“Faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
One of the most dangerous places a man can live is inside his own head with nowhere for the fear to go. Not panic — the low-level dread that just sits there. The fear of not knowing how something resolves. The fear that this season is permanent. The fear that you’re spinning while the clock runs and the people around you are waiting on an answer you don’t have yet.
Most men manage that fear by strategizing. We run every scenario, map every angle, prepare for every outcome. It feels like discipline. It isn’t. It’s control wearing discipline’s clothes. And before long, you’re not solving anything. You’re just spinning.
That was me this morning.
This quote from MLK landed a few days ago and wouldn’t leave. Faith is taking the first step, even when you can’t see the whole staircase. The staircase I can’t see right now is what’s on the other side of a long, brutal legal season — nearly two years of it: My divorce proceedings. I don’t know exactly how it resolves. I don’t know exactly when. What I know is that at every point in my life when I couldn’t see what was coming, I’ve been provided for. That’s evidence. Faith is supposed to be built on evidence, not certainty.
But this morning, the fear was louder than the evidence. So I did something I’ve done before and have no excuse for forgetting.
I picked up the journal.
I wrote out everything I was afraid of — the things I’d been trying to think around instead of just naming. Then I wrote next to each one: why this isn’t true, and why I’ll be okay even if it is. Not complicated. Doesn’t cost anything. Works every time. I know it works and I still resist it — because doing the work means releasing the illusion that I can think my way through something that requires faith. Struggle is what it looks like when I’m holding on to control instead of taking the step that’s in front of me.
Here’s what happened when I stopped spinning.
I showed up to honor a leader in my world who just hit a four-year milestone. He’d put himself through a 360-degree feedback process — asked eight people around him to tell him the truth about how they experience him. That takes guts. He wanted to process it with someone he trusted, and I wanted to show up fully for that. To see what four years of genuine growth looks like on a man who’s doing the work.
If I’d walked into that room carrying everything I’d been spinning on two hours earlier, I’d have been there in body only. Instead, I showed up present. I could hear him. I could see him. I could honor what he’d built without projecting any of my own fear onto what was supposed to be his moment. That lunch was a step up the staircase — and I only got to take it because I’d taken a different first step in the morning.
Men, the clarity you’re looking for is not at the top of the staircase. It’s on the next step. The first step — the journal, the honest conversation, the decision you’ve been postponing — that’s where clarity lives. Not at the end. Right now.
This week’s lesson: the staircase you can’t see is not evidence that there’s no staircase. It’s evidence that faith is required.
