The Daily Ripples Podcast

Paris opens on willingness as the thing that comes before any action, and takes it straight to the practical mechanics of a Step Eight list. His sponsor had him mark each name yes, no, or never, and he wanted to write never beside every single one of them. What he's found since is that the categories move. Corey points out if you do enough of the yeses and...

Pastor Mike opens with something he was carrying this time last year — a season of real depression rooted in unresolved family relationships he'd decided he was powerless to change. He'd been praying the Serenity Prayer daily and getting nowhere, until he saw why: he had the relationship filed under "things I cannot change" when it belonged under "co...

Corey brings a question a friend put to him about recovery as a spiral (always circling, always moving) and the thing that troubled him about the picture: there was no way out of it. He points instead to the free man in the Big Book, the one who can go anywhere other free people go so long as he keeps a certain simple attitude, and lands on what actually c...

Corey picks up where the forewords left off and moves into the chapter that sets the whole book in motion. He opens with the man behind it — Dr. William Silkworth, a neurologist who by some counts worked with tens of thousands of alcoholics in the years before the book was written, and who describes a patient in late 1934 he'd come to regard as hopel...

Paris is back with Pastor Mike and Corey, and he opens the week on the difference between counting your actions and counting the people on the other end of them. Corey names the trap honestly — how easily the language of "my part" becomes a ledger, how the ego rebuilds itself over three or four days until the fault has quietly migrated across the tab...

Pastor Mike builds this one around a single word most of us have said a thousand times without hearing it. In the Lord's Prayer — recited standing, together, in churches and recovery rooms across the Mid-South — sits the line forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. That little word as is asking God to hand us the ...

Corey opens Saturday on the difference between playing something out in your head and putting it down on paper. He's honest that he can rehearse a thing a hundred times and get nowhere, but the moment his list went into black and white, his shoulders started to drop. He walks the actual process — the Third Step prayer, a stretch of meditation asking ...

Pastor Mike opens on the thing that once drove him out of the faith altogether: watching people treat being saved as the finish line, living like it didn't much matter what they did afterward. His counter, learned the long way back through sixteen years of atheism, is that faithfully living the way Jesus teaches simply makes life work — a way of livi...

Pastor Mike and Corey sit with a question that runs underneath every choice: what's actually driving it? Corey brings an old-timer's line that's stuck with him for years — that all he has today are decisions to be made and appointments to be kept — and finds that when those decisions bend toward service, his life starts to look full regardless ...

Pastor Mike opens with a confession that reframes the whole conversation: people tell him he's a good listener, and he's quick to admit he isn't one by nature — it's a skill he had to acquire, partly because not listening once cost him dearly, and partly through the slow work of God, the program, and the steps. He and Corey dig into what real listeni...

Pastor Mike and Corey get into the daily mechanics of a faith that actually grows, and Corey — self-admittedly predictable — takes it straight to how he starts his morning. He walks through the on-awakening instructions from the Big Book, the value of reviewing the day behind and the day ahead, and why "each morning" means each morning, not whe...

Wave Book Study — Session One: The Forewords

Corey opens a new side project this week: a page-by-page walk through the Big Book, running alongside the daily show as its own study series. He starts where the book itself starts — before the Doctor's Opinion, before Bill's Story — with the set-aside prayer and the forewords most people flip right past. From there he digs into the details that reward slowing down: the...

Pastor Mike and Corey open the week on service, with Corey announcing up front that he's just here to be present today, not to co-host. The conversation circles a paradox they keep bumping into: the instinct to make service sound appealing — to convince someone into this way of life — quietly turns the whole thing into a pitch, when the real po...

Sundays are Pastor Mike's, and this one pairs the Eighth and Ninth Steps with the feeding of the five thousand from Matthew 14. The hinge is a single line the disciples say when the crowd gets hungry and the day gets long: send them away. It sounds like the responsible call — it's late, there's no food, let everyone fend for themselves — but un...

Corey opens the month solo on a Saturday, and sets the frame for August: the show turns toward Step Eight and the making of amends. His anchor is a line from the Twelve and Twelve — the member's life actually depends on obedience to spiritual principles, and if he drifts too far, the penalty is sure and swift. Drawing on his years working with wires,...

Corey opens on the Big Book's blunt line about the alcoholic as an extreme example of self-will run riot — "though he usually doesn't think so" — and asks the obvious follow-up: so how would I know when I'm in it? Pastor Mike's answer is honest, that the gap between running on self-will and catching it has just gotten shorter over time. From th...

Corey opens with a thought experiment about walking into a room full of strangers who happen to have the cure for exactly what's killing you — and then refusing to pass it on to the next person who walks through the door. That's the tension of today's episode: what you've been given was never meant to stop with you. Pastor Mike takes it to Matthew 25...

Pastor Mike opens with the Sermon on the Mount's instruction not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing — and notes how often Jesus told the people he'd just healed to keep quiet about it. Corey brings the Big Book's harder question: it's not whether to give, but when and how, because the wrong kind of help teaches someone to lean o...

Corey opens with Tradition Five in its long form — a group has but one primary purpose — and makes the case that knowing exactly who you're equipped to help is its own kind of humility. Pastor Mike takes it to Exodus 18, where Jethro tells Moses plainly that the work is too heavy, he can't handle it alone, and he'll only wear himself out trying...