What Motivates Me - Part 2

I wanted to talk more about why love motivates me when life gets difficult and hard. I don’t always communicate my heart clearly or in accurate words and terms, so with God’s grace and help I hope to turn my lemon into some delicious lemonade.

It is so easy to love when life is easy, pleasant, and fun just like a Walt Disney theme park or like a fairy tale when the “good” characters live happily ever after. The reality is that life is trouble from the day we are born till the day we die and not everyone gets to experience a golden life or have happiness in their life. Hence the founding fathers of America called it the “pursuit of happiness.”

My best friend, Kevin, used to tell me what his dad used to tell him and that is when life gives you a bunch of lemons then you make lemonade. I used to carry a bunch of lemons around in my life that I was unable to turn into lemonade because ultimately it was and is beyond my own power to make the lemonade. An example of this is losing someone you love either to death or by separation.

I can see lemons in my own kids’ lives, especially when they are little and have no concept of time yet like when I drop them off at daycare and have to go to work. In their little world they do not understand that when I leave them with the intention of only a temporary separation all they understand is that they do not know if they will ever see me again so they begin to cry and mourn for me. Just being separated from the ones they love and who bring them security is too much for them to bear.

The fact is that life’s lemons come in all shapes and sizes. Lemons can be just the same monotonous experience day after day such as going to work or living the same routine every day. Lemons can be a small as stubbing your toe or getting a paper cut or as large as experiencing a car wreck, enduring a hurricane, a job loss, or the loss of your home. Lemons can be experiencing a sickness or becoming poor. Lemons can come from the ones you love as well as from your enemies; they can be unintentional as well as intentional. Lemons can even come from yourself, such as your own weaknesses, limitations, and character flaws. Lemons can test your endurance, your patience, your very character. Lemons are trials and tribulations.

I believe that God allows lemons in our life so that we can learn to make lemonade. It is part of my faith that God has been trying to teach us to make lemonade from lemons from the very beginning of creation, and the ultimate example God has given to us is of Him becoming a man in order to show us the way to make lemonade out of all the lemons in life. In the end Jesus shows us that God is ultimately responsible for turning the ultimate lemons of evil, pain, suffering, and death into lemonade through the victory of Jesus’ righteous and pure life culminating ultimately in His resurrection into a new and glorious immortal life.

I’m not sure that I have clearly communicated such a difficult and painful subject on life’s lemons, but I have given it my best shot. In the end being able to endure lemons in life relies upon faith in God who has not just told us the way, but has lived through the lemons in life so that we could follow Him and one day taste the sweet lemonade of victory!

If you want to know why I am a Christian, then this is one of the main reasons why. No other religion, faith, or worldview that I know shows the way to make lemonade out of all life’s lemons and has such a guarantee of obtaining the sweet fruits of victory!