May 7 - Handle With Care

Truth is not a blunt instrument. This episode is about the difference between honesty that heals and honesty that harms — and how recovery teaches you to hold both at the same time. Truth should never be used as a weapon. Growth requires honesty about myself, but always with care and respect toward others. Corey opens with Big Book page 77 on amends — a passage that warns him twice in the same paragraph: others' faults are not to be discussed, stick to your own side of the street. Then page 67: we resolutely looked at our mistakes. Then page 62: our troubles are basically of our own making. And he lands it with a story — the DUI at the Gold Club, the lawyer, his mom, and the moment he decided it was actually his dead father's fault. Recovery, he says, is the slow process of realizing it was a you problem all along. Paris matches him beat for beat — his own DUI in a ditch in a snowstorm, the girl he told the truth to who was not, in fact, happy about it, and a confession from this past weekend he didn't plan to make on air. Corey uses it as a teaching moment about HOW — the program's catchphrase of Honesty, Open-mindedness, and Willingness. The trouble is, that's not the order it happened. Willingness came first, from desperation. Honesty came around step four or five. And open-mindedness came last, when God started making sense. Then the wires: if you're trying to build conscious contact with God and you've got lies stacked up everywhere, you've got a complicated life. Getting honest starts untangling the wires. That's what the fifth step promise on page 75 is really about — you don't know God better because you said the words. You know Him better because something got cleared out. The episode closes with Paris telling the story of the night Corey's GPS went silent. He thought his guy was gone. Corey was in treatment. They came back together anyway — and today they're sitting in a room reading books. Find every daily entry at dailyripples.com. Reach out 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.