Most people eventually do a quiet bit of math. You can be thirty-four or fifty-two or seventy. You count the years that went into the wrong relationship, the job you hated and stayed in, the drinking, the drift, the faith you put on a shelf, the calls you never made to a parent who has since died. You get a number. Nobody else ever sees it, and you never say it out loud. But it sits under a lot of what you do, like a debt you're paying on in small, tired installments.

If you have a number like that, this article is for you. I'm not going to tell you the years weren't really lost, because some of them were. I want to show you a different way to pray about them, one that starts with an odd promise from one of the shortest books in the Bible.

The locust years

The book of Joel opens with a disaster. A plague of locusts has stripped the land. Joel lists them in waves ("what the cutting locust left, the swarming locust has eaten") until there's nothing left: no grain, no wine, no oil for the offerings. For an agrarian people, this wasn't one bad season. A crop wiped out meant seed wiped out, which put the next harvest at risk too. The damage ran forward in time.

Then, in Joel 2:25, God says something that doesn't seem to make sense: "I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten."

Read it closely. The promise is not "I will give you back the grain." It says years. Time can't literally be handed back. Nobody gets to relive 2014. So what's being promised?

The context answers it. The verses around it describe threshing floors full of wheat and vats overflowing with wine and oil. The restoration happens in the future harvest. The lost years aren't undone. They're redeemed by what grows next. The new harvest doesn't erase the plague. It makes the plague stop being the end of the story.

That difference is what the rest of this piece is about. Regret prays toward the past and asks for it to be different. Joel 2:25 turns that prayer toward the years still ahead.

Why "if only" feels like prayer but isn't

Psychologists who study regret use the term counterfactual thinking for the mental habit of imagining how things might have gone otherwise. The upward kind, "if only I had…", produces most of regret's sting.

The social psychologist Neal Roese has argued that counterfactuals aren't simply a flaw. They have a function. When you imagine a better alternative, you can pull out a lesson for next time: if only I'd spoken up turns into next time, I'll speak up. Used that way, regret is useful. It's how experience becomes judgment.

The trouble starts when the counterfactual never makes that turn. It loops. The late psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema spent her career studying rumination, which is repetitive, passive focus on your distress and its causes. Her research linked it to deeper and longer-lasting low mood. Rumination feels like you're dealing with the problem. You're thinking hard about it, after all. But it produces no action and no resolution. It just goes around again.

This is why regret can disguise itself as prayer so easily. You lie awake and go back over the years in God's presence, telling them again and asking again why. It feels devout. Often it's rumination with a religious vocabulary: the same loop, now aimed at heaven.

Joel offers a better instruction a few verses earlier: "Rend your hearts and not your garments" (2:13). Tearing your clothes was the public sign of grief. It was dramatic, visible, and could be repeated. Rending the heart is quieter and costs more. It means grieving fully and then actually turning. Ruminating tears the garment over and over. Repentance and grief tear the heart once, honestly, and then face forward.

The years you're actually grieving

It helps to know what kind of regret you're carrying, because the two kinds behave differently.

In a well-known 1995 paper, Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Husted Medvec reviewed research on what people regret. In the short term, people tend to feel the sharpest pain over things they did: the rash word, the bad decision. Over the long run, the regrets people carry most are the things they didn't do. The chances they never took. The love they didn't express. The calling they postponed until it got quiet.

This matters for prayer. Regret over an action usually needs confession and, where possible, repair. Regret over an inaction usually needs something harder: doing the thing now, late, imperfectly, at the age you are.

Many "wasted years" are really inaction regrets. Years spent waiting, numbing out, or hiding. The locust in your story may have been passivity more than any dramatic sin. If so, Joel 2:25 is not mainly a promise of forgiveness. You may already have that. It's a promise that a harvest is still possible, which means planting is still possible. And planting is something you do with your hands, this week.

Praying Joel 2:25 without lying to yourself

There's a cheap way to use this verse: as a slogan that skips the grief. God will restore it all! That isn't what Joel describes. The people mourn first. They gather, they fast, they weep. The promise is spoken into honest lament, not instead of it.

So pray it in two parts.

First, name the loss specifically. Not "I've wasted so much time," which is a fog you can't pray through. Say the actual years and the actual locust: "From 2011 to 2019 I stayed in a marriage I'd emotionally left, and I let it make me small." "I spent my twenties angry at you and called it independence." Specific grief can be held. Vague grief just spreads.

Second, pray the promise forward, with your own years written into it: "Lord, you said you would restore the years the locust ate. I'm not asking you to undo those years. I'm asking for a harvest out of the ones I have left. Show me what to plant."

That last sentence matters most. It turns the prayer from a request about the past, which can't be granted, into a request about the future, which can be answered. Often the answer is surprisingly small and concrete.

What restoration tends to look like

When people describe how lost years were "restored," they rarely mean they got the time back. They mean the lost years turned into something. The person who wasted a decade on addiction becomes the one who can sit, without flinching, beside someone at the start of theirs. The parent who missed too much of one child's life shows up with real attention for the grandchildren. The late starter writes the book at sixty, and it's better because of what the locust taught them.

None of that makes the waste good. Joel never calls the locusts good. But a harvest that grows on land the locusts stripped carries a particular kind of gratitude, from someone who knows exactly how bare that field once was.

Your next moves

  • Write down the span. On paper, name the specific years you regret and the specific "locust" that ate them, in one or two plain sentences. Don't explain it or defend it. Just name it.
  • Sort it into one of two kinds. Next to it, write did or didn't. If it's something you did, is there one person you owe a sincere, no-excuses apology? If it's something you didn't do, what's the smallest version of it you could still do?
  • Pray Joel 2:25 aloud with your years in it. Read the verse, then say: "Restore the years from ___ to ___. Not by undoing them. By what grows next." Out loud, once, today.
  • Turn one "if only" into one "starting now." Take your most persistent counterfactual (if only I'd called her more) and rewrite it as a single action you can take within 48 hours (call her sister on Sunday). Put it on your calendar.
  • Give rumination a rule. The next time the old loop starts, read Joel 2:25 once, say "show me what to plant," and then stand up and do something physical. Don't let the loop finish its lap.

A verse for the years still ahead

Regret doesn't usually leave because of one good insight. It loosens through repetition, by turning your face forward again and again, often daily, until it becomes habit. That's the idea behind Lectio: one verse a day, read slowly and prayed in your own words, so that something like Joel 2:25 has a chance to move from an idea you agree with to a prayer you actually live in. If you're trying to stop going back over the locust years and start planting in the ones you have, it might be a quiet place to begin. Try Lectio here.