Here’s a little quiz question to start your day. What do you think is the total length of ALL the roads in the UK?
It is 246,700 miles.
Stand by for another crazy statistic—albeit one that won’t come as a surprise if you do a serious amount of driving on UK roads.
In 2018, drivers reported a whopping 1,031,787 potholes. That’s according to research by the UK Insurance company Confused.com.
If you combined the total number of potholes in the UK, they would reach a depth of 26 miles – almost four times deeper than the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench.
Frankly, I’m more disturbed that somebody spent their valuable time doing the math on that one. Didn’t they have something better to do with their time?
Around 600 years before Jesus was born, the prophet Isaiah looked forward to the day when:
Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level (Isaiah 40:3, NIV)
Seven hundred years later, a man called John knew Jesus was coming soon. His job was to smooth the way, clear away roadblocks, make a straight path—even fill in a few metaphorical potholes—so that Jesus could come and be welcomed by the people.
From the rest of the Gospel story, we know how that all panned out.
The common people—the outcasts, the poor, the sick—all welcomed Jesus with open arms. It was the religious people—ironically—who treated him with suspicion and jealousy. Whilst Jesus connected easily with the downtrodden and the rejected, he seemed to rub the well-to-do people up the wrong way every time he opened his mouth.
So much so that they rejected him, betrayed him and offered him up for crucifixion
What about us? Are we making a smooth road for Jesus? Or are we stuck in a rut, doing the same old things in our spiritual life that we’ve been doing for years?
Let’s face it. Many of us get stuck in a rut because we are happy to be there. It’s familiar and comfortable to keep going the same way as we have always done.
I remember helping at a Youth Camp many years ago when I worked as a Youth Adviser in the Diocese. It was all “under canvas”, held in a farmer’s field in North Yorkshire. I hated every moment I had to stumble to the portable toilets in the middle of the night! It didn’t help that my co-leader, another Diocesan staff member, showed up in an RV with its own TV, kitchen, shower and toilet!
Somehow, I ended up as one of the insured minibus drivers. Anybody who knows my driving standards would have never asked me to drive a minibus. But, still…
I discovered that the ruts across the field (presumably from previous camps) were so deep, so hardened—that I could put the front wheels of the minibus into the ruts and drive across the entire field without touching the steering wheel!
It became an enormous source of amusement for the kids! My ‘look... no hands’ driving became a highlight whenever we returned to camp after a day out!
Our spiritual lives can become like that.
We wear down a groove with our familiar ways. Eventually, we get stuck in the rut. We have a ‘look… no hands’ spiritual life. We rumble on without a care in the world. And even thinking about doing something different fills us with dread...
But God is looking for people who refuse to be content with the familiar. He is calling us higher.
David is our example of spiritual hunger. He wrote:
As the deer pants for the water, my soul pants after You, O God. (Psalm 42:1).
He actually felt pretty lousy when he wrote those words, so we can’t use our discouragement as an excuse. David fanned the flames of spiritual fervour even when he felt like quitting.
Are you stuck in a spiritual rut? It’s easily done.
When I drove that minibus on the Youth Camp, I had to make a considerable effort to get out of the rut. I had to wrench the steering wheel to one side physically. There was no way that the vehicle would jump out of the rut of its own volition.
It was easier to stay in the ruts than go to the physical effort of jerking the minibus back onto the open field.
It’s the same with our lives. We naturally gravitate towards fixed rituals, set routines, and rigid practices.
In the beginning, this is incredibly helpful and helps us develop discipline and rhythm in our lives. But before long, those things cease being helpful. Instead of anchoring our lives, they cramp us, make us feel constrained, boxed in…
We need to get out of our rut.
There’s nothing wrong with routine and rhythm—until the fixed pattern becomes the only way we can operate. Then it becomes a problem.
Churches are excellent at teaching routines but less good at innovation and experimentation. So, we tend to teach people to behave the same way in their spiritual lives.
Perhaps it is time for all of us to take a fresh look at our spiritual lives and ask whether we have got stuck in a rut.
Many of us, if we are honest, are in a rut. There’s no shame in that. But it’s time to wrench the steering wheel and to get out of that rut…
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