Recently, while working with a couple, our conversation turned toward their children. They were growing up, and while each new stage brought something good, previous good things were disappearing too.
There were versions of their children they would never see again. There were seasons of their family life that had ended. Things like stories at bedtime, holding hands in grocery stores, and easy wonder with new experiences.
They loved what their teens were becoming, and they missed what was gone.
It reminded me how much of life requires us to hold those two realities at the same time.
We are constantly receiving what is becoming while grieving what can no longer be.
I see this particularly clearly in recovery.
Those struggling with compulsive sexual behavior eventually have to grieve something that can be difficult to acknowledge: the behavior that caused so much destruction also did something for them. It comforted them or helped them regulate emotions. It created excitement and offered relief. Recovery means surrendering not only something harmful, but something they once depended upon to make life bearable.
Partners grieve differently. They may grieve the relationship they believed they had, the story they thought they were living, or the future they assumed was secure.
And eventually both encounter a reality much larger than addiction or betrayal:
We are finite.
There are things we cannot undo. There are things we cannot get back. As I was thinking about some of these things in my own life, God reminded me of the fall in the Garden.
The serpent's invitation was, “You will be like God.”
Behind that invitation is a temptation that has never really disappeared: Do not accept the limits of being human.
We want life without boundaries. We want to keep every possibility open and somehow avoid the pain that comes whenever one possibility requires relinquishing another. But that isn't the life God designed. We were created as finite people, and that is part of His design.
That means grief is one of the ways we learn to live truthfully within the life we have actually been given. And when we allow ourselves to grieve what cannot be, we are more fully open to receiving what still can be.
This is one of the subtle but profound tasks of recovery. Recovery certainly involves boundaries, accountability, honesty, community, and new ways of coping. But beneath many of those practices lies an even deeper invitation: to stop demanding an infinite life.
To accept this life with its limits, its losses, its responsibilities, and its astonishing gifts.
Maturity is not learning how to escape our limits; it is discovering that the richest life is found within them.
✉️ Mike Vaughn
Executive Director
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