It's Always Darkest Before the Fridge Door Opens: Enjoying the Fruits of Middle Age
By Martha Bolton and Phil Callaway
3.5/5
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About this ebook
Life is full of problems: there's not enough time in the day, your kids won't stop fighting, and those cars won't let you merge onto the highway. Not to mention the really bad stuff: your best friends are getting divorced, and your close relative is sick. It's enough to make you want to scream and cry and stomp your feet. But then you remember you're not three.
Life is like a refrigerator--it offers us a lot of good things, but it can be smelly if left for too long.
Don't let life be a stinker. God provided the equipment to laugh--we just have to remember to use it. Martha Bolton and Phil Callaway show how they look on the bright side of life as they teach us creative ways to deal with telemarketers, remind us that we could cope with the world if it wasn't for the people, and explain why M&Ms are healthy. Where there's a will, there's a way, and Martha and Phil will help you find a way to laugh yourself back into a joyful life!
Martha Bolton
Emmy-nominated and Dove-nominated writer Martha Bolton is also the author of over eighty books of inspiration and humor. She wrote the libretto for The Confession Musical, based on Beverly Lewis' popular Amish trilogy, as well as the libretto for Half-Stitched, the Musical, based on Wanda Brumstetter's newest Amish romance. Martha was a staff writer for Bob Hope for over fifteen years, writing humor to entertain the public and presidents alike.
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It's Always Darkest Before the Fridge Door Opens - Martha Bolton
know.
When we lose, I eat. When we win, I eat.
I also eat when we’re rained out.
Tommy Lasorda quote, seen on a friend’s fridge
Tommy would likely agree that Krispy Kreme donuts are not therapy. They’re delicious and may make us feel better temporarily, but eating a box (or two or twenty) of them is not going to change your life or bring you lasting joy. When we go looking for comfort in the fridge, our problems are still going to be exactly where we left them. (What won’t be where we left it is our waistline.) But what brings true comfort and lasting joy? Here are some stories and ideas we think will help provide the answer. We also think they will help you laugh.
Warning: If you have a serious addiction to chocolate, please skim this section, as it may give you an unhealthy desire to sell everything you own and drive to Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Chocolate Therapy
Chocolate makes me all better.
Lily Bolton, three years old
Did you ever think, like Forrest Gump, that life is like a box of chocolates, only in your case it seems that someone stole all the best ones and left you with nothing but the nuts? Well, even nuts are a lot more tolerable in almond roca or a strawberry sundae. In other words, there are certain foods that make those rocky, nutty places of life seem to go down a little easier. But we’re not sure that anything can help turnips.1 While some foods are natural energy boosters, and others improve our immune system, others, well, maybe God created to be our comfort foods.
But you may be wondering, just how much comfort is enough? If you start eating chocolate by the fistful before eight o’clock in the morning. to make up for the fact that your husband snored most of the night, is that an allowable amount? The candy wrapper may have its nutritional facts, but it probably doesn’t list any emotional information. It won’t tell you how much of it you need to eat for your emotional well-being. Pick up an aspirin bottle and there are warnings and instructions and recommended dosages for removing all kinds of headaches.2 But how are we supposed to know just how many Kit Kat bars one should eat to experience similar results in our psyches? How many Twix bars are required before we can forget that promotion we know we deserved but didn’t get? How big does our banana split need to be to cover that outrageous gas bill? And how many brownies does it take to heal a broken heart?3 None of these questions can be answered by reading the packages or asking the Baskin-Robbins clerk. Until now, we have had to leave it all to mere guesswork. But thanks to our extensive research team, we’re about to change all that. Our Table of Comfort Foods and Cures is not only the first of its kind, it is, we understand, in the running for a Nobel Prize in Science and Home Economics. There is no need to thank us for developing this ‘‘feel good’’ food chart. The research was reward enough.
Table of Comfort Foods and Cures
This, of course, is in no way all-inclusive. There are plenty more examples of food and drink that bring comfort when consumed in the right quantities and at the proper times. But this is something that has been known for years. Certain foods really do bring us comfort. Of course, when we were children and got sick, our mothers had other remedies they wanted to try out on us. Their charts looked more like this:
I (Phil) don’t know about all the other remedies, but I certainly remember how comforting Old South orange juice was to me. When my temperature climbed above one hundred degrees, I loved the joyful sound of my dear mother clanging the wooden spoon (the same one she spanked me with, I believe) around and around in the pitcher, trying to melt that concentrate, and when at last she poured me a tall glass, I knew it was just a matter of time before that fever was history and I would mourn the fact that I had to return to school. (I was shocked in later years to discover that they sell Old South orange juice in grocery stores. I had no idea you could buy it. I always thought Old South came straight from our pastor at the little country church we attended, since he usually arrived about the same time my juice did.)
When we are sick, few things equal the comfort that comes when a friend or clergy member knocks on the door with compassion in his or her heart (and a casserole in each hand). Friends and food make a great pair, don’t they? Sitting around the table enjoying six or seven of the four basic food groups all in one dish can be a comfort during the good times and bad.
In the Bible, the apostle Paul was comforted by friends (Colossians 4:11), contrary to Job’s friends, who we don’t think even brought a casserole. Paul was also comforted by the love of Christ (Philippians 2:1). What greater comfort could there be than knowing that God loves us; that he will always be with us; that he will never take us where he has not been. The psalmist agrees. ‘‘My comfort in my suffering is this,’’ he wrote, ‘‘lots and lots of chocolate!’’ Okay, sorry, that was a typo. No, his comfort wasn’t found in chocolate. Or caramel. Or nougat. Or espresso. Or any of the other things that some of us turn to so quickly to find that ‘‘feel good’’ feeling. While some look for comfort at the bottom of a rum bottle or in six pounds of rum-filled truffles, the psalmist found his comfort in God’s promises: ‘‘Your promise preserves my life’’ (Psalm 119:50).
May the contents of your fridge be used to comfort others and yourself. But more important, may the contents of God’s Word be your eternal comfort.
All praise to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the source of every mercy and the God who comforts us. He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others.
2 Corinthians 1:3–4 NLT
¹Some foods were not so much meant to be eaten as they were meant to be thrown. Not that we’re recommending this.
²Yes, there are different kinds. At last count 347.
³This was a Bee Gees song.
⁴Half cup mustard powder, 1 cup flour, mix with water. Pancake mix can be substituted, but blueberry pancake mix can cause your doctor to misdiagnose you with a heart problem.
⁵This is a great diet idea and one of the few that really works. Bonus: Without even dieting, you look smaller to people because they stay far away.
You Can’t Keep a Good Man
(or Woman) Down
There are some things in life that just can’t help but put a smile on our face, no matter what kind of a mood we happen to be in. Take, for instance, a Mexican mariachi band. Have you ever tried to stay down while listening to the music in a Mexican restaurant? It’s impossible. You may have walked in humming ‘‘Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen,’’ but after a couple choruses of ‘‘La Cucaracha,’’ you’ll be donning a sombrero and tapping your flatware to the beat.
Have you ever watched a group of preschoolers sing at a Christmas program while their teachers hover over them, praying against disaster? If you can do so without smiling, you have bigger problems than two humorists can fix.
Here are a few other things it is impossible to do and stay feeling down.
The Hokey Pokey
Be tickled
Eat cotton candy
Wear a clown nose
Juggle1
Play with a yo-yo
Yodel
Speak pig Latin2
Hold a puppy
Chew bubble gum
Carry a balloon
Swing on a swing set
Ride a carousel
Blow bubbles
Fly a kite
Skip
Listen to banjo music
Ride a stick horse
Listen to a polka
Play the harmonica3
Help someone else
A man there was, tho’ some did count him mad,
The more he cast away, the more he had.
John Bunyan
¹Unless you’re severely down, in which case we wouldn’t recommend juggling chainsaws.
²Though listening to someone else speak pig Latin may be the ticket to send you over the edge.
³Phil once had a Sunday school teacher who played the harmonica professionally and carried a beeper—which was a little optimistic of him.
In Pursuit of Your Passion
Why does SeaWorld have a seafood restaurant?
I’m halfway through my fish burger and I realize . . .
I could be eating a slow learner.
Lynda Montgomery
Some people live to eat. Others live to cook. And some of us (like Phil) live to eat other people’s cooking. But even Phil doesn’t take it to the extremes that some people do.
At the World Hot Dog Eating Championships