But the thing David had done displeased the Lord. 2 Samuel 11:26b

Sometimes in books or movies or television shows, the beginning is the end. The first scene opens on a major catastrophe, usually with a main character looking around at the carnage with a look on their face that says, “How did I get here?” The story then zooms out and backs up 24 hours, a week, a year–to the beginning of the end–to give the answer to the character’s question.

A disaster of epic proportions rarely happens out of the blue–there are small steps and slight actions that are perhaps unnoticeable at first. They take place in a series of snowballing events that then lead to the kind of carnage that leaves one shell-shocked, looking around at the mess, and wondering how you ended up there in the first place.

The end of 2 Samuel 11 states that “the thing David had done displeased the Lord.” The “thing” David had done? Let’s start at the beginning of the end: coveting his neighbor’s wife led to adultery, lying, and murder. David didn’t wake up one day and decide to kill someone. A commentary I read this week said, “Satan could never tempt David with the entire package at once, but he deceived him with it piece by piece.” 

Isn’t that how it goes for us, too? 

We never wake up and decide to do something big, messy, and so wrong that it’s going to absolutely wreck our lives. It always starts with the breaking of the first commandment: You shall have no other gods before me. It was the beginning of the end for David, and it is for us, too. David’s sin was not in seeing a beautiful woman; it was that he allowed his gaze to linger there. David put his own indulgences before God. Once that sin was allowed to grow unchecked, it fractured his entire life and the lives of many around him.

We may not sin as “spectacularly” as David did, but neither are we immune from fractured/fracturing living. The question is: will we retrace our steps and right the wrong, or allow the splinters of our sin to continue to grow unchecked, until one day we’re standing shell-shocked, looking around at the mess of our lives and wondering, “How did I get here?”

The good news is that the beginning doesn’t have to determine our end. David did go on to repent before God (2 Samuel 12), but there were consequences of his behavior. David (and everyone else his actions affected) could have avoided the ensuing heartache if he had course-corrected sooner. Are there “small” things in your life that are taking you to a place you don’t want to end up? Is there a situation in your life that should have been addressed a long time ago? Take some time to talk to God about them today.