May 17 - Letting Forgiveness Flow

Forgiving someone else and forgiving yourself turn out to be the same river. This episode is about what happens when you stop damming it. Forgiving others and forgiving myself are deeply connected. When resentment builds, it blocks both. When it is released, healing begins to flow in both directions. Mike opens with a question: which is harder — forgiving someone else or forgiving yourself? Corey doesn't know. He has a four-page prayer notebook, ten names on the front, ten on the back, people he still owes amends to, people he prays for every morning. Some of them he's praying will forgive him. He hasn't figured out yet whether that's forgiving others or forgiving himself. Matthew 6:14-15 connects it — forgive others so your Father will forgive you. Corey traces it straight to page 67: the old angle was that the world and its people were wrong, and concluding they were wrong was as far as he ever got. Because they dominated him. And the reason they dominated him was that he demanded they love, comfort, and understand him. 12&12 page 78 names it: to escape looking at the wrongs we have done another, we resentfully focus on the wrongs he has done us. The house always wins. And Corey is the house. Then page 552 — Freedom from Bondage, the personal stories, a section Corey has said on air he doesn't like and rarely reads. He reads it anyway. Pray for the person you resent. Ask for everything you want for yourself to be given to them. Even when you don't mean it, do it anyway. Do it every day for two weeks. You will find you have come to mean it. Mike takes it to the end: can you forgive Mr. Brown when he gets the girl, the house, and you're in a rental? In faith, the answer is yes — not because you co-sign what he did, but because the only thing keeping you captive is withholding it. The episode closes on a single question and a single answer. Can I do that on my own? No. But God, through me, can. Find every daily entry at dailyripples.com. Reach out anytime at [email protected]. Daily Ripples is a daily devotional reflection connecting recovery principles with the life of faith. New episodes every day at dailyripples.com.