When God Restores the Years
Locust armies, the birth of podcasts, and my strange Christian life at the turn of the century
What I didn’t fully understand at the time was that sometimes God creates by first un-creating, restores by laying waste, reconstitutes us by scattering our words and fallowing our fields first.
I still don’t fully understand this.
It was summer 2001 (maaaaybe 2002?). Highschool graduation was still some years off.
On the hottest days, I’d while away entire afternoons at one of several cool places in town—the YMCA, the library, a random hardware store whose owners didn’t mind me loitering with a book in the bulk nail aisle for hours on end. (Clearly I was aiming for “cool” as in temperature, not trend-setter.)
One afternoon, I made the long trek on my bike along the fields of Wittman Airport—a patchwork of weed-sprouted landing strips that mostly serviced hobby pilots—to the (now defunct) BASIC Books, our local Christian bookstore/cafe/cringey-small-town-attempt-at-hipster-watering-hole.
The place was a fixture of my youth and young adult life.
In addition to being the gathering place of choice among my friends and youth group leaders, BASIC was where I purchased a Bible with my own money for the first time. OBVIOUSLY it was Nelson’s Extreme Teen NKJV, because you can’t beat that migraine-inducing cover palette or the subtitle’s eloquent distillation of the Bible’s ENTIRE MESSAGE into one, quintessentially ‘90s slogan (that sounds like it could have been stolen from a Bon Jovi song, but it most certainly wasn’t because Bon Jovi was sinful. Also stealing.)
Just a future with a promise, baby!
Thankfully, once my palate matured, I graduated to the infinitely more sophisticated Zondervan NIV Study Bible.
Other critical life junctures of my young adulthood that unfolded within the confines of the BASIC-Books metaverse…
It’s where I worked my first (and thankfully, for anyone who actually had to be served by me, LAST) job as a barista during college. (Let’s just say filling one repetitive coffee order after another wasn’t great for what could lovingly be termed “existential fragility,” and this affected the quality of both my coffee and customer service skills.)
It’s where, circa 2005, I listened to my first podcast after Curtis, my boss, tried to explain this new thing called iTunes. A show? That you listened to instead of watched? Okaaaay, Curtis.
Back then, we didn’t know how addictive podcasts were—as a culture, we’d only recently begun facing the music on nicotine (not enough to ban smoking in restaurants or public places, mind you, but… we’d get there eventually). Podcasts seem safe enough.
And so, innocently ignorant of the fact he was basically introducing me to a gateway drug, Curtis started me out with something light and Christian: Ravi Zacharias’s show “Let My People Think” (this was decades before Zacharias’s monstrous concealment of sexual misconduct was publicly revealed).
I was hooked by the end of the first episode.
In those days, we had to listen to podcasts through our computer (or iPod if you had one, which I didn’t), because cell phones weren’t up to the task yet. Being a podcast listener thus required a certain degree of dedication and commitment, of sitting still, a virtue the ancients might call stabilitas loci. That or a willingness to carry our laptops around, the speakers set to the highest setting.
But enough about Podcasts 1.0…
BASIC was also where I got a purity ring. I was 17. That thin pewter band—the word “Jesus” engraved in a font that now strikes as maybe a little too playful for the occasion—would stay on my finger until I got married over a decade later, long after I’d begun distancing myself from purity culture for years. (As much as the symbolism of purity rings had begun to feel problematic to me by that point, somehow the symbolism of prematurely taking off a purity ring seemed even more so. So I didn’t.)
But this isn’t a story about all the strange Evangelical baggage BASIC epitomized.
In fact, my memories of that place are mostly fond ones. Case in point: that afternoon in 2001.
Perusing the nonfiction section in the back recesses of the bookstore, nearly hidden behind aisles of the more in-demand products like Christian romance novels and Thomas Kinkade wall hangings the approximate size of a teenage elephant, I was taken in by a memoir I hadn’t noticed on the shelves before.
I recall almost nothing about it except the broad brushstrokes of its narrative arc.
The woman who wrote it had lived through some kind of *very painful and prolonged experience* (Schizophrenia? Domestic abuse? Drug addiction? Again, I don’t remember).
After years in this torturous situation, whatever it was, she emerged with renewed faith and hope.
But that only invited a whole new dilemma: what to do with all the years she had lost to said *very painful experience I don’t remember.*
She found consolation in a verse I’d never encountered before, not in all the months of reading an entire chapter of Extreme Teen Bible every day:
“I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten.” (Joel 2:25)
Knowing nothing of the context of this verse, it communicated to me a simple and unalloyed promise: that God will bring back years we thought had been stolen from us—that He restores not just the land the locust have ravaged, but somehow, the years themselves.
As young as I was, and as stable as my life may have seemed to others at that time, this promise was deeply felt and deeply needed.
That I remember neither the title nor author nor cover of this book, but can nevertheless recall with almost photographic precision the shoddy typesetting—perhaps printed from a mimeographed copy—on the page I first encountered this verse, tells you about all you need to know about that season of my life, and the way that verse has traveled with me in the years since.
He did restore those years for me, but He has also allowed the locust to return for other ones, usually to dismantle what I am too afraid to let go of. And then? And then He has restored and re-restored the years all over again.
The Day of the Lord has come and gone for me countless times, and will doubtless come again.
What I didn’t understand then, due to my lack of both biblical and existential understanding, was that—in the context of Joel’s prophecy—it was God, not some random army of “bad guys,” who had sent (or would be sending) the locust in the first place.
I didn’t understand that in this verse, locusts weren’t symbolic of the sort of morally neutral suffering we experience through no fault of our own—like grief, trauma, abuse—the suffering endemic to life in a fractured world. They had been, essentially, a punishment. A chastening. A “great army” God had “sent among” (2:25) His people to soften, turn, and re-turn them to His graciousness and compassion (2:14).
I didn’t understand that sometimes God creates by destroying, restores by laying waste, reconstitutes us by scattering our words and fallowing our fields first.
I still don’t fully understand this.
What I do know is that He did restore those years, the ones the locust had already devoured even as I sat there, in the bowels of a bookstore that was about as authentic as a pop-tart, a teenager so desperate for hope she could stake her life on a mere page of a mere memoir now lost to time.
He restored those years, but He has also allowed the locust to return for other ones, usually to dismantle what I am too afraid to let go of. And then? And then He has restored and re-restored the years all over again.
The Day of the Lord has come and gone for me countless times, and will doubtless come again.
In all this, the verse—however little I understood it then, or have come to understand it now, or realize how little I ever will understand of it—has traveled with me, broken with me, been restored with me through all the little pictures I’ve painted in my head of God and how He saves us, pictures that themselves are always incomplete and which He allows the locust to devour from time to time, that I may come to more fully know Him and participate in His fullness and the Mystery of His salvation.
This the “backstory” behind the name of my upcoming group program, Restore, which takes its inspiration from Joel 2:25, a verse that—as elusive as its full meaning continues to be—has been a rod to tether my tender stalks to as they heal and grow taller.
The promise of restoring the years we have lost to the locusts of sin—whether our own or sin inflicted against us—is, for me at least, one of the most comforting in all of Scriptures when it comes to experiences of trauma and their aftermath.
For a long time I’ve been wanting to build a trauma healing coaching community for Eastern-leaning Christians (read: Orthodox and Eastern-rite Catholics). Coming to Orthodoxy has been integral to my own healing, but it has also taken work, insight, wise pastoral counsel, mistakes, and humility to translate some of the riches of Orthodoxy to the wounds I’ve accumulated from major traumas in my life.
I also know that for some, faith is directly tied to their trauma wounds. For them, it’s difficult to lean into faith in any meaningful way, because doing so brings them into contact with the crippling weight of memories and distress. This can happen when we’ve experienced spiritual abuse in Christian contexts, communities, or homes, but it can also happen if we simply haven’t learned ways of inhabiting faith without the soul-deadening rules of engagement other traumas have instilled in us.
In the course of my own learning and growing and healing, most recently through my work as a certified trauma-informed coach, I’ve come alongside people in 1:1 settings and through informational webinars, as well as a variety of group coaching programs on peripherally related topics. But what’s been missing is a community that is specifically intended to integrate trauma healing skills with an Orthodox understanding of the soul, spirituality, and what it means to be human.
It’s hard to believe but the launch of the first run of that program is only a week away.
If you feel like you’ve lost years of your life to trauma or other deep life wounds, we’d love to have you.
Key details
Who:
Who’s leading: The program will be facilitated and moderated by me, Nicole Roccas. In addition to being a certified trauma-informed coach, I’m also a trauma survivor and an (always in process) Orthodox Christian.
Who can join: The program is open to anyone curious about how to apply practices and insights from the Christian East to their healing journey, regardless of faith background, but it is specifically intended for trauma survivors from Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Eastern Catholic backgrounds.
When: July 24 - August 29, 2023 (Enrollment ends July 27)
Weekly group sessions: Thursday nights, 7:30-9PM Eastern (the first session will be July 27)
All participants are granted access to view session recordings.
What: Restore combines community oriented, practice-based approaches to trauma healing with historical Christian traditions and practices to give participants opportunities to grow and move forward in their healing journey.
Pricing: $199 for total cost of program (option to pay in one sum or spread the fee out over two installments)
Thank you for this. :) In the middle of a period of life where so much has been destroyed, being reminded of God and His promises is always a good thing.