Pastor Mike takes Sunday solo with a turn most amends lists never make. We reach for the scenes when we sit down with that pen — the argument, the thing we broke, the money we took, the night everybody else remembers even when we can't. Every one of those has a beginning, an end, and usually a witness. This one asks about the empty chair beside the hospital bed, the call never made to someone struggling, the friend in a waiting room watching a door that never opened. An action leaves evidence; an absence leaves a space, and a space makes no sound at all. People adjust, learn you're someone who doesn't show up, and it settles into the way things are. He works through the program's old phrase for it, sins of omission, and the definition of harm broad enough that a person can be wounded without a voice ever being raised. Then to the road to Jericho, where a priest and a Levite both had good reasons and somewhere to be, and Jesus lays the weight of the whole story on two men who did nothing at all. It widens from there — Leviticus on the foreigner, Matthew 25 on the stranger, and an honest account of driving past a man he recognized on an interstate on-ramp — before turning to the Word made flesh, a hand extended to a man with leprosy, and the amends that has to become a habit rather than a conversation.

The stone for today: Sometimes the greatest harm is not what I did, but what I failed to do.

Read today's full Daily Ripple at www.dailyripples.com — and we'd love to hear from you. Reach out any time at [email protected].

The harm of absence | sins of omission | showing up for people | Christian recovery | 12-step faith | the Good Samaritan | welcoming the stranger | living amends | Big Book study | sobriety devotional | addiction recovery

Daily Ripples is a daily devotional reflection connecting recovery principles with the life of faith. New episodes every day at dailyripples.com.

Corey takes Saturday solo and follows a single thread all the way out: the domino effect. He starts with the actor on page 61 who wants to run the whole show, arranging the lights and the scenery and the rest of the players so that everything comes out the way he'd like it, and admits how much of his life went into arranging people to please him while telling himself it was for their benefit. Then he traces what that actually costs. A relationship falls apart, and now her mother knows, and her father, and the sister doing the consoling. Somebody loses a job, so they lose an income, so a child support payment goes unmade — and the circle keeps widening past anything he intended or noticed. He's honest that his instinct is to shrink it, and honest too about the ones still on his list, including a decades-old DUI he's carried since he was seventeen. The back half walks through what page 80 actually asks before a hard amends: secure their consent, consult with others, ask God for help, and then refuse to shrink from it. It closes on page 16 and the surprising claim that utopia is available right here and right now, in a simple talk in somebody's kitchen.

The stone for today: Healing begins when I honestly acknowledge that my actions affected more people than I realized.

Read today's full Daily Ripple at www.dailyripples.com — and we'd love to hear from you. Reach out any time at [email protected].

Seeing the impact | the ripple effect of harm | Step Eight and Step Nine | Christian recovery | 12-step faith | the actor running the show | securing consent before amends | Big Book study | sobriety devotional | addiction recovery

Daily Ripples is a daily devotional reflection connecting recovery principles with the life of faith. New episodes every day at dailyripples.com.

Corey opens on a question that reframes the whole week: am I a demonstration of what God can do, or am I the guy doing ninety-five down the interstate with the recovery sticker on my bumper? He works through Colossians' instruction to work at everything as though for the Lord rather than for people, gets honest about the line "there is no favoritism" — he'd rather liked thinking he was the favorite — and describes the moment an amends stopped being theoretical: looking someone in the face, naming things she never knew, and watching what that does to a person. Paris brings the practical side back to sweeping his own side of the street, with a memory of an old man who walked the neighborhood picking up trash for no reason anyone could see. Pastor Mike takes it to the plank and the speck from Matthew 7, and makes the case that we stop noticing our own plank because we've spent a lifetime looking around it — the speck across the room is always easier to spot. Along the way, a running attempt to needle Corey with wall slogans, a passage from page 61 read with his name plugged in, and a reminder that once love gets inserted into a situation, the anger and fear have nowhere left to stand.

The stone for today: Peace comes not from what others do for me, but from doing what is mine to do before God.

Read today's full Daily Ripple at www.dailyripples.com — and we'd love to hear from you. Reach out any time at [email protected].

Making things right | cleaning my side of the street | the plank and the speck | Christian recovery | 12-step faith | amends without expectation | leaving results to God | Big Book study | sobriety devotional | addiction recovery

Daily Ripples is a daily devotional reflection connecting recovery principles with the life of faith. New episodes every day at dailyripples.com.

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 the maybes start turning into laters; do enough of those and the nevers start happening too, until you're walking a road you never expected to be on. Pastor Mike watches the two of them go back and forth on it, notes the good-natured fussing, and brings the conversation to what's happening underneath: the humility, honesty, and courage the Ripple names are fruit rather than achievements, grown by God in a person who keeps showing up. They pair it with Philippians 2 and 1 John's blunt test that anyone claiming to love God while hating his brother is telling himself a story. Corey's example lands it: inventorying his grandfather, a preacher and by his own account a man with some real flaws, and finding nothing to write in the second column except he was just being human. Then a drive to a cemetery in Jackson to say so out loud.

The stone for today: Spiritual growth requires more than facing the past. It requires clearing away what still stands between me and others.

Read today's full Daily Ripple at www.dailyripples.com — and we'd love to hear from you. Reach out any time at [email protected].

Clearing the way | willingness before action | Step Eight list | Christian recovery | 12-step faith | humility honesty and courage | loving my brother | Big Book study | sobriety devotional | addiction recovery

Daily Ripples is a daily devotional reflection connecting recovery principles with the life of faith. New episodes every day at dailyripples.com.

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 "courage to change the things I can." Wrong category, and no amount of praying was going to sort that out for him. He ties it to Jesus' instruction in Matthew 5 to be reconciled to your brother before you bring your gift to the altar, and notes that everything he was offering (to a congregation, to people in recovery) kept falling flat until he did the scary work of reaching out. Corey brings Romans 12 and the renewing of the mind, then walks through the amends instructions on pages 77 and 78, landing on the hardest part: setting aside everything you believe the other person did and looking only at your own faults. His example is his birth mother, two unanswered letters at eighteen, and the peace he found making amends in a hospital parking lot after she was gone. Paris closes it out with a good-natured disagreement about whether faith can be borrowed, and where the job of carrying the message ends.

The stone for today: I cannot move fully into peace until I am willing to face the parts of my past that still stand in the way.

Read today's full Daily Ripple at www.dailyripples.com — and we'd love to hear from you. Reach out any time at [email protected].

Looking back to move forward | reconciliation before the altar | the Serenity Prayer | Christian recovery | 12-step faith | sweeping my side of the street | amends and peace | Big Book study | sobriety devotional | addiction recovery

Daily Ripples is a daily devotional reflection connecting recovery principles with the life of faith. New episodes every day at dailyripples.com.

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 changed for him. It was rarely the circumstances; it was the point of view he brought into them. Pastor Mike picks it up with his own first Fourth Step, when he told his sponsor he had no resentments at all; he loved everybody, got along with everyone; and then found everything buried so deep he couldn't see it until he started writing. He pairs it with the promise in Psalm 147 that God heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds, and notes that the breaking open has to come before the binding up. Paris turns the conversation back to the foundation underneath all of it, the utter defeat that came before any of the steps, and the sacred date nobody can take from you. It closes with a Third Tradition pop quiz, some laughter, and an unexpected bit of affirmation about counting the right day.

The stone for today: God often uses the pain I face honestly to heal the pain I've carried for years.

Read today's full Daily Ripple at www.dailyripples.com — and we'd love to hear from you. Reach out any time at [email protected].

Healing what still hurts | facing buried resentments | freedom and point of view | Christian recovery | 12-step faith | Fourth Step inventory | Psalm 147 | Big Book study | sobriety devotional | addiction recovery

Daily Ripples is a daily devotional reflection connecting recovery principles with the life of faith. New episodes every day at dailyripples.com.

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 hopeless. That patient was Bill Wilson. From there Corey walks the letters line by line, marking the words worth circling: must, only, essential, necessary. He lands on the three facts stacked in the first letter, the phrase "manifestation of an allergy" that separated these people from everyone else, and the plain conclusion that something more than human power would be needed. Along the way he pushes back honestly on HALT and offers his own counter-evidence — he drank full, happy, surrounded by people, and wide awake — before arriving at what settles it for him: feelings are subjective and always shifting, while this work is objective, real, and has worked for millions. It closes on Silkworth's own invitation, that a man may come to scoff and remain to pray.

A study offered in the spirit of one alcoholic sharing experience, strength, and hope with another. Next week: Bill's Story.

Read along at home — and if this series speaks to you, we'd love to hear from you. Reach out any time at [email protected].

Big Book study | the Doctor's Opinion | Dr. Silkworth | phenomenon of craving | allergy of the body | psychic change | entire abstinence | recovery literature | experience strength and hope | addiction recovery

Disclaimer: This Wave Book Study is an independent recovery study offered free of charge as a teaching aid. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or approved by Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. (A.A.W.S.). Passages read and discussed are drawn from the book Alcoholics Anonymous ("The Big Book"), © A.A.W.S., Inc., and are used here for educational and discussion purposes with attribution. This study is not a substitute for the Big Book itself — we'd encourage you to get your own copy and read it. A.A.W.S. has not reviewed or approved this content, and the views expressed are those of the host alone.

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 table, and why putting it in black and white settles the argument for good. Pastor Mike brings King David and the prophet Nathan, who told a king a story about a stolen lamb and let him pronounce judgment on himself before landing the four words that changed everything: you are the man. David had blinders on right up until someone else pointed at the people he'd harmed. The conversation turns practical toward the end, with Corey walking through how he flips his own inventory — same columns, other direction, asking how he affected their pocketbook, their ambitions, their relationships. It closes on the daily maintenance that keeps any of it working, and the reminder that kindness toward someone who hurt you starts with remembering they're sick too.

The stone for today: Real repentance begins when I stop seeing my actions as mistakes and start seeing the people they affect.

Read today's full Daily Ripple at www.dailyripples.com — and we'd love to hear from you. Reach out any time at [email protected].

Seeing the people I hurt | Step Eight and the list | David and Nathan | Christian recovery | 12-step faith | inventory and honesty | empathy in amends | Big Book study | sobriety devotional | addiction recovery

Daily Ripples is a daily devotional reflection connecting recovery principles with the life of faith. New episodes every day at dailyripples.com.

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 same terms we've been handing everyone else, which turns out to be a considerable request once you slow down enough to notice it. From there he works the Big Book's blunt verdict that resentment is the number one offender, and the strange math of it: something happens to you once, over in a second, and then you carry it eleven years, winning the argument again in the shower while the other person goes on with their life. He draws a careful line between forgiving someone and trusting them again — you can set down what you're carrying and still keep the keys in your pocket — then turns to the practical remedy the book actually offers, praying for the person as you would a sick friend, even through your teeth at first. It closes on Jesus' answer to Peter about seventy times seven, the parable of the debt no one could pay set against the one that fits in your hand, and an honest observation: willing is the place most of us can actually reach.

The stone for today: I cannot fully seek forgiveness while refusing to extend forgiveness to others.

Read today's full Daily Ripple at www.dailyripples.com — and we'd love to hear from you. Reach out any time at [email protected].

Willing to forgive | resentment and letting go | the Lord's Prayer | Christian recovery | 12-step faith | praying for those who hurt us | Step Eight | Big Book study | sobriety devotional | addiction recovery

Daily Ripples is a daily devotional reflection connecting recovery principles with the life of faith. New episodes every day at dailyripples.com.

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 God to bring names forward, the Seventh Step prayer to close it out, and then the writing itself — and he's clear about why he does it: to grow his relationship with God first, and let the relationships in the world follow from there. From there he moves to Jesus' instruction in Matthew to leave your gift at the altar and go make peace with your brother first, and pairs it with page 164's promise that the answers come when your own house is in order. It lands on page 124 and a line he reads twice: we grow by our willingness to face and rectify errors and turn them into assets. The takeaway is plain and freeing — the most important amends is the next one, because that's all there is.

The stone for today: Healing begins when I become willing to face the harm I've caused and take responsibility for it.

Read today's full Daily Ripple at www.dailyripples.com — and we'd love to hear from you. Reach out any time at [email protected].

Willing to make things right | Step Eight and making the list | facing the past honestly | Christian recovery | 12-step faith | fit spiritual condition | defects into assets | Big Book study | sobriety devotional | addiction recovery

Daily Ripples is a daily devotional reflection connecting recovery principles with the life of faith. New episodes every day at dailyripples.com.