When Life Gives You Lemons

After a couple of particularly difficult days on the job last week my fiance sent me a beautiful bouquet assorted of green, white and yellow arranged flowers. This bouquet was particularly interesting because sitting proudly among the flowers were bright yellow lemons. Attached the card simply read:

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

This caused quite a scene on my floor at my hospital because any flowers that come to the floor usually go to our patients. Needless to say I blushed brightly at all the attention while my heart smiled softly over the thoughtfulness of my fiance. I explained to my coworkers that I had had a couple of hard days at work and expressed my exhaustion over the phone after work one night. One coworker looked surprised and admitted, " I didn't even notice you were having a rough day." I just smiled and raised an eyebrow...

Yesterday at church our pastor was also talking about stress. He spoke of the pressures in our life that we have or will one day face. There will come a day in your life, he explained, when a situation arrives that you will have no control over and the stress of the situation will be too much for you to handle. Why does this happen, we ask? "Letting “all hell break loose” in our lives is the only way God can get our attention at times. God will often let more be put on us than we can handle so that we will stop boasting in our own strength and become desperate for His," He explained. Yes, there is hope. There is a God that is sovereign and in control of every situation. If we no longer see our problem as our own but as God's problem (God's cancer, God's addiction, God's job, etc.) then we are set free. We leave the situation at His feet and trust in Him to take care of the burden...

Ahhhh, what a sweet and refreshing comfort! Sweeter than even an ice cold glass of freshly squeezed lemonade...