Where Small Steps Lead

My wife and I went to Branson, Missouri, for the first time this spring and caught a Sight and Sound production of the life of David. It is a genuinely impressive show — Broadway-level sets, an LED video wall built into the staging, and a Goliath so massive it took three or four people to operate.

What stuck with me, however, wasn’t the actual show; it was where the play chose to end. The curtain came down right after David’s repentance to the prophet Nathan for his sin with Bathsheba. At first, that surprised me.

Then it made sense.

There isn’t much else in David’s story that belongs on a stage. Everyone knows about Bathsheba and the murder that covered it up. What few people notice is that the ease of deception was not new for David. It had been growing for years.

• Long before the rooftop, David encouraged Jonathan to lie to King Saul in order to protect David, a lie that nearly got Jonathan killed and damaged his relationship with his father.
• David lied to the priests at Nob about being on a mission for Saul, and eighty-five priests and an entire town were slaughtered over his lie.
• He faked insanity to survive among the Philistines, scratching at gates and letting spit run down his beard, trading his dignity for safety.

The list could go on (read 1 Samuel 20 through 27), but notice that each time the lie got him something, and each time it cost someone else more. His lies grow in their repercussions.

The boy who faced Goliath with five stones and no armor because he trusted God completely slowly became a man who trusted his own instinct instead.

That shift didn’t happen in one dramatic moment. It happened in a hundred small ones, each easy to justify in the moment it was made. There’s a phrase from the movie “What About Bob?” that I’ve used for years, mostly as a joke with friends who love that film as much as I do. The main character’s whole recovery hinges on a mantra about baby steps. “Baby steps onto the elevator. I’m in the elevator!” (IYKYK) It’s the idea of small, manageable movements toward something too big to face all at once.

I’ve used it to encourage my kids through tasks that felt too large. I’ve also used it as a warning when I talk with pastors about how easily any of us can lie to ourselves about where our baby steps are actually headed.

There are sins you’re not capable of today. Your heart is nowhere near them. But keep taking small steps in that direction, and eventually you arrive.

Once you’ve stepped that close, you’re capable of that sin. So am I.

I’ve had this on my mind because I just spent a week with a church staff whose senior leader had his moral failure exposed publicly, in a way the whole city now knows. It started years before it became visible. The staff and the congregation feel betrayed and lied to, and rightly so. What I kept wondering wasn’t how he got there. It was where, along that long line of small steps, a little honesty with someone might have stopped it.

So I‘ll ask you what I couldn’t ask him:

• What keeps you from honesty?
• What keeps you from the kind of open conversation, the kind of transparency, that lets someone else speak into your heart before the baby steps add up to somewhere you never meant to go?

King David’s and this pastor’s stories say the same thing: those honest conversations are worth the discomfort. If you have no safe person to talk to, please reach out to me. No judgment. No condemnation. Just honesty and care about the condition of your heart.