Today, I hammered to pieces a tile countertop. It was messy and loud. The hardest hammer blow was the first. To strike the gleaming white, uncracked tile seemed wrong, but it was a “Wham!” toward better.
I’ve done this before, destroyed a kitchen, but it’s been awhile so I Googled how. Seconds later, there it was, my exact white, tile counter on the screen and a guy knocking and prying it into oblivion.
Perfect!
Got it!
You whack off the outside edge first — with a bucket below to catch the debris — then you shove a power bar underneath the supporting plywood, and you the pry it up — plywood, mortar, tile, grout and all.
What did we do before Youtube?
The mind is constantly seeking knowledge, the “how-to,” the “Why?” “ and the very best buy. We want to know the conveniency, the piquancy, the frequency and the decency. Sometimes we need answer for, “What the heck?”
A friend of mine just got diagnosed with acute leukemia. Tough! It’s rough! “Heck!”
Why does she have cancer, and not me? “Hmmm,” even just thinking of this question, I detect a smidgeon of survivor’s guilt in me — and some survivor’s gratitude.
I can figure out how to do some things — break stuff — but not how to fix some stuff, and not why some things happen to us, especially the things that cave us in. Google has some answers. They don’t always satisfy.
Chance, choice, DNA, fate, karma, acts of God, poor diet, chemicals, providence, rats, flees, volcanoes — we all want explanations, something we can grab on to, something we can live with. But we don’t always get them. We can Google “countertop demolition” and we can Google “leukemia” and we can Google “housing market, “ but we still might not know why life comes to our door the way it does — or does not.
We know; we don’t. We keep trying
Maybe we shouldn’t. Some things don’t have satisfactory answers. A child drowns. No explanation will do. Often a combination of answers come to mind, sometimes only anger comes to mind, sometimes all we have is blinding, numbing loss.
We are shattered tile.
But what if having an answer doesn’t always matter. Not knowing where the hammer came from, admitting that we don’t really know — it’s at least honest. We don’t know every how or why or what, so what if we don’t pretend to.
Why disrespect great suffering with goofy platitudes? Every demolition doesn’t make things better.
Why demean complex problems with simplistic euphemisms?
The brave often go on, move on, live on without answers. We don’t have to explain everything in order to live with it. Perhaps this is the meaning of Proverbs 3:5-6.
Hammered, we may yet live well within a cracked and courageous quietness.
Thrive! 
very well, even.