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Have you ever looked back at a season of your life that felt like a total waste? The season left you with feelings of frustration and regret? I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, so you know I had to write a SILY about it.
Today I want to talk about some of the hard seasons, the failures, the painful years in my life that felt like were going nowhere. How I learned they aren’t setbacks, they’re ingredients. And I’m going to use some of your favorite comfort foods to prove it.
Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday, this is episode 700, “Mountains of Meatloaf.” I’m Darrell Darnell. Americans eat about 27 pounds of rice per person each year, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
Are you hungry?
Honestly? I am. As I’m writing this, it’s getting late in the afternoon and lunch is starting to wear off.
So I’m going to give you some foods, and I want you to pick one. Ready? Fried rice, french toast, meatloaf, swiss cheese fondue, and bread pudding. There’s a good variety there, so regardless of the time of day, hopefully something sounds good.
Which one did you pick?
Me? I chose fried rice. Rice is great when you’re really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something.
Okay, here’s a secret…just between you and me. Those foods weren’t random. I’ll award 10,000 bonus points if you can tell me what all five of them have in common. Once again: fried rice, french toast, meatloaf, swiss cheese fondue, and bread pudding.
I’ll give you just a moment to think about it.
Got it?
All of these much-loved comfort foods were originally born out of necessity to stretch ingredients and prevent waste.
Fried rice was developed across East and Southeast Asia as a practical way to use up day-old, dried-out rice alongside leftover scraps of meat and vegetables. French toast is known in France as pain perdu, which translates to “lost bread.” It was invented specifically to soften and repurpose stale bread that would otherwise be thrown away. Meatloaf was popularized in America during the Great Depression as a clever way to stretch affordable cuts of meat by combining them with leftover breadcrumbs, crackers, and vegetable scraps. Swiss cheese fondue was originally a way for Alpine farmers to feed their families during the winter by melting down hardened leftover cheese and softening stale bread. And bread pudding, similar to French toast, was created to use up hardened, day-old loaves, croissants, or even leftover donuts by baking them with eggs, milk, and sugar.
Here’s what I learned.
We are all like meatloaf, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
What? You’re still here? You want more details?
That’s fair.
I recently edited a podcast episode for one of my clients, and the host said something that I thought was profound. He said you can’t climb a smooth surface. Think about that for a second. The rough spots on the side of a mountain are exactly what you grip onto. The jagged edges, the uneven ledges, the places that look like damage from a distance, those are the handholds that pull you upward. Without them, you’d slide right back down.
I’ve been thinking about that ever since, because it perfectly describes my life.
I spent nineteen years in corporate retail. Nineteen years of operations, buying, inventory management, logistics, and eventually technology. There were seasons of real frustration. Seasons where I felt overlooked, underutilized, or just plain stuck. I made mistakes. Some of them cost me. Some of them cost my team and my position. And I carried the weight of those failures longer than I probably should have.
But then something shifted.
I launched a podcast production company. And the more I worked toward building that company, the more I realized something almost embarrassing in its simplicity. Every single thing I’d done for nineteen years had been preparing me for that exact moment. The operations background taught me systems and processes. The buying experience taught me how to evaluate quality and negotiate value. The tech years taught me the tools. The leadership failures taught me humility. The difficult seasons taught me how to keep going when the outcome isn’t guaranteed.
None of it was wasted. Not one year. Not one failure. Not one frustrating Tuesday afternoon where nothing went right.
Back in college, I was a big fan of a band called Caedmon’s Call. If you were in Christian music circles in the late nineties and early two thousands, you know exactly who I’m talking about. One of their songs, “Lead of Love,” has stayed with me for over two decades now. The lyrics describe looking back at a long, winding, sometimes painful road and finally being able to see the shape of it. There’s a line that says: “Had to walk the rocks to see the mountain view.”
Twenty-year-old me thought that was just a nice turn of phrase. Fifty year old me knows it’s the whole story. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that twenty year old me imagined that it was true based on what he’d heard other people say. Fifty year old me knows it’s true because of the first hand experiences I’ve had that have led me to where I am now.
You don’t get the view from the top by avoiding the rocks. You get it because of them.
My parents divorced when I was young. At the time, it just felt like loss. Like something had been taken. And honestly, for a while, that’s all it was. But somewhere along the way, that experience gave me something unexpected. It gave me empathy. It gave me the ability to sit with someone going through something painful and not immediately try to fix it or explain it away, because I knew what it felt like to carry something hard and have no clean resolution. It gave me perspective on marriage that has made me a better husband and father.
That rough experience became a handhold for someone else’s climb as well as my own.
I’ve watched friends face things I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Parents who lost a child and had to figure out how to keep breathing in a world that suddenly didn’t make sense anymore. Some of those parents, the ones who let themselves grieve fully and honestly, eventually turned that unbearable loss into something that helped other people. They started foundations. They showed up for other grieving families. They became the person they desperately needed in their darkest moment. Their deepest wound became their greatest gift to someone else.
I’ve had seasons of real financial difficulty too. Seasons where the math just didn’t work no matter how many times I ran it. And I’ll be honest, I didn’t handle all of those seasons with grace. But I came out the other side with something I couldn’t have bought: a genuine compassion for people who are struggling, and a real, earned appreciation for what I have. Not a “gratitude journal” gratitude. A deep-in-your-bones gratitude that only comes from knowing what it feels like to not have enough.
The rough spots bring growth every single time.
The Apostle Paul wrote something in his letter to the church at Philippi that has kept me going and given me perspective during difficult times. He said it this way:
“I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I find myself. I know how to make do with little, and I know how to make do with a lot. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being content, whether well fed or hungry, whether in abundance or in need. I am able to do all things through Him who strengthens me.”
Read that carefully. He didn’t say contentment came naturally. He said he learned it. That word matters. Learning implies a process. It implies mistakes and repetition and time. It implies that at some point before he wrote those words, Paul was not content. He was in the middle of the hard thing, feeling every rough edge of it, and he had to work through it to get to the other side.
Contentment isn’t something that gets handed to you on a smooth, uneventful day. It gets forged in the in-between, in the waiting rooms and the lean seasons and the years that don’t seem to be going anywhere. Paul was essentially saying, “I’ve been through enough to know that God doesn’t waste any of it.”
And I believe him. Because I’ve seen it in my own life too many times to dismiss it.
So back to our comfort foods.
What makes fried rice great isn’t the fresh ingredients. It’s the day-old rice. The slightly dried-out leftovers that seem past their prime. What makes French toast magical is that it starts with bread that’s gone stale. What makes meatloaf satisfying is that it takes the scraps, the bits and pieces that didn’t seem good enough on their own, and combines them into something nourishing and whole.
Nothing wasted. Everything useful. Even the stuff that seemed like it was past its prime.
That’s the metaphor that I see when I look at my own life. The nineteen years that felt like detours. The failures that felt like dead ends. The painful seasons I would have fast-forwarded through if I could have. None of it was wasted. God was doing what He’s always done: taking the leftovers, the stale bread, the hardened cheese, the dried-out rice, and turning it into something that feeds people.
The rough edges of the mountain are exactly what we grip onto to pull ourselves up. The losses and the failures and the lean years aren’t the opposite of your story. They are your story. And if you let them, they become someone else’s handhold too.
Here’s what I’ve learned.
If we let Him, God will use everything. The good and the bad. The smooth and the rough. The seasons of abundance and the seasons of barely enough. He uses all of it to help us, strengthen us, shape us, teach us, and equip us. And then He turns around and uses what He’s built in us to help the people walking the same roads we’ve already walked.
Don’t despise the rough spots. Don’t rush past the hard seasons. Don’t be so focused on what you’ve lost that you miss what you’re gaining. Because somewhere down the road, when you finally stop and look back, you’ll see it. The shape of it. The design of it. The love threaded through all of it.
You had to walk the rocks to see the mountain view.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
I want you to be a part of the next Monday Mailbag coming up this month on June 29th! The submission deadline is the end of day on Wednesday June 24th. Monday Mailbag is your opportunity to Share what YOU’VE learned, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can send in questions or responses to my SILY episodes, and I’ll respond to them via Monday Mailbag episodes. You can participate in Monday Mailbags by visiting the Golden Spiral Media listener feedback page.