The Problem With Potholes

What happens when God decides to dig deeper than you were expecting

We’ve just had a local election and all the pamphlets that came through the door had one issue front and centre:

Potholes.

You see, our town is ridiculously riddled with potholes. Not just tiny little things. Big mahoosive potholes that burst your tyres, crack your rims, or detach your suspension in the most unsuspecting of manners. Not least to say, dare you hit one on a bike and you could easily end up with a broken collar bone (true story, not me thankfully).

Thing is. I’m pretty sure in the two years we’ve lived here, most potholes that have been repaired return. Same stretch of road, same potholes, same problem, appearing with suspicious reliability again and again.

It turns out there are two ways to repair a road. The OG way involved proper excavation — digging right down through the damaged layers, removing everything compromised, and rebuilding from a solid base upward. It took longer. Multiple people had to be involved. It cost more. It left a bigger mess in the short term. But in the longterm? Job done.

The newer method — faster, cheaper, tidier on the surface — has a very fancy looking machine (the tech is ‘top-of-the-range’) which skims off the top couple of inches, fills it in, and moves on. It looks fine. For a while. But it is only skin-deep. Water can still find its way in through the edges, work its way down through the layers, and eventually the whole thing cracks open again. Same road. Same problem. Because the repair never went deep enough to reach the damage.

And whaddya know, I reckon this relates pretty closely to healing:
The kind God does vs. the kind we tend to prefer.

If we’re honest, most of us would choose the skim-and-fill approach every time. It’s faster. It’s less disruptive. It lets us keep moving. We’d rather patch over the painful thing — manage it, reframe it, keep it functional enough to get through the week — rather than let anyone dig down to where the actual damage is. Including God.

Especially God, sometimes.

But God has never been particularly interested in surface-level repairs.

In Ezekiel 36:26 He says something that sounds amazing, brilliant, and it is. But I don’t know when I actually considered the cost of what would be involved to make the switch happen. He says:

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

New heart – yay!

But hold up a minute. Removing the old one? Not patch. Not smooth over. Remove and replace.

That’s not renovation language. That’s surgical language. The kind that assumes the old material is too compromised to simply fix — that what’s needed isn’t more work on what’s already there, but something taken out entirely and something new put in its place. A heart of stone removed. A heart of flesh given. The hard, defended, calcified, stubborn thing — whatever made it that way, however long it took — gone. And something living, responsive, and tender put in its place.

That is an extraordinary promise. It’s also, if we’re honest, a little terrifying.

Because excavation exposes. It’s disruptive. It makes a mess of the surface before it makes anything better. And there’s a stretch in the middle of proper repair where things look considerably worse than they did before anyone started digging, and you wonder whether the whole thing was a mistake.

But the skim-and-fill approach to our wounds — the managed, surface-level, functional version of healing (the one that looks palatable and neat and tidy to everyone else on the outside) — will eventually crack. And we find ourselves back at the same stretch of road, wondering why we’re here again, not quite connecting it to the repair that never went deep enough.

God is not interested in a repair that won’t hold.

He’s interested in you — the real you, the layers underneath, the damage that goes further down than you’ve let anyone see. And He is not frightened by what He finds there. He is not put off by the extent of the excavation. He doesn’t look at what needs to come out and decide it’s too much work.

He removes the stone. He gives the flesh. He rebuilds from the foundation up.

And Paul, writing to the Philippians, brings us the good news:

He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. — Philippians 1:6, NIV.

If Jesus started this then He’s not stopping halfway. The excavation you’re in the middle of right now — the uncomfortable, exposed, this-is-taking-longer-than-I-expected stretch — is not God abandoning the project. It’s God doing the work properly.

The mess on the surface is not the final state of the road.
It’s what proper repair looks like in the middle.

Friend, if you’re in that middle right now — if something is being dug up in you that you’d honestly rather leave alone — can I gently suggest that the discomfort might be the point? Not punishment. Not abandonment. Excavation.

God is doing a deep work. The kind that holds.

And praise Jesus, He does not leave us half-repaired.

Is there an area of your life where you’ve been choosing the skim-and-fill approach — managing the surface rather than letting God go deeper?

What would it look like to give Him permission to excavate — even if it means a messier, more exposed season before things get better?

Let’s pray:

Lord, forgive us for the times we've chosen a quick fix rather than the deep heal. For the ways we've managed our wounds rather than brought them to You. We give You permission — even when it's scary, even when it's exposing — to go as deep as You need to go. Remove what needs to come out. Replace what is hard and defended with something living and responsive. We trust that You who began this work will finish it. And we trust that the road will hold. Amen.

Praying that in the discomfort of what's being dug up, you will discover God is building something in you that will last the distance.

Cheering you on,

Em 💛

This week from Grow + Go:

Watch on the pod:
’The Trouble with Jesus’ with Constance Hastings

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