I've always heard that when life gives you lemons you should make lemonade, or you should throw them at people, or you should put them in your sweet tea and thank God that you were born in the South. All of these cute little phrases are good ways to shrug off your problems and never really think more about them. The only problem is...life has never handed anyone lemons. Life doesn't hand anyone anything.
We get trials and tests. We get things thrown our way that are just downright awful. We get sucker punched right in the gut and left breathless. The rough things that happen in life catch us off guard and make us feel like we are all alone. It is so much worse than stupid sour lemons. It is feeling lost and hopeless. It is feeling like we've been shipwrecked in a hurricane.
Life doesn't hand us lemons. Trials come our way and when they do we find ourselves asking, Why me? When awful things happen to the people we love, we ask God how He could possibly let something so bad happen to people who are so good. Sometimes I even ask myself why God couldn't have let this awful thing happen to an awful person. I see people who are amazing suffering and people who are pretty terrible prospering. In my tiny little finite mind, it seems so senseless. It seems cruel and unfair. How can a God who loves us so much allow His children to love Him to suffer hardship?
Recently, a family that I love dearly suffered an absolutely senseless loss. When I found out what had happened to them, I just felt numb. How could God let them hurt that way?
Sometimes, we have to go through things that hurt. Sometimes, we have to be weak to remember that His strength is made perfect in our weakness. Sometimes we have to go through the hard things even though they make no sense. It isn't that God loves us any less. It is just that we grow the most when we aren't in our comfort zone. We grow the closest to Him when we are reminded that he is the only constant in our lives. When all we can do is cry out to Jesus for comfort and love we are reminded that His grace and salvation is all we need.
I remember this point last semester when one of my classmates and I were walking into a final that we knew was going to be particularly difficult. She said to me, "This is the hardest semester I have ever had. My grades have never been worst. But you know what? I've never been so close to God in my life. I've had to rely on Him more than ever."
Isaiah 48:10 says, "See, I have refined you, though not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction."
So, many times in life when we are going through difficulty, it is because God is allowing us to go through the fires of life for a time so we will come out stronger and closer to Him. Life doesn't hand us lemons. Trials aren't random and they aren't cutesy little happenings, but that's OK. As much as they hurt for a time, when we let Him carry us through, trials are OK.
