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Amazing Facts

Doug Batchelor

A Cold Confession

This presentation is brought to you by the Friends of the Amazing Facts Ministry.

I praise God because I was a slave, it controlled my time, it took my money, at the end of the day it had to be part of my day, it was like I associated it with comfort, it was almost emotional, but I was addicted I'm going to be sharing something very personal with you and making a confession.

You've heard it said before confession is good for the soul but very bad for the reputation and that may be the case today But your pastor was addicted and involved in substance abuse for over 30 years.

Yeah, they got the substance there on the screen right now.

But I had a very serious problem with an addiction to ice cream.

Now when I get done, you describe it, you let me know what you think that if it fits the definition.

Now I don't know exactly when it began, but I know it started a long time ago, and my substance abuse started innocently enough and I want to make it clear right from the beginning I am not saying that ice cream is a sin.

But it got to the place where it was for me.

The Bible says in 1 Corinthians 10.31, Therefore whether you eat or whether you drink, do all to the glory of God.

And I certainly was not doing it to the glory of God.

Now, I don't know if any of you remember a day where years ago they had an ice cream man that would go up and down the neighborhood and a bell would ring and a song would play.

On those hot summer days and you'd hear that music, it was like the gates of heaven had opened up, right?

And you'd hear that music playing and this little white truck would come out and all the kids would crowd into certain set spots in the street and just about throw themselves in front of this vehicle.

And he would step out, and usually he was friendly.

And there in the truck he had his dried ice.

He showed me a piece of the dried ice and the fog billowing out and he'd pull out these exotic treats.

And I remember some of my favorites were...

It was a double popsicle, it had 2 sticks that went up through it.

You could break it in half and share it with a friend, so I often would split a rainbow rocket I'm sure it was full of colors and chemicals and things, but it was delicious it was probably all corn syrup.

They had another 1 that was orange with vanilla inside, it was an orange popsicle with vanilla anyone?

They still make those But it goes way back and I remember that it was so important to me, I couldn't understand why my grandmother would not give me 10 or 25 cents, that's all it was back then, every day.

And she said, it's a treat, you can't have it every day.

And I'm ashamed to tell you that I vividly remember stealing money from my grandmother.

She, this is 1 of my earliest memories, she hung her black leather purse over the doorknob of her bedroom and inside her purse she had another little purse that had 1 of those very difficult snaps on it that you had to twist it was the change purse and she caught me 1 day I don't know how many times I did it, more than once That's where my life of crime began.

And then I went to live with dad, and that's when it really started to get serious.

Is, in Florida, we actually had I know you don't think of Miami Beach having milkmen, but we had a milkman.

And I looked it up online to see, they're still in business, the company was called MacArthur Dairy.

And they would bring the milk to the door and my stepmother would fill out a form and it wasn't every day, but like every other day, he would bring the order.

In Miami Beach, the milkmen not only brought milk, they brought fresh squeezed Tropicana orange juice in a jar, a glass jar, and they would squeeze it that day and you'd get fresh orange juice and they brought ice cream now we always knew when he was coming because you can't leave your ice cream out on the porch for very long and you know I didn't...I was living with my dad and my stepmother and my stepbrother and my brother was sick and I was struggling during those years and 1 of the treats for me was I would take a half a pint of ice cream and pour in Tropicana orange juice and mix it all...it reminded me of those orange things the good humor man had.

But it got to where my stepmother started saying, who ate all the ice cream?

Because I was eating all of the ice cream.

But then things really turned from bad to worse, because summer came and I needed to find a job and guess where I got a job?

Karen and I were in Miami Beach not too long ago.

I took her by, tried to find where the old ice cream shop was and I guess it's not there anymore, Lincoln Mall, but I worked at 31 Flavors and the owner was Lee Scott.

And I remember when he hired me, I was only like 14, 15 years old, and I said, when he was hiring me, I said, now I'm just wondering, are we allowed to eat the product?

He said, you can eat as much as you want, you'll get tired of it.

I never even got close to getting tired of it.

He had...now you know Baskin Robbins is called 31 not because they've got 31 flavours, they guarantee having 31 flavours in the store at any given time.

They have hundreds of flavours and we had new flavours rotating in all the time And I'm not kidding you, I would eat a pralines and cream banana split for lunch and then I'd have a hot fudge mocha sundae for dinner and it's amazing when you're a teenager what you can do to yourself.

And the problem was I was not only now a user I was a dealer.

But I worked there until I ran away from home.

And then it was hit and miss on the road for a little while with ice cream.

But even when I moved up into the mountains in a cave no refrigeration obviously it's a very long way to town, grueling hike, but it was the desert back then they had thrifties drugstores everywhere, I don't see, thrifties drugstore is evidently out of business I don't know if you can still get Thrifty's ice cream, but in all their drugstores they had an ice cream counter.

Do any of you remember when it was a nickel a scoop?

And you could get a triple scoop for 15 cents.

But when you're living in a cave in a desert and you've got no refrigeration, the highlight for me was to go panhandle and see if I could get 15 cents I would beg on the street and say, could I please have 15 cents for something to eat?

I didn't tell them what I was going to eat, but it's true I would spend my last 15 cents on ice cream.

And I remember I wasn't the only 1, a lot of the street people, it was a big deal.

And there were others that were living in the desert, most of them lived in the First Valley, I lived way back in the canyon.

And I remember I was hanging out on the street 1 day with my friends and some kid had walked out of Thrifty's with a triple scoop of ice cream and he wasn't paying attention and the ice cream guy at the counter, you know, at 50's when you got your ice cream the same guy that worked the cash register, he worked the counter and he didn't always know what to do with ice cream, and so he didn't press that first scoop has to get pressed down into the cone or it can become detached.

And he had a triple scoop and his kid walked out on the street and he turned and the thing fell off the cone, but it landed not flat, it landed still intact with 3 scoops like little tower pieces sticking straight up, and the kid began to cry and the parents said oh come on in, we'll get you another 1.

And they walked in the store, I'm standing there with my friends and we're looking at that.

And I said, you know, only part of that hit the ground, kid didn't even lick it yet.

And if he did lick it, the part he licked is the part on the ground, the other stuff is still good and while we were processing that, before I could act on my thought, my friend Richie got down on all fours and he began to eat the ice cream off the street like that really, I didn't do it, But I thought about it because I thought that's some perfectly good ice cream that's going to waste right now.

And I wouldn't just eat 1 triple thing of ice cream, I would eat 1 when I arrived to town and then later in the day I'd get another 1 before I went up the hill and that would have to last me You know, I used to wonder why was it so important to me?

And I later found out there was a study, believe it or not, there's medical research Journal of Clinical Investigation, this is a study done in 2011, a team of researchers led by Lucas Van Oudenhove, University of Belgium, they were publishing images of brain activity during times of sadness, and they had 12 volunteers that had their brains scanned with an MRI and also agreed to have a feeding tube put into their stomach.

Then they were shown images and played some neutral or sad music and shown neutral or sad images and then they would rate how they felt on a scale of 1 to 9, and when they were feeling sad they would then inject in their stomachs a solution.

They didn't know what was going in their stomach.

Some of them would get a fat solution that would be similar to what you would find in ice cream.

And then they would evaluate them afterward.

And they found out in almost every case those who were sad after being given the fatty solution, it says the effect was significant in a pharmacological sense.

The fatty solution reduced the intensity of sad emotions by almost half, which is about as much as any prescription antidepressant can achieve.

And so you were wondering why you thought ice cream was comfort food.

They finally done research to say it actually does work as an antidepressant.

So I guess you could say I was addicted to antidepressants.

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You know the Bible says that a little bit of certain things is okay but something can be taken to an extreme and it becomes sin.

Ecclesiastes 10, 17, Blessed are you O land when your king is the son of nobles and your princes feast at the proper time for strength and not for drunkenness.

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A Cold Confession

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