My mechanic moved to Israel. For the past eight years, I have had the luxury of staying away from auto repair garages. Instead I would call my mechanic, and he would drive his mobile repair shop to my house. Anticipating an afternoon of entertainment, my kids eagerly announced his arrival whenever his trailer turned into our driveway.
Panic overtook me yesterday when reality crashed in: My mechanic is gone. My cars no longer have permission to break down. From now on, I have to pretend odd clicking noises and eery engine sounds belong to the brand new Mercedes next to me at the red light.
I read a book called Things Fall Apart in high school. I don’t remember much of what it was about, but the title stays with me because things keep breaking in life. Cars. AC units. Date night plans. Parenting plans. Marriages. Lawn mowers. iPhone screens. Door knobs. The coffee grinder.
No doubt we keep repair shops in business. For every desk in a school and new building built downtown, somewhere there is a hospital bed and a landfill.
Things fall apart. If you change the artwork on Chinua Achebe’s front cover, you could place that book on the shelf of any section in Barnes & Noble. World History, Cooking, Sports, Science-Fiction, Romance, and Travel. “Things Fall Apart” fits our universal reality.
The only section I hesitate to add is “Self-Help”. The self-help section is littered with titles which promise results. Hope sells. And for good reason. Few who desire more for themselves would choose “Things Fall Apart” over “Your Best Life Now”. The thing is, hope sells because things have fallen apart. More problems develop, too, when we attempt to find or buy hope without entering the broken parts of ourselves.
Life has fallen apart, and many times we have something to do with it. These are two tough pills to swallow. First, life does not work. Second, in many cases, we are agents in its breakdown. The former says hope must come from something or someone greater than ourselves. The latter says hope will not be found until we take an inside look.
Both are true.
