I did not come to faith until I was in my sixties, and I keep grieving all the years I spent somewhere else. Can anything be done with what is left?

“And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.”

Joel is speaking to farmers who had watched successive waves of locusts eat several seasons of harvest. The loss was real and those years were genuinely gone. What is promised is not a rewritten past but a restoration on the far side of it. The promise is addressed to a community that had already counted its losses honestly, which is a very different thing from being told the losses did not matter.

“Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”

Paul writes this from custody, late in life, having spent his early years persecuting the very people he now serves. He had more wasted time to account for than most of us. His method is not denial but direction: he refuses to let the past set the agenda for whatever remains. Coming from a man with his particular history, forgetting what is behind is a hard discipline rather than an easy sentiment.