visits every part of the suffering land and reawakens it, starting with the soil, and moving on to the animals of the field, and the trees, and finally the rain clouds. Then, when everything is come back to life, God delivers his promise that the people will eat in plenty and be satisfied, that he, the Lord, will dwell in the midst of them, and that they will never again be put to shame.
The long nightmare was over, and there's hope of good things to come. That's great. But where does that put those lost years? What joy does that bring to the time you still struggle to put into words.
What about those moments when an event occurs, that evokes a wave of memories that leave you feeling empty. You hope that no one close to you places their hand on yours because you know if they do you'll crumple into sobbing?
Here's where God speaks right into the heart of your bewilderment and despair. "I will restore the years the swarming locust has eaten." Listen to that. Not just a promise about the future. Not just a determination that the good times will roll and you can put the past behind you. No. No here its restoring taking something from yesterday and making it useful, "I will restore the years the swarming locust has eaten." That's something extraordinary.
Think of the wife who waited and waited for her husband to get over his pride.
"I will restore those years."
I know if you've heard such promises and you've built up resistances to letting them reach the raw parts of you that cry out for understanding and renewal. But now hear a new word. "I will restore the years." Which years? You know which years. God knows which years. The years that you think of as holding no value the years you say why I had to go through those experiences that left me hurt and defensive. Let yourself hear this new promise, beyond anything you'd dared hope. "I will restore the years the swarming locust has eaten."
Swarming locusts aren't evil. They're just being locusts. They do terrible damage, but they're part of creation like the rest of us. The point is, finding who's to blame for those lost years isn't the answer. The years are still lost, whoever's to blame. This isn't about vindication or blame. This is about something more wonderful.
This is about restoration. This is about something that was lost becoming found, something that was a burden and a curse and a plague becoming a gift.
How can that happen? How can the unspeakable and the unmentionable and the constantly threatening source of loss and pain and degradation be restored as something that brings hope? Well, they can be reincorporated. That's to say, they can come to shape your future in unexpected and beautiful ways.
"Experience is the name we give to our mistakes" (Oscar Wilde), and when experience does no more than take you back to the locust years you remember like a bad migraine, there's not much to be said for it. But when experience is given time, and understanding, and discernment, and gentleness, and when you later find yourself in a situation that calls for all the resources you can draw on, then experience can be distilled into wisdom.
We'd all like to imagine we walk forward into our future, but the truth is we walk backwards into our future, composing our reactions and behavior in unforeseen circumstances out of the discarded elements in our own personal histories.
If you're thinking to yourself, "I can't imagine any circumstances in which those locust years could come to offer any kind of blessing," the answer may be, "Perhaps not yet. But there could be something ahead of you where you'll think differently, and where you'll find yourself drawing on that troubling time in ways you could never have predicted."
You remember how greyhounds after their racing adventures were often put up for adoption to families that wanted a large dog. This guy tells the story of being in such a home not long ago where they had adopted a dog who had raced. I guess he was a kind of Dog Whisperer.
One of the little kids was pulling on his tail. An older sibling had his head over on that old dogs stomach, using it for a pillow. That dog seemed so happy, so he asked the dog, "Are you still racing any?" "No, no, no, I don't race anymore." He said, "do you miss the excitement, the cheering screaming crowds of the track." "No," he said, "No, No."
Well the guy said, "what's the matter? Did you just get too old?" "No, I still have some race in me." "Well," the guy said, "was it that you stopping winning?" The dog said, "no, I won over a million dollars for the owner."
"Was it bad treatment then?" he asked. "Oh no," the dog replied, "they treated us royally when we were racing." He said, "then what? Did you get hurt?" The dog said, "nothing like that."
He asked, "what caused you to stop racing?" "I quit." "Yeah, you said that before but why?" The dog paused. "I discovered that what I was chasing after was not a real rabbit. And I quit." He looked at the man saying, "All that running, running, running, running, and what? I was chasing something that isn't real. The rabbit was fake."
Just imagine you were promised a future that didn't just replace what the locust had eaten, didn't just reimburse you for it, but truly grafted those years back into your destiny, no longer now as burden and curse but instead as wisdom and compassion.
Just imagine, in other words, that you were being given the gospel - the gospel that restores our past and opens out our future. That's what the gospel does. And what's the word that describes succinctly the heart of this gospel? The word is resurrection. More than replacement, more than reimbursement, more than reincorporation, more than restoration: the word is resurrection.
The locusts scorched the earth till there was no life in it. Jesus too was buried in that scorched earth and there was no life in him.
But he was brought back into the story, he was restored, so all those years the locust had eaten, the years of his ministry in Nazareth and Galilee, and before them the years of God's companionship with Israel over many centuries and glories and tragedies, all those locust years are restored to us - and we call them the Bible. Our source of wisdom and compassion, the Bible our joy and our gift, the gift that comes from the restoration of those years.
It's resurrection that finally heals the locust years, resurrection that gives us back our past as a gift, resurrection that begins to create our hopeful future out of the ruins of our wasted histories. "I will restore the years the swarming locust has eaten." Think one last time about your wasted years, your locust years.
Is it really beyond God to restore even them? Are you happy to let the swarming locust have the last word? The God who transformed the greatest waste of all, the ruthless slaying of his son - can he not restore your years? Can God not resurrect ... even you?