“What is the deal? Traffic is backed up for nearly a mile? Why is there a traffic jam at this time of the day?”

    I was running close to my deadline—of course this is not at all unusual. I didn’t want to be late. But traffic was a mess and it was middle of the morning. I was frustrated, and I wanted to know what was causing the delay.

    After about 10 minutes, I moved close enough to the front of the logjam to see the problem. There was no wreck, no emergency, and no big deal. Workmen were walking with a big tar truck holding hoses. When they came to cracks in the roadway, they would spray tar in the cracks and seal it with some other black oily substance.

We are all flawed.

    They had reduced our 6 lane highway into a two lane frustration strip. Then it suddenly hit me. I was putting more stock in my getting to my destination 10 minutes sooner, than I was about the road being repaired. But after thinking about it, I know that if the cracks aren’t sealed, the roadway is going to break down because of the water, heat, cold, and dirt that will put increasing stress on the existing cracks. If this road is going to hold up, it had better have its cracks sealed!

    The same is true in relationships. God’s Kingdom Family is made up of people who have one thing in common. We are all flawed. We have all sinned and we will all sin again. We sometimes say things that are unkind and unhelpful. Some of these are accidents. Others are just being insensitive. Unfortuanately, a few are deliberate darts intended to wound. Our behaviors are not much better.

    I want to encourage you to prayerfully read Matthew 18—the WHOLE chapter! As you pray and read through this, notice how emphatic Jesus is that the cracks in our relationships be completely repaired and forgiven. In a throw away and move fast culture, our tendency is to find somebody else to “hang around with” when we run into a relationship problem. Rather than repair the crack we’d rather run away. It’s cleaner and quicker, and even seems easier. But in the long run, we’re going to find that our friendships breakdown and become undependable if we don’t stop and repair the cracks and value our spiritual family.

    God wants our relationships in Christ to last forever. So let’s take time and repair those cracks in our relationships.