The Years the Locusts Ate: Restoring a Neglected House, and What It Teaches About Lost Time

There is a moment in restoring an old house when you stop seeing only the damage. At first it is all you notice: the sagging verandah, the termite-eaten door frames, the roof sheets rusted through at the edges, the garden swallowed by macca and guinea grass. Somebody has let this place go for years, maybe decades. Then one afternoon you scrape back a patch of grey paint and find the original blue underneath, or pull up linoleum to discover a mahogany floor, and the house begins to show you what it used to be, and could be again.

People who restore houses often talk about them in almost spiritual language. It is not hard to see why.

A promise to farmers who had lost everything

The prophet Joel wrote to people whose land had been stripped bare. A plague of locusts had come in waves, devouring the crops, the vines, the fig trees, leaving the bark white. Grain offerings stopped. Farmers wept. It was an agricultural and economic disaster, and it took years to recover from.

Into that devastation came God’s promise:

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

It is an extraordinary line when you think about it. You can replace a crop. You cannot, in the normal course of things, replace years. Time lost is lost. Yet God speaks of giving back the years themselves, promising threshing floors full of grain and vats overflowing with wine and oil.

The promise came with a call to return. Earlier in the chapter God says, “Return to me with all your heart” (Joel 2:12). Restoration in Joel is not a mindset people talk themselves into. It is something God does, as people turn back to him.

What neglect does to a house

Houses rarely collapse all at once. They decline in small, unnoticed steps. A gutter blocks and nobody clears it. Water runs down the wall instead of away from it. Paint blisters. The timber behind it softens. Termites find the soft wood. A few years later the frame is hollow and the wall bows. Each step was small. Together they are a swarm.

Often there is a human story behind the neglect: an owner who emigrated and could not manage from afar, an elderly parent who could no longer climb a ladder, a family dispute that left the house in limbo while siblings argued, a season of illness or grief when nobody had the heart for repairs. Houses show the years we could not attend to them.

Lives do the same. Years eaten by addiction, a bad marriage, unemployment, depression, or simply by drifting. Relationships that were not tended. Callings that went unanswered. Many of us can look back on a stretch of time and feel that something consumed it.

How restoration actually happens

Anyone who has restored a house knows it is not a single dramatic act. It follows a pattern, and the pattern is surprisingly familiar.

1. An honest assessment. You cannot restore what you will not look at. The first step is walking through with a builder or engineer and naming what is really wrong.
2. Stopping the damage. Before anything beautiful happens, you fix the roof, clear the drains, treat the termites. You deal with what is still eating the house.
3. Removing what cannot be saved. Some timbers are too far gone. Pretending otherwise only hides the rot under fresh paint.
4. Keeping what can. The original doors, the fretwork, the old floorboards. Restoration is not replacement. It honours what was there.
5. Patient work over time. Room by room, season by season, as money and energy allow.

Spiritual restoration often follows a similar path: honesty before God, turning away from whatever is still causing harm, grieving what is truly lost, recovering what can be recovered, and then a long, patient rebuilding, often with the help of others.

Better than it was

Here is the surprising thing about many restored houses. They end up better than new. Not identical to how they were, but stronger: new hurricane straps hidden in the roof, proper drainage, sound timber, perhaps a verandah rebuilt to last another century. The damage becomes the occasion for improvements that would never have happened otherwise.

Consider a family who inherit a grandparent’s house that stood empty for fifteen years. The restoration takes three years and more money than anyone expected. But by the end, cousins who had not spoken in a decade have worked side by side on weekends. Children have learned to sand and paint. The house hosts the family’s first reunion in a generation. The years the locusts ate were not simply returned. They were redeemed into something the family did not have before.

That is the hope in Joel’s promise. Not that we can pretend the lost years did not happen, but that God is able to bring fruit from ground that looked finished. Whether you are standing in front of a neglected house or looking back at a neglected stretch of your own life, it may be worth scraping back a little paint. There may be something good underneath, waiting to be restored.

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