The Law of the First Step

Starting a project is one of the most difficult things for me to do. It doesn’t have to be a huge undertaking that has potential to impact the entire world. The simplest of activities can keep me sidelined on the “thinking” bench (aka the “do-nothing” bench).

I don’t consider thinking to be a beginning for me because, in most cases, it doesn’t accomplish anything. Thinking about cleaning the bathroom has never yet expunged one square millimeter of grime from my bathtub. Thinking of sentiments to write in a card will not advance the greeting even one inch toward the mailbox because if I don’t write my thoughts down, I will lose them and have to think up something else later.

What I need is action. And that has led me to discover how to get a project started. I have to take that first step.

That first step is hard, though. Maybe it has something to do with Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion, also called the law of inertia. Do you remember that one from science class? It states that an object remains at rest or continues in uniform motion until acted upon by an external force. I know—it’s a law of physics and it refers to a physical object. But I think the principle can be applied to the concept of progress as well. Progress requires a first step, i.e., it needs movement to get started. But Newton tells me it takes an outside force to get me moving. And that doesn’t happen easily.

So, first steps aren’t easy. But they can be extremely simple. For cleaning the bathroom, my first step is to pull the cleaning supplies out of the cabinet and set them in the middle of the floor. Our bathroom is small. If I don’t want to keep tripping over the toilet bowl cleaner, I have to use it so I can put it away.

If I want to send a card with a friendly note tucked inside . . . OK. You’re probably wondering how that can be such a difficult thing to do. Maybe it’s because I labor over the words so they say exactly what I want. Therefore, I know it will take a sizeable chunk of time, so I put it off. Anyway, my first step is to go through my stock and pick out a card. It may still lie around a few days, but now that it’s picked out, it will get sent.

The same principle of taking that first step applies to huge projects, though they may require many first steps along the way. My yearlong project of cleaning out 40 years of accumulation in our basement and attic is about as huge as they come.

In the past I have attempted to tackle this, but I have basically failed. I can never decide what to do with things. Do I keep an item, throw it away, or give it away? If I give it away, does it go to a friend, to the gag gift pile, or to a charity? Which charity is the right one? Since I rarely get past the first decision, nothing gets cleaned out. But this year, I’m determined things will be different.

I decided to start in my 10’ x 10’ “sewing” room in the basement. I don’t remember ever sewing down there, though my sewing machine does inhabit one of its deep, dark corners. The counters, table, and floor are piled high with craft and office supplies, teaching materials from when I retired six years ago, and miscellaneous items I brought home from my parents’ house when Mom died nine years ago. Added to all of this are extras that appear when CW gets an urge to clean the basement area outside my room and he doesn’t know what to do with them.  The disorder of the bags, boxes, and loose objects barely leaves space to walk.

My first step was simply to wade into the room and stay there till inspiration came. I probably stood there at least a half hour staring at what might as well have been a beachful of sand that I needed to relocate—grain by grain with tweezers—to various and unknown other beaches. But I wasn’t going to leave the room until I did something.

Finally inspiration showed up. I began sifting through bags for any office supplies and I tossed them into an empty box. It filled up, so I got a second box and divided the supplies—paper products in one, everything else in the other. When I had filled both boxes and didn’t detect any other supplies, I called it a day. The appearance of the room had not changed, but I had moved a few grains of sand to an intermediate beach. I wouldn’t have accomplished even that if I hadn’t taken the first step—the only thing I knew to do. Sometimes we just have to commit some time and wade in.

Sometimes God says to wait on Him. But when He’s ready to do a work in the lives of His people, He often requires a first step from us. There’s an illustration in chapters 11-14 of Exodus. After the Israelites had lived in Egypt 430 years, God said the waiting was over; the time was right for Him to rescue His people from their bondage to the Egyptians. Moses led the Israelites in a mass exodus out of Egypt, but the Egyptians pursued them to capture and return them to slavery. When they reached the Red Sea, there was nowhere to go. God had an escape plan for His people . . . but it depended on what Moses did.

The Lord said to Moses, “Raise your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea to divide the water so that the Israelites can go through the sea on dry ground.” . . . Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and all that night the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land. The waters were divided, and the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left. (Exodus 14: 16, 21-22)

I believe if Moses had not raised his staff and stretched out his hand over the sea, the Egyptians would have hauled the Israelites back to Egypt to their lives of slavery. God certainly could have driven back the sea without Moses, but He had His reasons for requiring a first step from him. One thought is that Moses’s act was necessary so the Israelites would see him as the person God had chosen to deliver them (Clarke’s Commentary). And it worked for a while. (The Israelites were a forgetful people, but that’s another story.)

God has reasons for the first steps He requires from us, too. He wants to work together with us. He wants us to be involved in what He is doing and He wants to be involved in what we are doing. (Ideally, those should be the same.) I think in many cases God simply wants to see if we have commitment to a task before He steps in to help us. It isn’t His plan to do all the work Himself. And if He did everything right off the bat, I expect He’d have a lot of lazy workers sitting on the “thinking” bench.

I may have discovered my own law to complement Newton’s. It applies to tasks God has given me, ranging from attacking the basement to starting a ministry. It’s the Law of the First Step: A first step leads to more steps; no first step leads nowhere. I’ve experienced both situations, and the first one is definitely more satisfying. I don’t have to know what the “more steps” are before I take the first step. And when I don’t know what the first step is, I just need to ask God. If I listen and wait, He will happily show me—because we’re in it together.