Repairing one broken window at a time…

By Daniel Francis

What is the ‘Broken Window Effect’? Think back to a time when your home was in a state of perpetual messiness. You felt like you were too overwhelmed or maybe too lazy to clean.

The ‘Broken Window Effect’ might suggest how you got there. It is a popular theory in sociology where researchers believe that visible signs of disorder encourage further disorder.

So that initial pile of dirty dishes that you left unwashed for a day or two sent a subconscious message to your brain that encouraged overall neglect to spread throughout the home.

The dirty dishes encouraged the laundry to pile up, the bed to be left unmade, the counters to be messy, etc. One little slip-up encouraged many other tiny slip-ups, which culminated in a drastic overall spiral.

This effect got me thinking about our spiritual lives. We often imagine serious moral or spiritual failures happening suddenly, but is that truly the case? I believe, like most other things, our faith weakens gradually, not from one huge detrimental act.

For example, it can be as simple as prayer becomes less consistent, Sunday Mass becomes optional, Confession becomes infrequent, bitterness is tolerated, and gossip or complaining becomes normal. Before the wall collapses, there is usually a crack that starts the deterioration.

If you think about it, this is where the enemy starts: in our small acts of defiance or negligence. He begins by tempting us with small acts like excuses, delays, and rationalisations of things we know to be wrong.

What starts as ‘just this once’, ‘everyone does it’, and ‘it’s not that serious’ escalates into something more serious. Most spiritual disasters begin as small permissions that increase over time.

When we continue to ignore these spiritual broken windows, we experience a similar cumulative effect that it has on all other areas.

Here is an illustration of this in play: if a Catholic misses one day of prayer or one weekend Mass, little seems to happen. Miss a week, a month, a year, and eventually the absence becomes visible.

Not because God has abandoned us, but because we drifted. I can speak firsthand to this effect. In college, I made that one first excuse to miss Holy Mass. I told myself I had to cram for an exam. The next thing I knew, I had not gone to church in almost two years. It starts small but escalates drastically when unchecked.

The good news is that the Broken Window Effect also works positively. In the same way that small negative actions can have a detrimental effect, small acts of virtue also spread.

For example, that one family prayer together, one person returning to Confession, one act of kindness, one daily Rosary, or even one invitation back to Mass can begin reversing the effects.

Just as disorder spreads, so does holiness.

I think the Kingdom of God often works in these small actions that appear insignificant but catalyse great impact over time. The world we live in celebrates dramatic, flashy moments, but God often works through daily acts of faithfulness. It makes sense as the Church encourages daily acts of prayer, weekly Mass, regular Confession, etc. The Church understands that these small habits profoundly shape the soul.

Many of us spend our lives looking for the major threats to our faith, not realising that we have been ignoring the small broken windows. These small broken windows are the unspoken resentments, neglected prayer life, the casual dishonesty, the rationalisation to miss church, and the compromises we keep postponing. Yet these are the places where spiritual decline begins.

The good news is that the Broken Window Effect, as I mentioned earlier, works both ways. If one broken window can invite disorder, one repaired window can begin restoration. Perhaps today, God is not asking us to repair our entire home but to focus on that one broken window.

Daniel Francis is a book publisher, leadership development coach, entrepreneur, and author of The Millennial Mind, The Millennial Experience, and How to Write and Self-Publish Your Book.

As the founder of One Momentum Publishing, he helps Caribbean authors move from manuscript to publication, guiding them through editing, design, and global distribution on platforms like Amazon, positioning them as authorities in their fields.

Through his work, Daniel equips individuals with the mindset and structure needed to turn ideas into impact.

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