What the Locust Have Eaten

We aren't in February anymore. We are in March, you know, that month that comes in like a lion and leaves like a lamb, or comes in like a lamb and leaves like a lion. But we aren't talking about lions today. We are talking about locust. And in Joel one we see that the locust have come in a ravonous swarm, leaving nothing in their path.


Joel 1:4 What the gnawing locust has left, the swarming locust has eaten; And what the swarming locust has left, the creeping locust has eaten; And what the creeping locust has left, the stripping locust has eaten.


This verse jumped out at me once, when I stood in a desolate place in my life. I felt like the tree stump in my front yard, cut off and dead.


All these locust had come into my life in the form of rejections and other things and left me with nothing. Even as I prayed, I felt dead at His feet. As an exercise I named the locust that had come. Somethings that happened in my childhood I named the gnawing locust. The abandonment of my sister, I named the swarming locust. The recent deaths of my in-laws, especially my mother-in-law to whom I was very close, I named the creeping locust, etc.

I meditated on this verse for some time because of that desolate place. I couldn't shake for a while. Sometimes I reassigned the locust for whatever it was that made me feel desolate that day. But always it was the same. Many things had been stripped away from me. And there was nothing I could do but grieve over things old and new that worked together to destroy me.

And I needed to grieve over it rather than pretend it never happened.