When Life Gives You Lemons [And You Hate Lemonade]

{By Hailey Sadler}
Your parents warn you about it from an early age.

You get the inkling that it might actually be true, when certain things happen – like your sibling getting way better stuff on Christmas or your friend landing the main part in the play, even though your audition was [objectively, of course] far better.

Then you grow up [some]; reality hits and it hits hard. There’s someone you love. And they die. There’s something you want really, really badly and work like a maniac for. And you don’t get it. You fail. Someone who lied and cheated wins in your place. There’s a dream you have. And it fades away, far out of your reach. There’s something you prayed for with all your heart. And it doesn’t happen. Life isn't fair.

Why?? I can honestly say that I do not know. You can shake your fist in the face of heaven or you can lie on the ground in broken subjection, crying out for a reason; you can become bitter, cynical, and decide it’s not worth loving, trying, dreaming, or praying when confronted with the bald fact that so much in life is wrong and messed up and unjust. For no apparent reason. Sometimes it seems as if that is what bothers us most. We cry out for a why, a reason in the face of the pointless pain, a thread of purpose interwoven throughout the appalling unfairness of it all. We can bear it, as long as we can believe there is a master plan behind it all, making it somehow worthwhile.

That is the other option. You can trust.

It’s not exactly something I am naturally good at. If it tells you anything, I was the child who would not stand up on the picnic table and fall backwards into the scrawny arms of her Sunday School class. Just not going to do that, sorry. It is still hard – I want reasons, I want logic, I want some sort of guarantee that I won’t be hurt if I trust [that I won’t end up with my back on the ground and my Sunday school group chorusing, “oops!”]… which defeats the purpose of trusting, I guess. But what we have to realize is, trust is not about who we are. It’s about who God is. Trust your life on who He is,  and along the way you will find that He takes away the frustration and disappointment and in its place, gives peace. Illogical, unreasonable peace that passes all understanding.

Choosing to trust is more of a journey than a destination. I know because I am still on my own journey, a journey to reconcile the two undeniable facts I see around me:

That life is terribly, terribly unfair.

 And God is terribly, terribly good.

Things don’t always make sense, and to my mind, grasping for logic, that can be hard to accept. But God is good. And someday, when the veil of mortality and constraints of time and place are torn away, and we get to glimpse this world and these lives from His vantage point,  we will suddenly be able to comprehend the reconciliation of those to facts and see how perfect His purpose was all along.

Until then, trust. You don’t have to understand it all. It won’t all make sense. But that’s ok. If you knew every reason why, it would no longer be trusting. ;)