Tuesday night, I watched a baseball game turn on a series of moments that, by themselves, didn’t seem all that dramatic.
A pitch here.
A walk there.
A runner advances.
The bases get loaded.
Then one mistake happens at exactly the wrong time…
and suddenly the tying run crosses home plate.
Everybody sees the run.
Everybody knows the mistake that allowed it.
But that moment didn’t happen by itself.
There was a whole series of smaller moments that put everyone in position for it.
And sitting there watching it unfold, I started thinking about how much of life works the same way.
We tend to remember the big decisions.
The day we surrendered our lives to Christ.
The day we said, “I do.”
The day we accepted the calling.
The day we walked away from something we knew was destroying us.
The day we started over.
Those moments matter.
But most of life isn’t lived in those moments.
It’s lived in the thousands of smaller decisions between them.
Jesus said:
“If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.”
— Luke 9:23 NKJV
Daily.
There’s something in that word we shouldn’t overlook.
Following Jesus isn’t only a decision we made years ago at an altar.
It’s a decision we make again today.
And then again an hour from now.
It’s the decision to pray when we’re tired.
To guard the thought nobody else knows we’re thinking.
To keep our mouth shut when everything in us wants the last word.
To tell the truth when a lie would be easier.
To forgive when resentment feels justified.
To maintain the boundary when moving it just a little would be convenient.
To obey the quiet prompting of God when nobody else would ever know if we ignored it.
None of those may feel life-changing in the moment.
That’s what makes them so easy to underestimate.
We keep waiting for the enormous crossroads where we’ll have to decide what kind of person we’re going to be.
Meanwhile…
we’re deciding it every day.
One choice at a time.
One response at a time.
One act of obedience—or disobedience—at a time.
Think of a stepping-stone path.
One stone by itself doesn’t tell you very much.
It’s just a stone.
But lay another one beside it.
Then another.
And another.
Eventually, those individual stones begin pointing somewhere.
One stone is just a stone.
A thousand stones become a path.
Our decisions work much the same way.
One decision may not determine the direction of our entire life.
One failure doesn’t define us.
One act of obedience doesn’t mean we’ve arrived.
But repeated decisions become patterns.
Patterns become habits.
Habits begin shaping character.
And before long, those seemingly ordinary choices have built a road we’re already walking.
But there’s another side to this.
What happens when the stones keep pointing in different directions?
What happens when one decision says, I’m following Christ…
and the next says, except here?
When we trust God with this part of our lives…
but keep another part carefully guarded from Him?
When we want His will—
until His will conflicts with ours?
Eventually, we aren’t simply dealing with individual decisions anymore.
We’re dealing with a divided heart.
James gives us a vivid picture of instability when he writes about asking God for wisdom.
He tells us to ask in faith rather than doubting, comparing the doubter to a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind.
Then he describes that person this way:
“…he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.”
— James 1:8 NKJV
Double-minded.
Two minds.
Two directions.
Two competing voices trying to determine which way the next stone gets laid.
James is speaking specifically about trusting God when we ask Him for wisdom, but the picture he gives us is hard to miss:
A life continually pulled in competing directions becomes unstable.
And that instability doesn’t usually begin with one enormous decision.
It begins quietly.
A small compromise.
A boundary moved slightly.
A conviction ignored.
A temptation entertained a little longer than it should have been.
An act of obedience postponed until tomorrow.
One stone laid slightly off course.
Then another.
Then another.
None of them may seem particularly consequential by themselves.
But eventually we look up and wonder:
How did I get here?
The uncomfortable answer may be that we didn’t arrive there through one life-altering decision.
We arrived through a thousand small ones.
But there’s grace here, too.
If you realize the path has begun moving in the wrong direction, you can change where you lay the next stone.
Yesterday’s decisions may explain where you’re standing.
They don’t have to determine where you go next.
Repentance changes direction.
Grace gives us another step.
And obedience begins laying stones toward a different destination.
That’s why divided loyalties are so dangerous.
We imagine there will eventually be some enormous moment when the two directions become obvious and we’ll finally choose which one we’re going to follow.
But Jesus didn’t describe allegiance that way.
He said:
“No one can serve two masters…”
— Matthew 6:24 NKJV
Notice that He didn’t merely say we shouldn’t.
He said we can’t.
Eventually, two masters will ask different things of us.
Eventually, two paths will move in different directions.
Eventually, we will have to decide where the next stone goes.
And sometimes we tell ourselves we’re postponing that decision.
We’re not choosing yet.
We’re waiting.
We’re keeping our options open.
But even then—
a decision is being made.
Silence decides something.
Delay decides something.
Avoidance decides something.
Doing nothing allows whatever direction we’re already moving to keep carrying us forward.
That’s why Joshua’s words to Israel were so direct:
“Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve…”
— Joshua 24:15 NKJV
Choose.
This day.
Not someday.
Not when the stakes become enormous.
Not when everybody is watching.
Today.
Because today gives us another thousand opportunities to choose.
Most won’t feel monumental.
There probably won’t be music playing in the background.
Nobody will applaud when we get them right.
And nobody may notice when we get them wrong.
But each one lays another stone.
Each one strengthens a pattern.
Each one moves us a little farther in a direction.
And eventually…
the stones become a path.
The direction of our lives is rarely determined by one enormous decision.
More often, it’s established through a thousand small decisions made when we didn’t even realize we were standing at a crossroads.
Tomorrow we’ll get another thousand.
Another thousand opportunities to say:
This is who I am.
This is Whom I serve.
And this is the direction I’m going.
Final Word:
You don’t follow Christ once.
You choose to follow Him again and again—
in ordinary moments,
in unseen places,
in decisions nobody else will ever know you made.
And if yesterday’s stones carried you somewhere you never intended to go…
lay the next one differently.
One decision becomes another.
One stone becomes another.
And eventually…
you’ve built a road.
A thousand small decisions.
But…….
One direction.
One Master.
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