Going into my senior year of high school, our cross-country team set the goal of winning a state championship. Because Cross Country is a fall sport, that meant the foundation of our fitness would be built over the summer. A core group of guys (six of us) agreed to meet each day for workouts to hold each other accountable. The fact that there were six of us is important – in cross country, your top seven runners score points for the team and the rest of the runners don’t affect the score. All of our point scorers, except our top runner (we’ll call him Bob), were a part of the summer training sessions. Bob’s excuse? He wanted to sleep in and couldn’t make our early morning runs.

As the summer wound to a close, we all agreed to go camping the weekend before school started – a mini “retreat” to re-align ourselves on our purpose and goal for the upcoming season. Once again, our Bob didn’t come. His reason? Summer reading… (we all had homework too).

Fast forward to the second last race of the season – the district championship, and our team won. It was the first district championship in school history, and the team was ecstatic. Bob won the individual race too, and when he was interviewed by the local paper he talked about how important the camping trip had been to creating team morale … the very trip he didn’t go on.

Bob was the kind of kid who thought he could get away with murder. He was always pushing the envelope of what he could do before people would push back or say no. And for a while, he seemed to get away with a lot. He had a hell of a senior year, winning multiple state championships and getting recruited to a top-tier Division 1 school. But the truth is, he didn’t get away with anything – it all came back around. After that newspaper article came out in which he talked about how important the camping trip was to him, he lost the respect of every single one of the guys on the team. He was a cross-country captain (voted on the prior spring), but nobody voted for him as a captain for the indoor or outdoor track seasons. He did most of his runs for the rest of the year alone – people knew he only cared about himself, and so they stopped caring about him. I would see him in college at various meets/races and he was always alone. I felt bad for him because I don’t think he understood why people had shunned him. It was because he was constantly trying to get away with murder, and while he thought he was, he absolutely wasn’t.

We’ve all been guilty of this at some point. You show up to work a few minutes late and nobody says anything, so you think you got away with it. You tell a friend you’ll be there at a party or event and then cancel because you don’t feel well (you’re fine, you just don’t want to go). They tell you it’s ok and you think you’ve dodged the bullet. You push off an important report or conversation and say you “forgot”, hoping that people believe you and give you some extra time. In each instance, it feels like you got away with it, but the reality is that people notice these things and factor them into their opinion of you. Sooner or later, you’ll need something from those same people (help, trust, etc.), and your past behavior will impact how they proceed. We all make mistakes – the key is to be honest and upfront. Just remember, you can’t get away with murder – it will always come back around.