"The vision must be followed by the venture.  It is not enough to stare up the steps - we must step up the stairs. " ~Vance Havner

I am walking again. After a pretty violent ankle break and over two months of recovery, I am taking my first unassisted steps. They aren't graceful steps and they aren't huge steps, they are baby steps. My first few looked much like the first steps of our oldest child. We were living in Fort Bragg, North Carolina and it was the evening. I was holding our sons hands and he was moving around our living room when Vic came home from work. The sight of his dad caused him to let my hands go and begin to hobble away from me an into Vic's arms. As things go with the first born, the camera was ready, and on the return trip to me, I have pictures of those first steps. They were tentative, they were small, but they were filled with so much promise.
 My baby steps are much the same. In the quiet of my mother's kitchen, early one sleepless morning, I took my steps alone. Driven by determination, the familiarity of my surroundings and the promise of the future from this injury, I walked. Baby steps.
 Everything we do in life that has some bit of fear in it starts with these types of steps. I have stepped off airplanes into foreign countries with small, tentative steps. At the beginning of each deployment, the first steps after walking away from those heart wrenching goodbyes were baby steps. As you face the death of a loved one, you take baby steps. As you leave behind your dearest friends and look to find new ones, you take baby steps. When you reunite after deployment and learn how to dance together again, those are baby steps. These steps are the ones you aren't sure you can make but you take in faith. 
 Baby steps have to be made. They may not be graceful, they may not be huge and they will be tentative, but everyday ~ for one reason or another, we take them. Baby steps.