Mark
Thirty years ago when I was a teenager my parents’ marriage broke down in a catastrophic way. It was a traumatic and painful experience for everyone involved particularly my older brother and my younger sister with whom I subsequently lost contact. It’s 22 years since I last saw her with no obvious way to find her.
Like you I’m sure there are some verses in the Bible that always jump off the page at me. They are promises that have shaped my life. One of them is Joel 2:25 which say “I will restore to you the years the locust have eaten”. At the age of 15 I remember feeling that my childhood and my family had been destroyed and that if there was a God I blamed him for it all. At the age of 17, when I gave my life to Jesus, I came to see that He was a restorer and through this verse he was promising me that he would restore the years that I had lost.
My testimony is that Jesus is a restorer who keeps his promises. When I became a Christian Jesus gave me a new family, the Church, who loved me unconditionally and showed me how to love. Later He gave me a wonderful wife and three amazing daughters, a restoration family that is itself part of a restoration community.
Two weeks ago Jesus spoke to us and reminded us that He is a restorer. I wasn’t even in the meeting but my family told me all about it over Sunday lunch; I read about it about on Facebook and we prayed about it at our Church in the Home group.
I thought about the locust years and the restoration years that I have enjoyed since and gave thanks to God for his faithfulness. Two days later I got a Facebook friend request from you’ve guessed it, my sister. As you might imagine we have spent a lot of time catching up since. She has a family I have never met. We need to take our time but it feels good to have my sister back!
Perhaps the surprising part of this story is that I wasn’t praying about my sister but I am a member of a community that received an apostolic word that reminded us that Jesus is a restorer and Jesus decided to confirm his word with a sign by resurrecting a prayer I hadn’t prayed for a long time, answering it and in the process continuing to fulfil a promise he made to me 28 years ago. Faithful is he who has promised!
Mark Lawrence
