BackstageThe Prayer I Prayed for Years, and It Was the Wrong One
For a long time I prayed a prayer I was certain was faith. Yahuah, erase it. Delete the lost decade. Take the wasted years, the wrong room, the silence I chose, and let me start over at the age I was before it all went sideways. I wanted the calendar rewound. I wanted a clean page, as if the mercy of God were an eraser.
He never once did it. Not a single day subtracted. And it took me an embarrassingly long time to hear what He kept saying underneath my request: child, I do not erase. I repay.
That word broke something open in me, and the album grew out of the crack. I found it in the prophet Joel, chapter two, in a promise so specific it almost sounds like an accountant wrote it: I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten. Not I will pretend they did not happen. Not I will look away from them. Restore. Give back. Repay.
Four Kinds of Locust, Because He Does Not Lump Your Grief Together
The first thing I loved about that prophecy is how particular it is. Joel does not say a bug ate your crops. He names four devourers, the palmerworm, the locust, the cankerworm, the caterpillar. What one left, the next one took. It is grief in stages, and the God who inspired that verse refused to lump the stages together.
That mattered to me more than I can say. When I sat down to actually count my own losses, I did not want a vague pile called the bad time. I wanted honesty.
Twenty-three to the depression I could not name. Fourteen to the wrong man I should not have chosen. Ten to the silent profession that was not the same. Five to the prodigal child whose phone was frozen.
I put that kind of counting into a song on purpose, with a blank left open so you can name your own. Because Yahuah is not a Father who says they are all the same thing. He saw every stage, and He did not flinch at any of them. He keeps a ledger, not to accuse you, but because you cannot repay a debt you refuse to count. Year by year, He knows the date the season started and the date it broke.
The Twist: I Stopped Asking Him to Erase
The turn of the whole record, the song the whole thing is built to arrive at, is the one where the prayer finally gets corrected. I had spent so long asking for subtraction. And one day the answer came back inverted.
I stopped asking You to erase, and You started showing me repay. You don't subtract the locust years. You add the wondrous days.
Sit with the difference, because it is enormous. Subtraction shrinks your story down to the parts you are proud of. Repayment lets the whole thing live, even the wreckage, and then pays interest on it. The Hebrew verb under the promise is shalam: to make whole, to complete, to pay back in full. It is the root behind shalom. Repayment is not damage control. It is peace poured back into the exact place the damage happened.
You Were Not Absent From Those Years
There is a quieter song in the middle of the record that I almost did not include, because it names a grief people rarely say out loud, the shock of the mirror. You catch your reflection one morning and the face is older than the story in your head. You went in young. Where did the time go?
I needed to answer that honestly, because the cheap answer, don't dwell on it, is a lie that leaves people ashamed. Here is the true one:
The years did not skip me. I was inside them. I was breathing while the locust ate. I was praying while the seasons hardened.
You were not absent during the wasted years. You lived every one of them. And more to the point, so did Yahuah. He did not skip the seasons either; He was in the waiting room the whole time. The locust ate the calendar, but it did not eat the breath of the believer, and it did not touch the prayers you prayed with no visible answer. Those were not lost. They were seed in the ground. When I finally believed that the Father saw the inside of my years and not just the wreckage on the surface, the shame around the lost time began to lift on its own.
Larger Than Was Taken
Here is the part that still makes me want to shout. When Yahuah repays, He does not hand you back the same amount the thief took. He gives it back larger.
I wrote a whole song around a man I will call Brother Calvin, a composite of a hundred real recovery testimonies I have sat inside of. Sixteen to thirty-nine gone to addiction, a couch, a needle, a daughter he lost the right to visit. Then, slowly, a turning. And by his fifties: eight landscaping trucks, and eight recovering brothers driving them. Three foster boys tucked in at night on the same couch his own mother once tucked him into. Fifty regulars at a Wednesday recovery circle he leads.
Father, You did not give me back my twenties. You gave me a season larger than the theft. I have repaid people in my fifties more than I damaged in my twenties.
He did not get his calendar back. He got a repayment that dwarfed the loss. That is the pattern all through Scripture, the God who takes what the enemy meant for evil and makes it feed multitudes. What the locust ate did not exhaust His treasury.
Never Ashamed Again
Joel does not stop at the repayment. He adds a line that is really the reason I could put my own name on this record: and my people shall never be ashamed. That is the closing note of the whole album, not merely that the years come back, but that the shame attached to them finally has to leave.
The final song ends with a picture I cannot get out of my head. The Father wears the locust years now. I wear His wondrous vow. The exchange is complete. He does not ask you to hide the decade you lost; He asks you to wear the testimony of how thoroughly it was repaid, out loud, forehead-high.
I made this for the person who is convinced the best chapters are already behind them. For the one doing the math on wasted time and coming up short and ashamed. Stop praying my old prayer. He is not going to erase it, and thank God for that, because erasure would rob you of the very testimony He intends to make larger than the loss. Bring Him the honest count. Name the years. Then watch what a Father does who has never once dealt with His children in any way but wondrously. The locust does not get the last word. He does. And the last word is repaid.
