The Inventory of Loss
Before restoration can begin — or rather, before we can recognize that it has already begun — there is something important that many of us skip entirely: we have to name what was taken.
For survivors especially, this can feel indulgent. We learn early to minimize our own losses. Others had it worse. At least I have this. At least I made it out. And while gratitude is real and good, grief that is never witnessed doesn’t disappear. It lives in the body. It shows up as a tightness in the chest when someone mentions a season you can’t talk about yet, or a flash of something you can’t name when a certain kind of afternoon light hits the window just so.
There is no hierarchy of loss. The years taken from you by abuse, by illness, by betrayal, by neglect, by your own survival mechanisms — those years were real. The grief over them is real. You don’t have to earn the right to mourn them by proving they were bad enough. They were yours. They mattered.
So before we go any further, I want to gently invite you — privately, in the quiet of your own heart — to simply name one thing you lost. Not to dwell in it. Not to stay there. But to honor the reality of what happened to you, because your story deserves to be witnessed. Even by you. Especially by you.
The Kintsugi God 
There is a Japanese art form called Kintsugi — the practice of repairing broken pottery not by hiding the cracks, but by filling them with gold lacquer so that the fracture lines become the most beautiful, most visible part of the piece. The philosophy beneath the art is this: the breaking is not the end of the story. The breaking is where the gold goes in.
This is the God of Joel 2:25.
“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten…”
The Hebrew word translated “restore” or “repay” here is shalam — and it is deeply related to the word shalom, which we often translate simply as “peace,” but which carries far more. Shalom means wholeness. Completeness. A state of nothing missing, nothing broken. God is not promising to simply patch what was damaged. He is promising shalam — a restoration that moves toward wholeness, toward the peace that was always meant to be yours.
And then consider Psalm 23:3: “He restores my soul.” The Hebrew verb there is shuv — to return, to bring back, to cause to come home. What was scattered is being gathered. What was displaced is being led back to where it belongs. The Shepherd is not just fixing the sheep — He is bringing the sheep home.
God is not in the business of hiding your cracks. He is filling them with gold.
What Restoration Actually Looks Like
Here is something worth sitting with: restoration does not mean returning to who you were before the wound. The pre-wound version of you is not the destination. She was beloved, yes — but the restored version of you is something different. She is deeper. She has earned a kind of knowing that only comes through surviving something. She carries a compassion that cannot be manufactured or studied — it grows only in the soil of having suffered and come through.
Restored people are not identical to who they were before the locusts came. They are, in the truest sense, more.
And to the one who has been praying Joel 2:25 for years now — who has held onto that verse through nights that felt unending, who has spoken it over her life when nothing visible seemed to be changing — I want to say this slowly and clearly: the locusts don’t always leave on our timeline. God’s commitment to your restoration is not conditional on the speed at which it arrives.
The fact that you are still here, still reaching for something better, still willing to read a blog post about a God who restores — that is not nothing. That is evidence that something in you has refused to stop believing. And that refusal to stop believing? That, too, is part of the restoration. Honor it. It is braver than it looks.
“God is not promising to simply patch what was damaged. He is promising shalom — a restoration that moves toward wholeness, toward the peace that was always meant to be yours.”
I know what the locust years feel like. I know what it is to take inventory of a life and feel the weight of all that column of losses. And I know what it is to watch, slowly and sometimes imperceptibly, as God begins to bring things back — not always the same things, but things that carry that same gold quality of shalom. I’ve seen it in my own life. And I believe — with everything in me — that I will see it in yours. To the one still waiting: I’m waiting with you. And I am not afraid of what’s coming.
Monica
Listen to This Week’s Episode
This week’s episode — “Restoring What Was Broken” — goes much further than this post can. I walk through the full Restoration Inventory healing practice, give a complete word study of Joel 2:25 in the Hebrew, and guide you through a centering breath built around the image of still water filling a cracked vessel. Come listen wherever you stream podcasts, or find it at daylightinc.org. If someone you love is deep in their locust years right now, this episode was written with them in mind.
