God Is Not Finished with the Human You Became
Sunday, September 13, 2026. I wrote this for Matt, Jenn, and especially V.
There is a modern idea that if we can explain a human being thoroughly enough, we have somehow absolved them.
He was neglected. She was betrayed. His father drank.
Her mother disappeared into herself. He learned to go silent because speaking was dangerous.
She learned to pursue because nobody ever came back voluntarily.
He was scourged and made to kneel on salt.
All of this matters.
But an explanation is not an acquittal. It only tells us how the fire started.
It does not give us permission to keep throwing furniture into it.
The fourth-century monk known as Abba Moses understood this distinction rather dramatically.
Before he became a monk, he was reportedly a thief, a violent man, and the leader of a band of robbers.
He was known as Moses the Black, Moses the Ethiopian, Moses the Strong, and—without much ecclesiastical public-relations varnish—Moses the Robber.
Christianity has always had a peculiar fondness for putting the embarrassing facts directly into the saint’s name.
The Man Who Entered the Desert
The surviving accounts of Moses come to us through the traditions surrounding the Desert Fathers: the early Christian ascetics who withdrew into the Egyptian wilderness during the fourth and fifth centuries.
They did not enter the desert because sand was therapeutic. They went there because they believed the distractions of ordinary life made it possible to remain a stranger to oneself.
In the desert, there was no spouse to blame, no colleague to resent, no social standing to maintain, and no audience to persuade.
There was heat, silence, prayer, work—and the increasingly inconvenient contents of one’s own mind.
Moses eventually abandoned his life of violence and entered a monastery at Scetis. He became a disciple of Abba Isidore and, over time, a monk, priest, teacher, and spiritual father. The transformation is so complete that it is tempting to turn it into a pleasant story about redemption.
It was not pleasant.
Moses reportedly struggled fiercely with the habits, appetites, and impulses of his former life.
Conversion did not erase his history. The desert gave him fewer places to hide from it.
This may be the first reason he remains psychologically compelling. He did not confuse becoming a different man with pretending he had never been the first one.
The Leaking Basket
The best-known story about Abba Moses begins when a group of monks calls a council to judge a brother who has sinned.
Moses initially refuses to attend.
When the others insist, he arrives carrying a basket or sack filled with sand. The container has a hole in it. As Moses walks, the sand spills behind him.
The monks ask what he is doing.
My own sins are pouring out behind me, he explains, and I cannot see them—yet I have come here to judge the sins of another man.
The meeting, as meetings occasionally should, ends early.
It is difficult to improve on the image.
A man arrives at court carrying evidence against someone else while leaving a trail of his own unexamined life across the floor.
Most marriages have seen some version of this entrance.
Marriage as a Small Courtroom
Couples rarely arrive in therapy without evidence.
They have dates, quotations, text messages, bank statements, forgotten anniversaries, unfortunate remarks from 2017, and highly refined theories about the other person’s family of origin.
Often, they are factually correct. That is what makes the work interesting.
One partner really does withdraw. The other really does criticize. One has become controlling.
The other has become evasive. One committed the betrayal, but the other may now use permanent prosecution as a substitute for deciding whether to remain married.
Pain has an excellent memory but a poor sense of proportion.
Before long, the marriage becomes a small ecclesiastical court. Each spouse arrives to present the case against the other. Both accounts contain truth. Neither life partner can explain why the room keeps getting dirtier.
Then Abba Moses walks in, sand falling quietly behind him.
What Happened to You?
One of the humane achievements of modern psychology is its insistence on asking, What happened to you?
This question has rescued many people from the belief that their adaptations were evidence of some essential defect.
Hypervigilance may have begun as protection.
Withdrawal may once have prevented escalation.
Anger may have been the only emotion permitted in the family.
Perfectionism may have purchased a little safety.
Emotional numbness may have helped a child endure what could not be escaped.
Understanding these adaptations can replace contempt with compassion. But a marriage cannot survive indefinitely on origin stories.
Eventually, another question must be asked:
Given what happened to you, what will you do now?
Childhood may explain your defenses.
Attachment history may explain why distance feels like abandonment.
Neurodivergence may explain missed signals or sensory overload.
Betrayal may explain vigilance.
These truths should shape compassion and treatment. They do not automatically determine what you are permitted to do next.
An explanation can invite mercy.
It cannot become a lifetime diplomatic passport for bad behavior.
Responsibility Without Damnation
Couples often imagine they have only two choices.
The first is blame:
You knew exactly what you were doing, and this reveals who you truly are.
The second is exoneration:
You could not help it, so I should not expect anything different.
Neither position leaves much room for transformation.
Blame freezes a partner inside the worst thing they have ever done. Exoneration freezes them inside the worst thing that happened to them.
Abba Moses offers a sterner and more hopeful alternative: responsibility without damnation.
He did not say that his violent past was harmless because he had suffered.
He did not say that his violent past made holiness impossible.
He neither excused the man he had been nor accepted that man as his permanent identity.
This is repentance in its mature form. Not theatrical self-hatred. Not reputation management. Not the modern apology in which the injured person is eventually asked to comfort the person apologizing.
Repentance means turning around—and then continuing to walk in the new direction after the emotional ceremony has ended.
In couples therapy, this distinction is everything.
Remorse says, I feel terrible.
Accountability says, I am becoming safer.
Remorse may be sincere, but sincerity has never prevented a relapse into familiar behavior. An injured partner is not unreasonable for wanting more than tears, or for asking that insight become conduct.
The question is not whether your pain is legitimate.
The question is whether your pain has been appointed head of the household.
The Sins Behind Us
The leaking basket is not an argument against discernment.
Some behavior must be named clearly. Some boundaries must be firm. Some marriages should end. Forgiveness is not an obligation to remain available for further injury.
Moses was not saying that wrongdoing does not matter.
He was warning against the intoxicating pleasure of examining someone else’s soul while leaving our own conveniently uninspected.
This is especially important for the more articulate spouse.
Every couples therapist eventually meets someone who can explain the relationship with such fluency that the explanation itself has become a defense.
The vocabulary may include attachment, trauma, narcissism, autism, boundaries, gaslighting, differentiation, or any of the other terms that migrate from clinical language into marital combat.
The words may be accurate. They may also be functioning as exceptionally well-educated sandbags.
Insight is not measured by how precisely you can describe your partner’s pathology. It is measured by how difficult it has become for you to remain dishonest about yourself.
The Man You Became
Tradition says that when raiders eventually approached the monastery, Moses refused to flee or return to violence. He had once lived by the sword; he would not save himself by becoming that man again. He and several companions were killed.
Whether every detail reached us exactly as it occurred is less important than what the tradition recognized in him: transformation had become more than a mood. It had become character.
That is the slow hope beneath every serious attempt to repair a marriage. You need not deny what shaped you, minimize the wound, or forgive on somebody else’s timetable.
But neither are you condemned to reenact your history simply because your history explains you well.
The person you became was an adaptation, not necessarily a final identity.
The controlling partner can tolerate uncertainty.
The withdrawing partner can remain present.
The betrayed partner can relinquish permanent prosecution without relinquishing discernment.
The unfaithful partner can become trustworthy through hundreds of ordinary, unphotogenic decisions.
None of this happens because the past is forgotten.
It happens because the past is finally given the right amount of authority.
Feelings deserve attention. History deserves understanding. Wounds deserve care.
But values deserve authority.
God Is Not Finished
Moses the Robber became Abba Moses—not because his biography was clean, but because it was not sovereign.
That may be the part of his story we contemporary souls most need.
We alternate between excusing ourselves with our wounds and condemning ourselves with our failures. Moses permits neither luxury.
He asks us to look at the sand falling from our own basket. Then he asks us to just keep walking.
The Christian claim is not that your past does not matter. It is that your past does not get the final word.
God is not finished with the person who hurt you.
More dangerously, perhaps, God is not finished with you yet, either.
Why Work with Daniel?
Couples therapy should do more than help two people produce increasingly sophisticated explanations for why they are stuck.
Good couples work brings compassion and responsibility into the same room. It helps each partner understand what shaped the pattern—and decide what kind of partner will answer for it now.
I work with couples facing betrayal, emotional distance, neurodivergent relationship patterns, entrenched conflict, and the unnerving realization that insight alone has not changed much.
Our best work joins compassion to accountability until understanding becomes conduct.
Schedule a Free Introductory Call
Sources and Further Reading
The Ancient Fathers of the Desert, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America
The Story of Abba Moses the Strong, Coptic Orthodox Diocese of Los Angeles
Venerable Moses the Ethiopian of Scete, Orthodox Church in America
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.