It's Always Darkest Before the Fridge Door Opens: Enjoying the Fruits of Middle Age by Phil Callaway, Martha O. Bolton Page A

what do you see? Cheese, butter, eggs, six jars of jelly, some leftover pot roast, but no pie! What happened to your pie?! You turn to ask your beloved family, the family you work forty-eight hours a day for. The spouse you pledged your love to. The children you birthed. Even your mother-in-law. But no one is ’fessing up. At least not at first. Then your three-year-old confesses. You’re impressed with her honesty, but that was your piece of pie. She was the only one you hadn’t been emphatic with. You didn’t think you needed to be because she can’t even open the refrigerator, right? Apparently she can, and apparently she and the dog enjoyed your piece of chocolate cream pie together. You know this because of the whipped cream you find in the dog’s ear.
    Disappointment. Life is full of it. Being denied your piece of pie is sad, but there are far sadder stories that have to do with disappointment.
    A second grader watches as everyone else in the class gets Valentine’s cards, but his bag remains empty.
    A bride gets left at the altar.
    An old man gets dressed up for his birthday and waits all day for someone to show up to celebrate it with him, but no one comes.
    Disappointment can sure rob us of our joy, can’t it? What hurts so much about disappointment is the negative self-talk we go through after it:
    ‘‘Why’d I get my hopes up, anyway? I should know by now that nothing goes right for me.’’
    ‘‘Of course no one gave me a Valentine. Who’d give me one?’’
    ‘‘I should have known I’d get passed over for that promotion. What was I thinking to even apply for it?’’
    What makes disappointment so bad is the gnawing notion inside of us that says we wouldn’t have had so far to fall if we hadn’t built up our expectations so high in the first place. If we hadn’t even tried out for American Idol, we wouldn’t have known what it feels like to be rejected. If we hadn’t told everyone we know about that new house we were going to buy, we wouldn’t be so embarrassed now that the loan didn’t go through. If we hadn’t told them we loved them, it wouldn’t hurt so much to hear them say they don’t love us back.
    Disappointment.
    But even disappointment can be a good thing. I (Martha) remember one of the toughest afternoons of my life happening when one of the ‘‘cool kids’’ at my junior high school invited me to a party. She gave me her phone number and told me to call and find out where it was going to be. But later that night when I went to call, I couldn’t find that phone number anywhere. I remember looking all over the house and crying, feeling like my big chance was passing me by.
    My mother was sympathetic, but looking back I wonder if she also hadn’t protectively ‘‘misplaced’’ the number herself. This was back in the sixties, and a party with a bunch of teenagers that she didn’t know probably wasn’t her idea of a safe environment. My mother is gone now, so I’ll probably never know what really happened to that phone number. I do know, however, that I got over my disappointment and went on with my life. I also found out the next day that the party had turned into something I wouldn’t have wanted to be at anyway.
    There’s a wonderful old poem written by Edith Lillian Young. Think through the words carefully:
    Disappointment—His Appointment
    Change one letter, then I see
    That the thwarting of my purpose
    Is God’s better choice for me.
    His appointment must be blessing,
    Tho’ it may come in disguise,
    For the end from the beginning
    Open to His wisdom lies. 1
    Disappointment . . . sometimes it’s for our own good. But now, being cheated out of the last piece of a chocolate pie? Well, that’s just too sad for words!
    Disappointment is the nurse of wisdom.
Boyle Roche
    1 Public domain.

Sometimes the Answer
Is Right in Front of You
    When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one