"I wasted my life—40 years married to the wrong person with nothing to show for it."
How it sounds in your head: I'm 73 and starting from zero. All those years cooking, cleaning, supporting, sacrificing—for what? Friends who married well are traveling and enjoying retirement together. I'm alone in a small apartment wondering where my life went. I have nothing to show for all those years.
"You, who have shown me great and severe troubles, shall revive me again, and bring me up again from the depths of the earth. You shall increase my greatness, and comfort me on every side."
-- Psalm 71:20-21Enemy lie that decades with wrong outcomes equal wasted life, as if God can't redeem every single day for His glory and your good.
You look at peers in intact marriages living the retirement you imagined, and you're living a completely different reality. The math says 40 years gone, and you can't get them back.
Thirteen years in slavery and false imprisonment—his entire twenties and thirties GONE. Then in one day, prison to palace, slave to second-in-command of Egypt. God gave him two sons: Manasseh ('God has made me forget my hardship') and Ephraim ('God has made me fruitful in the land of my affliction'). Instant fruitfulness after years of waste.
I REFUSE the lie that I wasted my life. IT IS WRITTEN that God shall revive me again and INCREASE my greatness—not just restore, but INCREASE. My 40 years are not wasted; they are the testimony that makes my comeback glorious. IT IS WRITTEN that God works ALL things together for good, and that includes every single day of those 40 years. I will be FRUITFUL in my 70s. The BARAK blessing doesn't have an expiration date. God is increasing my greatness RIGHT NOW, and I receive it with JOY.
The Father sees those 40 years and He's not shaking His head—He's about to show you how He was working even then, and how the next chapter will make such sense of the past that you'll weep with gratitude. Nothing is wasted when God is the redeemer.