Winter - the season of snow and ice and sledding and skiing and fireplaces and cuddling and watching your breath fly away and earmuffs and hats and coats and galoshes and...and...potholes - thousands and thousands and millions and zillions of potholes. There was a rumor in the late Sixties and early Seventies that we didn't really send men to the moon - we just dressed them up in funny suits and took pictures of them on a Michigan side street.

I've encountered a few dozen more potholes this winter than etiquette demands. My chin and my kneecaps have become intimate beyond all propriety (I drive a small foreign car - the kind that can be lost for weeks in a trail of 18-wheeler droppings.). My tires no longer have treads - just wrinkles from cringing at the roadscape ahead.

Why do there have to be potholes? Yeah, yeah - hot and cold and compression and expansion and chemistry this and mathematics that and who let that semi drive through here, anyway? But that only answers how, not why.

I spent a couple of undergraduate years at Abilene Christian College, where the taking of Bible courses was a requirement for graduation. One of the teachers there was always prepared to answer the truly difficult questions. "There are some things God doesn't want us to know," he would reply.

I'm beginning to believe him. Death, birth, sex, Republicans - life is full of unaccountable mysteries. We've got a good handle on the hows; the whys continue to elude us.

Quantum mechanics (a branch of physics, not the guys who perform arcane rituals on your car in a garage) has studied the subatomic realm and discovered that all of us - people, pets, bathtubs and potholed streets - are composed of a great frenetic dance of subatomic elements. But when we press further, trying to understand these dancing elements, we make a profound discovery: there's nothing there! Sort of like Oakland or Congress or the vegetable drawer in the fridge. There is a dance going on - but the dancers are nothing you could grab and hold in your hand. We can know what something is, but we can't know where it is; or, we can know where something is, but not what it is. Sort of like getting dressed in the dark.

I don't know why there have to be potholes or pain or unknowns or mysteries of any kind. Life without uncertainty sure would help my weekly planning. But maybe a loving God designed life so we would always be reaching. And sometimes, when we reach, we touch God.