Every journey begins with a first step. We watch our children learn to smile, sit up, turn over, crawl and stand up, and then comes that first step. Tottering, often needing the ‘prop’ of a hand or the furniture to steady those wobbly legs, we clap in encouragement as the baby becomes a toddler. Before we know it, that faltering child is running confidently, excitedly discovering the world around them.

Martin Luther King said, ‘Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.’

God calls us to a life of faith, to a life of first steps. It’s not easy to learn to walk: there is much physical and mental development which has to take place before the baby can become a toddler. Similarly, we have to grow in faith if we are to do the things God calls us to do. In Will Smith’s words,‘The first step is you have to say you can.’ If we don’t believe we can walk, we never will. If we want to know our final destination and have life’s journey all mapped out before we begin, we will probably never get very far in God. He’s interested in faith steps, not setting out with all the answers before us. Faith will always involve uncertainty and doubt before confidence and arrival.

God calls us to first steps. Our journey will not always be easy. Like the toddler, we will doubtless stumble and fall many times on this journey; the toddler’s ability to ‘face plank’ results in many tears and scary moments, and life is similarly heart-breaking and terrifying at times. When we’re flat on our faces in bewilderment, it’s easy to think we’ll never get the hang of this ‘walking by faith’ lark. But God wants us to get up again and start again. The toddler is the perfect example in the merits of perseverance. No child gets up and walks confidently and steadily first time. It can take months before they can walk confidently. But it’s rare to find three year olds with no phsyical or neurological complications who can’t walk!

Prov 1:7 in the Message version says, ‘Start with God—the first step in learning is bowing down to God; only fools thumb their noses at such wisdom and learning.’ All first steps ultimately begin as we hear God and obey Him. The pilgrims’ annual journeys to Jerusalem all began with a first step. Every journey begins as we hear God and say ‘let us go…’ (see Ps 122:1) Be encouraged to take those first steps of faith and learn to walk tall in God.