You've become very good at being seen. You know how to read a room, how to offer just enough of your story to seem open while keeping the deepest thing safely out of view, how to hand the world a competent, admirable version of yourself. And still, underneath the feed and the applause and the performance you have perfected, there is an ache you can no longer explain away, because you are surrounded and you are not known. In this conversation, Ian Simkins joins me to name the quiet distance between the platform and the table, and to expose how much of our exhaustion is simply the cost of maintaining an image our bodies, our nervous systems, and our spirits were never built to sustain.

About Ian Simkins

Ian Simkins is the lead pastor of The Bridge Church just outside Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife, Katie, and their three sons. Shaped for years in ministry in the Chicagoland area before moving his family to Middle Tennessee, he writes and teaches out of the actual life of a local church rather than from theory. His new book, Every Table an Altar: Reclaiming Connection in a World of Division, Distraction, and Loneliness (Zondervan), was born from that community, and it makes the case that the antidote to our disconnection is not another program or platform but the ordinary, sacred practice of gathering at a table.

Episode Links

• Show Notes
• Buy my book "Healing What You Can't Erase" here!
• Invite me to speak at your church or event.
• Connect with me @WINTODAYChris on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Jonathan Eckert has spent more than three decades watching what happens to people, young and old, when comfort becomes the organizing principle of a life, and in this conversation he draws the line most of us have blurred: the line between happiness that is circumstantial, self-focused, and fleeting, and the joy the Lord actually offers, which is not the absence of struggle but the very fuel that allows us to struggle well. We talk about the frictionless world we have engineered for ourselves and what it is quietly costing our capacity to be human, about why Scripture rarely lets joy stand apart from trial, and about what it means to count it all joy when we meet trials of various kinds, not because the trial is good, but because of what the Lord forms in us when we refuse to run from it.

Episode Links

• Show Notes
• Buy my book "Healing What You Can't Erase" here!
• Invite me to speak at your church or event.
• Connect with me @WINTODAYChris on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

LJ Mitchell has spent a decade as the music director of Elevation Worship, and he joins me for a conversation that begins with performed faith and refuses to stay on the surface. Because the reason we broadcast the walk is the same reason we cannot put down the role: we have confused what we do with who we are, and we are frightened of who we would be without the applause. We talk about releasing what you're known for, the hidden work of formation that no one claps for, and the wilderness that excavates the false scaffolding out of you. LJ is not saying this from a safe distance; he is telling you what it cost him to loosen his grip while he was still holding the thing.

Episode Links

• Show Notes
• Buy my book "Healing What You Can't Erase" here!
• Invite me to speak at your church or event.
• Connect with me @WINTODAYChris on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Toni Collier joins me for a conversation that started with one sentence she posted online, watched go viral, and could not fully explain: some of us have become more obsessed with healing than becoming holy. We sit with what that exposes. Toni is the founder of Broken Crayons Still Color and the author of Don't Try This Alone, and she is not speaking from a safe distance; she is still in the work, still in counseling after more than a decade, still learning that healing is not a magic wand but the capacity to hold what you needed to heal. Together we trace the difference between healing and holiness, why making your own healing the idol will isolate you from the very people who could help you, and how the therapy words we have baptized (toxic, boundaries, protecting my peace) can quietly cost us the moral compass that is our God.

Here is the harder part. Your healing was never meant to end with you. In Luke 15, the younger son moves from "give me" to "make me," and that shift is the whole of sanctification. You are not made well so you can feel better. You are made well so you can be conformed to the image of Christ and love His people well. Transformation does not happen in a day; it happens daily. So the question this conversation puts in front of you is not whether you are getting better. It is whether you are becoming holy, and whether you are willing to let your healing cost you something on behalf of someone else.

Guest Bio

Toni Collier is the founder of Broken Crayons Still Color, a global ministry that helps women move through brokenness toward healing and hope, and the host of the Still Coloring podcast. She is the author of Don't Try This Alone, Brave Enough to Be Broken, and the children's book Broken Crayons Still Color, and she writes from inside her own story of heartbreak and rebuilding rather than from a safe distance. On this episode, she brings hard-won clarity to the difference between getting healed and becoming holy.

Show Partner(s)

SafeSleeve designs a phone case that blocks up to 99% of harmful EMF radiation—so I'm not carrying that kind of exposure next to my body all day. It's sleek, durable, and most importantly, lab-tested by third parties. The results aren't hidden—they're published right on their site. And that matters because many so-called EMF blockers on the market either don't work or can't prove they do. We protect our hearts and minds—why wouldn't we protect our bodies too? Head to safesleevecases.com and use the code WINTODAY10 for 10% off your order.

Episode Links

• Show Notes
• Buy my book "Healing What You Can't Erase" here!
• Invite me to speak at your church or event.
• Connect with me @WINTODAYChris on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Jacob Coyne joins me this week with the credibility of someone who has lived on both sides of that gap. He built a platform of more than a million followers and a suicide prevention movement that has reached a generation, and then received a warning that reordered his life: you cannot build a house on a rocket ship. We talk about the commercialization of Christianity and the strange market for spiritual performance, about how discernment is formed in slow and hidden places rather than loud ones, and about the sobering warning Jesus gives in Matthew 7—that a person can do impressive things in His name and still hear, "I never knew you." This is not a conversation about someone else's hypocrisy. It is about yours and mine.

Guest Bio

Jacob Coyne is a preacher, content creator, and the founder of Stay Here, a faith-based suicide prevention movement that has trained and equipped a generation, reaching people through a social media following of more than 1.4 million. He is the author of the new book The Secret Life of Christians: How to Live Authentically, Especially When No One Is Watching, which grew out of his own reckoning with platform, performance, and the cost of building a name. He lives with his wife, Mariah, and their daughters in East Tennessee, where much of this conversation about the hidden life was hard-won.

Show Partner

SafeSleeve designs a phone case that blocks up to 99% of harmful EMF radiation—so I'm not carrying that kind of exposure next to my body all day. It's sleek, durable, and most importantly, lab-tested by third parties. The results aren't hidden—they're published right on their site. And that matters because many so-called EMF blockers on the market either don't work or can't prove they do. We protect our hearts and minds—why wouldn't we protect our bodies too? Head to safesleevecases.com and use the code WINTODAY10 for 10% off your order.

Episode Links

• Show Notes
• Buy my book "Healing What You Can't Erase" here!
• Invite me to speak at your church or event.
• Connect with me @WINTODAYChris on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

You set out to have more faith, not to practice witchcraft, so nothing about your prayer life ever felt like sorcery. You were quoting Scripture the whole time. You learned to declare the promise, stand on the Word, and pray until the breakthrough came. But somewhere in there your prayers quietly stopped being surrender and became leverage; you found the verse that guaranteed the outcome you already wanted and began aiming it at your finances, your marriage, your body, less like a child asking a Father and more like a technician working a system, and you never stopped to ask what He might want to change in you before He changed anything around you. My guest today is Christa Black Singh.

Christa Black Singh spent years at the center of Christian worship, writing songs the church still sings and touring the world's biggest stages, before a search for healing pulled her one degree at a time into manifestation, astrology, tarot, energy work, and finally ayahuasca and plant-medicine ceremonies in Costa Rica, where she lost nearly everything before Jesus brought her home. She came back able to name what most of us cannot see: that the New Age and the prayer meeting are often running the same operating system. In this conversation, we take the cover off all of it: manifestation, Christian witchcraft, the divine feminine, New Thought and the law of attraction, and the self-help gospel that has climbed into too many pulpits under the name of a life-coach Jesus who asks nothing of you and changes nothing in you.

Here is what makes it dangerous. It works. The counterfeit really does deliver the house, the outcome, the feeling, and it sends the invoice later, because a power that gives you what you want has become the source you now answer to. The question this conversation forces is not whether the New Age is real. It is whether you have been trying to run your own life as god and calling it Christianity. Wholeness never comes through control; it comes through surrender, through the fear of the Lord, through daily repentance and a hunger for Jesus Himself rather than what He can get you. So before you decide this one is about someone else, look honestly at your own prayers and ask which of them have been trying to bend God's arm instead of bowing your knee.

Guest Bio

Christa Black Singh is a songwriter and worship musician who spent years at the center of the Christian music world, writing for artists and movements the church still sings and touring for more than a decade with Michael W. Smith, before a long search for healing led her out of the faith and into the New Age through manifestation, energy work, and plant-medicine ceremonies that cost her nearly everything. She has since returned to Jesus and now speaks openly about the deception she once taught, helping others recognize the counterfeit and close the doors it opened. She hosts the Head to Heart podcast and teaches on spiritual discernment, deliverance, and healing.

Show Partner

SafeSleeve designs a phone case that blocks up to 99% of harmful EMF radiation—so I'm not carrying that kind of exposure next to my body all day. It's sleek, durable, and most importantly, lab-tested by third parties. The results aren't hidden—they're published right on their site. And that matters because many so-called EMF blockers on the market either don't work or can't prove they do. We protect our hearts and minds—why wouldn't we protect our bodies too? Head to safesleevecases.com and use the code WINTODAY10 for 10% off your order.

Episode Links

• Show Notes
• Buy my book "Healing What You Can't Erase" here!
• Invite me to speak at your church or event.
• Connect with me @WINTODAYChris on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

You would never call it worship. You'd call it being responsible. But look at what you organize your life around, what you reach for the second the ground shifts, the thing you cannot fall asleep without having settled. You have built an altar to certainty, and you bow at it every time fear whispers that if you could just get control of this, you'd finally be safe. It isn't faith. It's control wearing faith's clothing, and underneath it is a version of you who learned a long time ago that holding everything together was the only way not to get hurt.

Dr. Alison Cook joins me for a conversation that goes straight underneath that pattern. A therapist, host of The Best of You podcast, and author of the new book The Secure Soul, Alison has spent two decades helping people tell the difference between security and certainty, and see why the two were never the same thing. We talk about what it means to be held by a God whose first gift is not a map but His presence, about the control we mistake for faith and the caretaking we mistake for love, and about the wilderness seasons that strip away every scaffolding we built to feel safe so that something truer can finally hold us.

If you are the strong one, the capable one, quietly white-knuckling a life that looks impressive from the outside and feels hollow underneath, this conversation will not hand you a better way to manage it. It will ask you to take your hands off the thing you have been worshiping. To let yourself be seen before you have earned it, loved before you have fixed it, held before you have figured any of it out. The security you are aching for is real. It was never on the other side of control; it is found in the presence of the One who has never once asked you to carry it alone, whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light.

Guest Bio

Dr. Alison Cook is a therapist and the host of the top-ranked The Best of You podcast, where she helps people heal past wounds, develop a strong sense of self, and experience a God who is for them. She earned her BA at Dartmouth College, her MA at Denver Seminary, and her PhD at the University of Denver, where she specialized in integrating psychology and theology. Certified in Internal Family Systems, she is the author of The Best of You, coauthor of Boundaries for Your Soul, and the author of the new book The Secure Soul: Finding Inner Strength and Connection When Trust Doesn't Come Easy.

Show Partner(s)

SafeSleeve designs a phone case that blocks up to 99% of harmful EMF radiation—so I'm not carrying that kind of exposure next to my body all day. It's sleek, durable, and most importantly, lab-tested by third parties. The results aren't hidden—they're published right on their site. And that matters because many so-called EMF blockers on the market either don't work or can't prove they do. We protect our hearts and minds—why wouldn't we protect our bodies too? Head to safesleevecases.com and use the code WINTODAY10 for 10% off your order.

Episode Links

• Show Notes
• Buy my book "Healing What You Can't Erase" here!
• Invite me to speak at your church or event.
• Connect with me @WINTODAYChris on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

You said you were fine, but fine is not a spiritual condition—it's a managed one. Fine means you've stopped expecting anything, stopped reaching for anything, and settled into the low hum of a life that moves without going anywhere. You're not in crisis. You're not walking away from the Lord. You're just less hungry than you used to be, less expectant, less alive. And because nothing is dramatically wrong, you've convinced yourself nothing needs to change.

Dr. Chris Palmer joins me for a conversation that names what that condition actually is—and it's not a season. Dr. Palmer is Dean of the Barnett College of Ministry and Theology at Southeastern University and the author of A World Without God (Zondervan), a work of narrative philosophy that takes the reader into Novemberton, an allegorical town in the grip of something it cannot name. What he argues is that the despair overtaking our culture isn't arriving as a manifesto—it's arriving as a mood. Nihilism, as he frames it, is not the dramatic philosophy-class version; it's the quiet, functional, show-up-to-church version—passive surrender dressed as stability, apathy wearing the clothes of peace. We talk about why values are on sale right now, what practical polytheism looks like inside a congregation, how self-centered spirituality masquerades as devotion, and why the only thing durable enough to bear the weight of our emptiness is not our own shoulders.

This conversation will not give you a strategy. It will give you a mirror—and what you do with what you see in it is the entire question. Come ready to be honest about what you've been calling fine.

Guest Bio

Dr. Chris Palmer is Dean of the Barnett College of Ministry and Theology at Southeastern University in Lakeland, Florida, where he teaches at the intersection of New Testament studies, philosophy, and cultural theology. He holds a PhD from Bangor University in Wales and is the author of several books, including his latest, A World Without God (Zondervan)—a work of narrative philosophy that examines what happens to meaning, purpose, and the human soul when God is not forgotten so much as he is treated as one option among many.

Show Partner

SafeSleeve designs a phone case that blocks up to 99% of harmful EMF radiation—so I'm not carrying that kind of exposure next to my body all day. It's sleek, durable, and most importantly, lab-tested by third parties. The results aren't hidden—they're published right on their site. And that matters because many so-called EMF blockers on the market either don't work or can't prove they do. We protect our hearts and minds—why wouldn't we protect our bodies too? Head to safesleevecases.com and use the code WINTODAY10 for 10% off your order.

Episode Links

• Show Notes
• Buy my book "Healing What You Can't Erase" here!
• Invite me to speak at your church or event.
• Connect with me @WINTODAYChris on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

You know the feeling. The world that once held shape around you — the role, the identity, the thing you built or pursued or believed about yourself — has come apart. And instead of leaning into the chaos and learning what it has to teach you, you've found a more comfortable option. You've constructed a story. A controlled version of events where you're still the hero, where the failure makes sense, where the disruption is somebody else's fault. The snow globe stays intact on the countertop. You shake it and admire the beauty. And you tell yourself the simulation is real.

Geoffrey Cain joins me for one of the most unusual and honestly riveting conversations this show has ever produced. Geoffrey is a national columnist and the author of Steve Jobs in Exile, the definitive account of the twelve wilderness years between Jobs's ousting from Apple in 1985 and his legendary return in 1997. What emerged from that research is something that has far less to do with Silicon Valley than it does with the interior architecture of every human being who has ever hit rock bottom and had to decide what to do next. We cover four lessons the wilderness teaches every person who enters it — how it harnesses potential, tests motivation, forces maturity, and compels you to finally confront yourself. We dig into ego death: what it actually is, why the ego is not the enemy it's made out to be, and why the unchecked ego eventually destroys every relationship it touches. We examine the moment Jobs stood at the edge of personal bankruptcy, nearly broken by his own brilliant volatility, and chose — slowly, painfully, imperfectly — to start releasing control and trusting the people around him. And we talk about the universal human tendency to choose fantasy over reality, comfort over confrontation, and the seductive lie that we can trick ourselves into maturity without ever doing the actual work of being transformed.

Here is what this conversation will ask of you: it will ask you to look honestly at the place where you are substituting the snow globe for the actual world. It will ask you to name the interior flaw you have been circling and avoiding rather than confronting. It will ask you to consider that the wilderness you are in right now is not a detour from your story but the very place where your story is being written. You can leave this conversation inspired, or you can leave it changed. Those are two very different exits.

Guest Bio

Geoffrey Cain is an award-winning author and national journalist whose work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Time, The Economist, Wired, and The Spectator. His previous books — Samsung Rising and The Perfect Police State — established him as one of the most rigorous and compelling chroniclers of technology, power, and human behavior writing today. His newest book, Steve Jobs in Exile, draws on previously unpublished documents, unbroadcast footage, and new interviews with Jobs's closest colleagues to tell the definitive story of the twelve years that transformed a volatile, brilliant young founder into one of the most consequential leaders in modern history. Geoffrey writes the Substack newsletter The Burner Files and is a managing partner at Alembic Partners.

Show Partner

SafeSleeve designs a phone case that blocks up to 99% of harmful EMF radiation—so I'm not carrying that kind of exposure next to my body all day. It's sleek, durable, and most importantly, lab-tested by third parties. The results aren't hidden—they're published right on their site. And that matters because many so-called EMF blockers on the market either don't work or can't prove they do. We protect our hearts and minds—why wouldn't we protect our bodies too? Head to safesleevecases.com and use the code WINTODAY10 for 10% off your order.

Episode Links

• Show Notes
• Buy my book "Healing What You Can't Erase" here!
• Invite me to speak at your church or event.
• Connect with me @WINTODAYChris on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Sexual addiction is often treated as a behavior problem. Stop the behavior. Remove the temptation. Try harder next time. But what if the behavior is not the real issue? What if the patterns that bring shame, secrecy, and self-sabotage are actually revealing something deeper about the story you carry? This week on Win Today, therapist and researcher Jay Stringer joins me to unpack the anatomy of sexual addiction and unwanted sexual behavior. Drawing from research involving more than 3,800 men and women, Jay explains why these patterns are rarely random and how the unresolved parts of our past often shape them. We talk about why shame keeps people trapped in destructive cycles, why curiosity is often the first step toward healing, and why grief has the surprising power to reshape what we desire. Sexual struggles are not simply moral failures to suppress. They can become a roadmap that leads us toward the healing we have avoided. If you are stuck in patterns you cannot explain, if shame has kept you silent, or if you've tried to manage the behavior without understanding the story behind it, this episode will help you see why real freedom begins with honesty.

Guest Bio

Jay Stringer is a licensed therapist, minister, and researcher who helps men and women understand and outgrow unwanted sexual behaviors. He is the author of the award-winning book Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing, based on a multiyear research study involving more than 3,800 men and women exploring the roots of sexual addiction and compulsive sexual behavior. Jay is also the creator of the Sexual Behavior Self-Assessment and The Journey Course, a five-month program designed to help individuals identify and transform the deeper drivers behind destructive patterns. He holds an MDiv and a master's degree in counseling psychology from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology and completed post-graduate training under Dr. Dan Allender while serving as a Senior Fellow at The Allender Center.

Show Partner

SafeSleeve designs a phone case that blocks up to 99% of harmful EMF radiation—so I'm not carrying that kind of exposure next to my body all day. It's sleek, durable, and most importantly, lab-tested by third parties. The results aren't hidden—they're published right on their site. And that matters because many so-called EMF blockers on the market either don't work or can't prove they do. We protect our hearts and minds—why wouldn't we protect our bodies too? Head to safesleevecases.com and use the code WINTODAY10 for 10% off your order.

Episode Links

• Show Notes
• Buy my book "Healing What You Can't Erase" here!
• Invite me to speak at your church or event.
• Connect with me @WINTODAYChris on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.