A small quiet place in Thuringia. Andreas’ (42) workshop is running well again and Martin (43) is not as much on the road as before. Son Max (19) is out of the house. Finally, the two have more time for themselves and travel in November to the Baltic Sea – as they have always done it before. But Martin is dissatisfied: the weather is bad and he would have preferred to stay at home. Andreas tears off his clothes and throws himself into the cold sea. Full of care, Martin tries to pull him back and swallows the salty water as he stumbles. Back in their holiday home the mood is disturbed by the different expectations. A cautious approach to the traces of a long relationship. Paths tells the love of two people. Not how they got together, not a period that they live through, but their day-to-day-life: all the years between the first kiss and now.

Johannes Klare is the senior, charismatic preacher of an unofficial, self-supporting fringe church in Stuttgart, aided by his devout, devoted wife Lydia and her ex-con cousin Bernd Trampe. Finding juvenile homeless busker Simon Rützel, who talked sense, by the way but refusing to be taken to hospital as ODd junkie, the childless couple take him in their home and start to think of him as a lost son. Rich parishioner Volker Reiche offers to privately finance the herd’s dream of a community center, but Johannes grows suspicious of his agenda. Discovering Simon’s homosexual nature, Johannes decides against throwing him out and must admit the exorcist is a gross bigot. In Lydia’s weekend absence, Johannes succumbs when Simon rightly guesses he suppressed his own gay lust for years, but comes clean to Lydia, where-after Simon is driven to relapse and the couple seeks to rescue their lives and vocation after the ‘mortal sin’ gets known.