What Do I Do With All These Lemons?

These are my notes on one of the last lessons that Candace and I taught together. For an activity we made lemonade, and I also challenged any of the students to take one of the unpeeled lemons and take a bite. Please note that my notes function as a way for me to get ready to teach, and I do not take them into the classroom with me. I feel that it is easier for me to engage the students in what I am talking about if I am not constantly looking at my notes.

Have you ever eaten a lemon? A lemon is a fruit which by itself is very bitter and causes a puckering up of the mouth, and is, in general, not considered to be an enjoyable fruit to eat by itself, but instead requires dilution, the addition of a sweetener, or possibly even both. Lemons are often described as being sour, a homonym for rotten.

In fact, the word lemon, because of the fruit's sourness, is used in the auto industry to describe a car that is problem ridden, or does not perform as well as other cars of the same make or model do. The disappointing vehicle is called a lemon because it is a deal gone sour, or something that has not worked out quite like it was supposed to work out.

This happens to us in life as well. Sometimes things don't work out the way that we thought that they would. Sometimes it seems to us that we have been given the short end of the stick, and that we have, in fact, been handed, by life, a truck-full of lemons. Where we should have sweet memories we have, instead, a whole truckload of bad experiences, bad decisions, and disappointments.

What do we do with the things we have been handed? What do we do with the sharp-edged pieces of shattered dreams and broken goals? What do we do when it seems that all we have left is hope? What do we do with all of these lemons that we have lying around as a testament of the hard curves that life has thrown us?
It's simple, really.

When life gives you lemons...make lemonade.

You take all the darkness that has come into your life, all of the hurt and failures, all of the let-downs and short-comings, everything in your life that has ever made you doubt, everything that has ever caused your heart to break, all of the shadows...you take them all...and you crush them. You squeeze all of the sourness and bitterness out of them, and then you pour in the sweetness of the love and forgiveness of God, and you turn those lemons into liquid sunshine. It becomes lemonade, a sweet drink that can provide refreshment during even the most punishing summer day. Suddenly, because of how you've changed the way you look at your life, you take a look back at all of those things in your life that you thought were lemons, and they aren't just lemons anymore. You look back at your failures, and you see where they led you to victory. You look at your broken heart, and you see that there were better things on the way. These disappointments aren't really disappointments anymore, instead, what they have become is your hope, your strength,and the proof of God's power. What they have become is your testimony.

So what do we do the next time life gives us lemons?

We make testimonies.