It's Always Darkest Before the Fridge Door Opens: Enjoying the Fruits of Middle Age (14 page)

For years, society has been working to improve some of our most common complaints. To help alleviate some of the workload on doctors, nursing stations and urgent care offices have now started opening up in pharmacies. That’s right, you can now go to the drugstore and see your doctor at the same time. We think this is a great idea. There’s nothing like the convenience of having your gallstones removed and being able to get them gift wrapped all in the same place.

As convenient as medical care is getting now, it still stands to reason that if you’re going to be operated on, most of us would like the doctor to stick around until we’re put back together again. It just seems like the more polite thing to do.

Thanks to modern medicine we are no longer forced to endure
prolonged pain, disease, discomfort, and wealth.
Robert Orben

We cannot learn without pain.
Aristotle

Hard to Swallow

Some things that we’re faced with both in our refrigerators and in life are simply just hard to swallow. Like the price of gasoline these days. But again, it’s all in how you look at it. Believe it or not, there are even some advantages to this hard-to-swallow reality of today’s world.

The Blessings of Rising Gas Prices

Don’t just sit there complaining about the rising price of gas. Look at the hidden blessings that come along with those prices. Here are just ten of them; we’re sure you can think of more:

1. We’ve been practicing riding stationary bikes for years in our basements and at our gyms. Now we finally might have the incentive to actually get outside and do it for real.

2. Fewer Hummers and SUVs to have to maneuver around in a parking lot.

3. Instead of planning that cross-country road trip, we can now finally visit that local campground that almost had to close its doors last summer.

4. We can turn the abandoned parking lots into tennis courts.

5. We can walk to work every Monday. Get there by Friday.

6. High gas prices are the perfect excuse to avoid the in-laws.

7. No more teenagers cruising the boulevards on the weekends.

8. No matter where we’re from, it gives us all something in common to talk about, besides the weather.

9. Parents don’t complain about their teenagers skateboarding anymore.

10. We keep the mileage down on our vehicles.

PART FOUR
Empty Shelves
(Overworked, Overstressed, Overwhelmed,
and Underappreciated—and That’s the Good News)

I was so depressed that I decided
to jump from the tenth floor. They sent up a priest.
He said, ‘‘On your mark . . .’’
Rodney Dangerfield

Have you ever felt over-appreciated to the point where you’d really like your children to stop thanking you for all your hard work in the kitchen, at your job, at their schools or sports teams, at church, or wherever else you find yourself working? Have you ever felt way too rested? Or way too overpaid? We suspect not. Very few of us have ever taken a check back to our bosses and said, ‘‘I’m sorry, there must be some mistake. I can get by on way less than this.’’ Nor have we said to our spouse or children, ‘‘You don’t have to thank me. Seeing your clothes strewn all over the floor is thanks enough, sweetie.’’

If you’ve ever opened the fridge door and the light wouldn’t come on, you know that all things at some point reach their limit of endurance. You have a few choices when this happens. You can remove the light bulb, then lick your finger and stick it into the socket to see if there’s any power left.
1
You can chip the dried chocolate pudding out of the light switch until it works again. Or you can remove the light bulb and calmly insert another one. We recommend the third step.
2
Then we recommend that you sit down, remove your shoes, and read the following tips and stories for the over-stressed, underpaid, and underappreciated who are having trouble seeing the light even when the fridge door is open.

¹
This was a joke. Please do not do this. If you do and there is a problem, please write us at You Did What? Box 403, Lower Zimbabwe.

²
Some opt for just closing the door and going back to bed.

The Stress Diet

Breakfast

1 slice multi-grain toast (lightly buttered)

1 orange (lightly squeezed)

1 cup bran cereal (no sugar)

6 oz. skim milk

Mid-morning

8 oz. iced tea

Lunch

6 oz. lean chicken

Leaf of lettuce, small

8 oz. water, no lemon

Small cluster of grapes

Small scoop of ice cream

Mid-afternoon snack

Mix handful of peanuts, pound of fudge, and a box of chocolates into remaining ice cream. Finish carton.

Dinner

1 large pizza (loaded) with extra cheese

1 medium pan lasagna

Gallon of root beer

2 slices raspberry cheesecake (eat with your hands)

More pizza (eat with your hands)

More ice cream (eat with your face)

Bedtime snack

3 packages of Rolaids
3

8 tablespoons Pepto Bismol
4

If people concentrated on the really important things in life,
there’d be a shortage of fishing poles.
Doug Larson

³
This is a joke.

⁴
This is also a joke.

Choose Your Rut Carefully

I don’t know the key to success,
but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
Bill Cosby

We love reading road signs. Like the one welcoming you to Kettle Falls, Washington, the home of ‘‘1,255 friendly people and one grouch.’’ In Hilt, California, a sign advises: ‘‘Brakeless trucks, use freeway.’’ Along Oregon’s winding coast, another sign warns: ‘‘Emergency stopping only. Whale watching is not an emergency. Keep driving.’’ There’s a service station somewhere with a bold sign proclaiming, ‘‘We have Mexican food. We have gas.’’ While traveling through Kentucky, I (Martha) once saw a traffic warning sign by a construction site on the interstate that said, ‘‘Whoa!’’ and the next one said, ‘‘Leave the racing to the horses!’’ But our favorite of them all is posted on an Alaska highway: ‘‘Choose your rut carefully. You’ll be in it for the next two hundred miles.’’

Have you noticed that when you’re rushing to get to your destination, you hardly notice any road signs? You’re so focused on arriving that the journey becomes more of a blur than a trip. You ate, but you don’t really remember where. You stopped for gas but couldn’t say which town you were in. You saw an accident, but if anyone was injured, you wouldn’t know it because all you could do was complain about the traffic jam it caused.

Rushing also causes us to make more mistakes. We miss our exit and don’t realize it until we’re twenty-six miles down the road. We can’t stop to check out that funny noise our engine is making until we have to stop because the funny noise has left us stranded by the side of the road on I-40. Or we race down the street only to hit every red light possible.

But rushing isn’t only done on our highways and streets. It’s also done in our homes.

As a young father, I (yes, Phil) found myself in the rut of spending sixty hours at work each week, speaking across the country on weekends, and wallpapering the house at night. I had three small children and one wife, and I was in danger of getting their names mixed up. I was in danger of not just writing about the grouch of Kettle Falls but becoming him, as well. Like the wallpaper, things were about to come crashing down. Before I knew what hit me, I was flat on my back. Burned out. Finished. Kaput.

What happened? I was reading signs. But I was reading all the wrong ones, like, ‘‘Give your kids the stuff you never had,’’ ‘‘Sign them up for all the extracurricular activities that all your friends have their kids in,’’ and the most dangerous sign of all, ‘‘Dads don’t really matter. Mom’s got it all under control.’’ I was stuck in the rut of believing that an ultra-busy schedule equals a productive and healthy family life. To me, a well-balanced life meant a well-balanced checkbook. If I had enough money for everything my kids wanted and all the sports and arts that they were involved in, then we were successful.

I (Martha) was in the rut of reading signs like, ‘‘If you never leave your rut, the road will be smooth.’’ But sometimes even the ruts are a little bumpy. Sometimes they even break way and leave you buried in the snow. It’s part of the nature of ruts.

But three liberating truths have freed us from trying to live up to everyone else’s expectations or from stressing out over the rocky places of life. We think these three truths should be clearly posted as road signs along life’s highway, ruts and all.

1. The fruit of the Spirit is not sour grapes.

In the midst of my (Phil’s) burnout, my four-year-old pounced on me and tickled me. I didn’t move. ‘‘Dad,’’ he said, ‘‘you don’t laugh so good anymore.’’ I wanted to say that it was because he had landed on my spleen and I was having difficulty breathing, much less laughing. But I knew it was more than that. That night I made a conscious decision to change. I began renting funny, wholesome movies. I bought a few cartoon books and explained the jokes to the kids. Within days, the difference in our home was noticeable. God is a God of joy. He has given us a built-in escape hatch for the pressures of life. It is our funny bone. Laughter has no MSG, no fat grams, no carbs, no trans fat. Laughter is low in cholesterol, and it tastes better than most health food. It’s our secret weapon against whatever ‘‘sour grapes’’ life happens to throw at us.

2. Even ants have time to attend picnics.

Recently my (Phil’s) family bought a puppy. Mojo cost us three hundred dollars, or a hundred dollars per brain cell. Sometimes she curls up on my lap, her tiny heart beating faster than you’d believe. But when she drifts off to sleep, it slows down remarkably. They say the jumping mouse’s heart beats five hundred times a minute. During hibernation, however, it slows to thirty beats per minute. We’re not recommending hibernation (although the idea is compelling if we don’t meet this deadline), but we are recommending rest. The Bible tells us that Jesus often took a break. No one in history accomplished more than he did, yet he did it all without overworking himself and acquiring an ulcer. Rest allows us to recharge our batteries and reorganize our priorities. The Creator of the universe took time to rest. So should we.