No one ever asks me to prove the existence of God, but if they ever do, I’ve got an answer for them. I figure I’ve been proving the existence of God several times a year since I was twelve. Recently for example, Nancy decided we needed to put in a pot rack. Neither of us had seriously injured ourselves in the kitchen for months, and the idea of suspending a lot of heavy stainless steel, nonstick, and cast-iron pots and skillets from the ceiling seemed like a pretty good one to both of us. When the pot rack arrived in the mail, Nancy and I discussed how we’d go about hanging it. A joist, we agreed was the sine qua non of hanging things from the ceiling. Find a joist and the rest would be simple. We were hanging it between two ceiling lights, and we knew there would be a good sturdy joist somewhere between them. So we got out the stud finder, and ran it slowly over the ceiling according to the directions until we heard a beep, and a light went off, telling us we’d found a stud. (I told Nancy, we didn’t need a stud finder because I live right there in the house.
1) The stud-finder worked like a charm, but when we tried it in another part of the ceiling, it indicated the joist was following a sort of river-bend pattern, as if it were made of some pliable non-joist-like material, such as whatever formed the skeletal structure of Gumby and Pokey. I then decided finding the joist would require the British Petroleum Method: Exploratory Drilling. I am proud to say, I managed to locate the joist after drilling only four holes in the ceiling. I put in the first two screw-hooks, satisfied how firmly they bit into the wood above the sheetrock. “This is a cinch,” I told Nancy. “We’ll have this rascal knocked out in another five minutes.”
This is how I know there’s a God. Because He heard us. I do not know much about God, whether he’s a Democrat or Republican, if he likes NASCAR or Metropolitan Opera, but I do know this – He’s very keen on humility, and He won’t put up with the opposite of humility, at least not from me because as soon as these words came out of my mouth, there began, as Shakespeare puts it, the tempest to my soul.
When we hung the pot rack from the two hooks we’d drilled into the joists, it swayed to and fro like a front porch swing. Every time Nancy added or subtracted a pot, the thing began to rock back and forth. It was like watching a pot rack in a galley on a pirate ship during a heavy storm. I will not go into the full and tedious adventure of solving this problem except to say I ended up drilling about six more holes and we had to hang the pot rack from purpose-bought hooks rather than the ones that came with the kit. Also, the two hooks that went into the joists, those turned out to be unusable and had to be removed. In other words, Nancy’s skillets, pots, and pans are hanging from the ceiling, held up by nothing but sheetrock. Now there are ceiling anchors, don’t get me wrong. We may be stupid, but we’re not crazy. But I know better than to go around bragging about my omnipotence in the matter of pot-rack-hanging. As far as I’m concerned, once is the maximum number of times you want to prove the existence of God per project. So any time I see those matte black and shiny black and heavy, heavy, heavy cookware hanging from the ceiling, I think, “God is good. God is good. God is good.”
1. Nancy didn't think it was funny, either.
