“When life gives you lemons, make
lemonade.”
This quote has been going around and around
my head for days now. I have always hated it, but I was unsure why. I think it
is partly because my initial reaction is ‘Wow, and did you cross-stitch that
onto a pillow or do you have it on the wall in your kitchen?’ It just seems so
cliché.
And the more I think about it, the more I
hate it.
Many people may not know this but last
year, 2012, was the hardest year of my life so far. It was a year filled with
the death of loved ones, both old and young. Due to grief I battled clinical
depression for about 7 months.
During this difficult time God was good,
gracious and kind. But if someone had told me to make lemonade I would have
done one of two things. I would have either burst into tears or bopped them
one.
And, unfortunately, some people with the
best of intentions did say things very similar to this. One thing I heard often
was ‘Oh well, we know that all things work together for good for all those that
love God’ (taken from Rom 8:28 and way too often taken completely out of
context).
Am I the only one that sees a problem here?
Has anyone else experienced a time when they just couldn’t make lemonade?
Let’s face it – some things in life just
suck. Sometimes life itself sucks. Some situations are so intense you can’t get
past them. Death of loved ones is permanent and painful. Mental and physical
illness can be long-term or life-long. Intellectual and physical disabilities do
not go away. Poverty and hunger is a way of life for many people. War can lead
to life-long devastation. The reality is that often these things simply do not have
a silver lining. Yes, God can use them to change us and make us more like Him,
which is wonderful. But they are the result of a broken world, not a perfect
creation. And often these situations do not make lemonade. They are just
lemons.
Sometimes it is just impossible to feel
joy. When I was in the middle of a depressive episode I was incapable of
feeling anything at all. It was a black hole of nothing, so impenetrable that I
couldn’t even get the energy to try to fight for any feeling at all. I just
existed. This can be said of times of great emotion as well – grief, sadness,
pain – you just exist in a bubble of emotion or emotional numbness. You cannot
make anything else matter.
Last year I learnt something very
important. If you get given a lemon, or are swimming in a bath of lemon juice,
it’s ok to purse your lips, shudder and cry out “I hate lemon juice!” Sometimes
we just don’t have the experience or energy or ingredients to make lemonade. So
we just have to suck the lemon, sometimes for days, weeks, months, years, or even
a lifetime.
Jesus was given a lemon – a massive one. He
was tortured and killed, even though He was innocent. When He was waiting for
this to happen He didn’t try to look on the bright side or be happy in His
suffering. Jesus shed tears, He curled up before God and wept, begging for
there to be another way, for God to take the bitter cup from Him. While He was
being beaten and He was hanging on a wooden cross He was not jovial or happy,
He was in unimaginable and humanly inescapable pain. His body would have been
screaming for life as it slowly gave up the fight. Jesus was able to do this
because He had something to cling to – hope. This hope was not the kind of hope
that we often refer to. It was not just an emotional hope or a happy feeling. Jesus had a true hope, a hope that was grounded in the promises of God.
When all Jesus felt was pain and sorrow He knew that God would keep His promise
to raise Him from the dead, that there would be time when the pain and
suffering was in the past. Jesus could trust His Father because throughout
history God had proven over and over that He always kept His promises.
This is the one thing that I could cling to
last year, the promises of God. I couldn’t feel anything for God but I knew I was loved by
God. I couldn’t feel the certainty of His promises but I could continue to
remind myself of them and know their certainty on an intellectual level. At a
time when I was incapable of feeling joy, happiness and fun I could know God was
there loving me and caring, even if I couldn’t feel it.
Knowing the facts and truths of God’s Word
and His promises of eternity meant I did not have to add another lemon to my
pile – the great guilt that comes with being unable to be joyful. There is a
lot of pressure, particularly in Christian circles, to always be joyful. This
is just completely stupid. We were created with the complete spectrum of
emotions for a reason. There are times in life when it is actually wrong to be
seeking joy and it is right to be sad and grieving. Being happy doesn’t make
you a better Christian. We have not been called to be happy all the time, to desperately
look for a bright side when there may not be one. We have been called to trust
God and His promises. So what is the point of pretending that everything is ok,
that our world is not broken and often sucks, and that sometimes there are
things in our lives that are just not as they should be? To do so is
untruthful, painful and often causes more harm than good.
There is no promise of joy on this earth,
although God is good and life can be truly wonderful. Because He is gracious
God can bring about great good from awful circumstances, but the circumstances
may still be awful. He can give joy and peace during painful times, but the
absence of these does not mean God is absent.
When life gives you lemons and you just
can’t make lemonade, that’s ok. It doesn’t make God’s promises less true. And God promises that one day there will be no more 'life lemons'. Although I am hoping there will be an awesome lemonade stand!
