Crisis & Tragedy
Recovery is not a destination. It is a daily decision, made in the presence of a brain that does not always cooperate with the decision.
If you are in recovery, you are doing something that requires more sustained effort than any athletic training plan anyone in this room has ever followed. And if you are a teammate of someone in recovery, your presence matters more than you probably know.
Read this passage slowly.
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
Romans 8:1 — NIVLet that sit for a second before you move.
No condemnation. The declaration is absolute and it is precisely what the person in recovery most needs to hear and most struggles to believe. The shame that addiction produces — the internal voice that catalogs every failure, every relapse, every moment where the decision went the wrong way — is one of the primary obstacles to sustained recovery. The condemnation is not coming from God. But it arrives with remarkable reliability from inside the person who is fighting.
The locker room can be a place where that condemnation is countered. Not by pretending the struggle isn’t real. By refusing to add to the shame pile. The teammate who treats the person in recovery as fully a member of the team — whose presence does not carry judgment or the performance of tolerance — is providing something the recovery support system outside the team cannot replicate: the normalizing presence of people who know what the person is carrying and do not treat it as the defining thing about them.
For the person in recovery: the fight is real and it is worth fighting. The team around you is not able to win the daily decision for you. They can be present for the daily fight in a way that makes the decision slightly more sustainable. Let them.
The teammate who treats the person in recovery as fully a member — whose presence doesn’t carry judgment — provides something the support system outside the team cannot: normalizing presence.
For teammates: what does non-judgmental presence look like specifically for someone in recovery? For the person in recovery: what does the team do that helps, and what makes it harder?
Both-sides question. If both parties are present, the honest answers here do significant relational work.
No condemnation. The fight is worth fighting. Let the team be present for it.
This devotional is a complement to professional recovery support, not a substitute for it. Ensure the athlete in recovery has access to appropriate professional care.