May 27 - Moving Forward Without Shame

Guilt can guide you or trap you. This episode is about the difference — and what the ego has to do with both. Guilt can either guide me or trap me. When it leads me to change, it serves a purpose. When it lingers without action, it becomes a burden I was never meant to carry. Mike opens with Romans 8:1 — no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus — and the God he grew up with, who couldn't wait to send him straight to hell for any misstep. That's not a theology Mike rejects intellectually. It's one he still has to actively counter, verse by verse. John 3:17 is the one he keeps tattooed on his arm: God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. He has to go back to it regularly. The childhood lessons don't just leave. Corey's entry point is three letters written in capitals: EGO. Before the first drink, before anything, his ego was already separating him from everyone around him — from kids with two parents, two siblings, cousins. He had none of that. Then at 13 he took his first drink and for the first time in his life, nothing separated him from anyone. He was one. He calls it a spiritual experience. It was. It was also the beginning of the destruction. Page 75's perfect peace and ease, walking hand in hand with God — that's the same feeling, he says, without the cost. The theological centerpiece of the episode comes from page 20 of the Big Book: if what we have learned and felt and seen means anything at all, it means that all of us, whatever our race, creed, or color, are the children of a living creator. Corey noticed the double "and" — learned and felt and seen — and mapped it: learned to the Father, felt to the Son, seen to the Holy Spirit. Then race, creed, and color mapping back to the same three: creed as what we've learned, race and color as what we've felt and seen through our own experience of the world. A Trinitarian structure buried in a 1939 sobriety text. It still worked, Mike tells him afterward. It more than worked. 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.