Outward calm is its own kind of hiding. This episode is Mike and Cristi working through what it actually means to guard your heart when life shakes everything loose.

Outward success can hide inward struggle. Real health begins beneath the surface where pride, ego, and self-reliance are addressed.

Cristi opens on mental health as an inside-out process — you can't build it outward when the inward is unaddressed. People struggle with this because the world rewards the performance. Admitting weakness is easier said than done, and it depends entirely on who you have to admit it to.

Mike makes it concrete. For three or four months after leaving his city manager role last November, he was employing what recovery calls fake it till you make it — outward calm, outward peace, hiding the inner struggle. He knew he wasn't going through it alone — God first, and Cristi as the safe space that held things steady. July 1st is when full-time ministry formally kicks in. The shake-up, as he puts it, is the reason this podcast exists.

Proverbs 4:23 lands it: above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. And then John Wesley — Mike's nerd-out, recovered mid-sentence — the early Methodist class meetings, where every gathering began with the same question: how is it with your soul? He wonders if that question belongs back in recovery rooms and churches. When you lay your head on the pillow at night, that's all you've got.

Tomorrow: one from the Bible, one from the Big Book, and Cristi.

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