It was my first Bible study in our new town, and I was late. I tucked my toddler into the church’s preschool room and jogged down the hall to my small group. I was tired. I hadn’t done our homework and was feeling ambivalent about showing up. Though I was grateful for the mommy break, I was in an unfamiliar town, with people I didn’t know, trying to navigate life as a young mom, and it seemed all my give-a-care had been left in a box, along with everything else we had yet to unpack. 

After the chit-chat and reflection, an older woman in the group spoke up. She read a verse from the passage we were studying.

“I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten” (Joel 2:25, NKJV). 

My head lifted. She looked at the younger women in the room. “Remember, God can always restore what the locusts have eaten. The time. The money. The relationships. The broken hopes. If we will just allow Him too.” I felt something stir inside my heart. 

Ten years later, her words would return with a new depth. 

COVID felt like a living word. We read about it, talked about it, and tried to Lysol wipe it off of everything. Over the next two years, our tight-knit church community scattered, and our neighborhood shut down. I watched the mental health of many close to me strain, and my husband was hospitalized with a COVID-associated illness. The locusts were swarming, and I felt like I was watching them ravish every part of my small, once-controlled world. 

“God can restore what the locusts have eaten.” 

Her words came back to me. But what she didn’t share, maybe in her mercy, was how hard the restoration would be. 

I remembered a prayer from the “12-Step Prayer Book”: 

Change me, O God. Though I cringe, kick, resist, and resent. Pay no attention to me whatsoever.

Restoration can only come when something has crumbled. Before the prophet Joel declared that God would return what the locusts had eaten, he announced a moment of choice for God’s people. For many of us, COVID presented the same opportunity. 

For my family, restoration felt more like a reckoning. We had to face that our old ways and community were no longer where God wanted us. We sold our home and traveled for a year. We surrendered to the unknown. 

Where I could once hide behind the walls of social busyness and connection that brought value and validity, the season of solitude with my family led me to recognize many of my own faults and failures. And I certainly resisted. But there was no doubt that the pain of restoration was more about mercy than punishment.

“Return to the LORD your God,

For He is gracious and merciful,

Slow to anger and of great kindness;

And He relents from doing harm.” (Joel 2: 12-17, NKJV)

And I know that my story is simply an echo of a greater work God was doing through those difficult years. I imagine you have your story too.

A marriage that shifted.

A child that revealed a deep need.

A friendship that ended.

A job that dissolved.

A community that was re-imagined.
The beauty of the call to restoration, to allow ourselves to be changed, is that God can restore what’s been stolen when we surrender and answer like the disciples, “To whom shall we go?” For many of us, COVID showed us that our unwillingness to let God have His way is the locust swarm. Not the hard circumstances. Not the trials. But the reluctance to live authentically and in surrender, allowing God to change us and save us from spiritual self-destruction. God’s great mercy is that He is always ready to restore what’s been taken if we’re willing to let Him. The question is, are we willing?