The change to Daylight Savings Time, which we recently experienced, can be brutal. It’s an hour you can’t get back. You move the clock on your nightstand before you go to bed on Saturday night and “boom,” it is one hour later. In the few seconds it takes to change your clock you have lost a complete hour. Gone. Never to get it back.
It gets you thinking about things that are lost that, seemingly, you can’t get back. Months or years spent in bitterness toward someone or something. Life-marking consequences from a decision you wish you hadn’t made. Regrets. Hurts. Of course, it’s not just time that is lost in these situations, but also heart-level things like security and innocence.
Thankfully, and graciously, lost things are nothing new to God and they actually put God in a position to do a few of His favorite things: redeem and restore.
In the book of Joel, one of the lesser known Old Testament prophets made famous by being quoted in Acts 2, God used the occasion of an incredible locust infestation to give His people a vivid illustration of the kind of restoration work He does.
Using this 20-Minute Bible Experience (“About Losing that Hour”), and with “springing forward” still fresh in the minds of your students, leverage the loss of that hour to explore the restoration that God wants to do in their lives with emotional and spiritual things they have lost. It’s free and simple: download the devotional below and send it to your students, or share this blog post within your youth ministry’s social media.