I went to visit some of the team of Newmarket YFC today. I left at 730 am, leaving myself an extra hour to compensate for the traffic.

2 miles away from the Dartford Crossing the traffic started to queue. I did not click that this was a queue for the junction so I kept on driving, and some nice person let me in to the long line of traffic 500 yard away from the junction. That 500 yards and crossing the roundabout took me 70 minutes.

A lot of that time we were not traveling at all. What could be the problem? After a while I decided that there must have been a pretty bad accident, so, as you do, I offered up a little arrow prayer asking God to help the emergency services and the people involved.

As I approached the roundabout at the top of the slip road it became very obvious what the problem was. Was it an accident? … no, a breakdown? … no, an escaped horse or cow? … no, a bird, a plane, Superman … errr no to all of those.

The reason was simply because so many people were ignoring the traffic signals, all selfishly thinking of themselves and refusing to allow people to move into gaps when they appeared. The whole roundabout was gridlocked with no where for cars to go.

As soon as I got off the roundabout, the M25 was clear and I traveled all the way to Newmarket, never going below 70mph.

Its amazing the effect human selfishness an have on the lives, or situations, of others. The shutdown was that people wanted to get to work so were pushing their cars into any little gap which appeared to progress their journey. They saw the gap and went to fill it! The reality was that if they sat back and allowed others to make use of the gap, the whole load of traffic would have been able to move forward. In fact, what was happening was that no one, not even those filling the gap, were going anywhere.

The repercussions were massive – on the other side of the Dartford Crossing, the traffic was queuing from 2 junctions back – just because of the gridlocked roundabout.

If only a few people let others go first, rather than pushing themselves, the whole landscape could have looked completely different to the one shown in the picture.

No doubt you can see the two parallels with church and life generally that I came up with while driving up the M11:

If we only think of ourselves, we all suffer.

If people are quick to fill gaps, gridlock can occur.

The second thought surprised me. In church we are always keen for people to fill the gaps as there are always plenty of jobs to do. I wonder, though, whether we should allow the gaps to exist longer to allow people to complete their journeys?

Does our keenness to get the jobs done, to fill the vacancies, to make sure all the groups have enough leaders actually stifle our growth as individual followers of Christ and, ultimately, stifle the growth and life of our church?

I wonder if maybe it does. I wonder whether we should leave gaps and just see what happens. I also wonder what happens to those prayers prayed, like mine at the start of the day, that could not be answered because my mind have filled the (cognitive) gap?!