How do you know what to do when you don’t know what to do? How do you fix something you didn’t realize was broken? How do you become something you didn’t know you needed to be? How do you adjust your vision of the future to be the opposite of what you imagined? How do you find a new path when you never wanted to leave the old path? How do you acknowledge the truth when you’re not even willing to share it with anyone else? How do you forgive someone when it never occurred to you they weren‘t worthy of your trust in the first place? How do you accept something when you don’t understand it? How do you undo things that have already been done?
Sometimes life hands you lemons, and sometimes it hurls them at you when you least expect it. One day you’re strolling along wondering what you did to deserve such good fortune, and the next you’re curled up in a ball crying and trying to figure out how you got from point A to point B. You’re wishing you had never started out at point A so you didn’t have to understand how truly painful point B is capable of being. You feel a complicated mixture of sadness, anger, confusion, and desperation. All of which you would give nearly anything to make disappear. You wonder what comes next, and you know that no matter what it is, it isn’t going to be easy. You’re full of questions with no answers, and no matter how hard you search for those answers, many times you will never find them. You pray and you ask for guidance, faith, and patience none of which actually make the situation any less painful in the moment. You then realize you don’t even know what exactly it is you need to be praying for so you simply pray for God to figure it out and help you to accept it. You spend an unfortunate amount of time staring off into space thinking blank thoughts in effort to avoid any real thoughts. You realize a whole day has passed and you never got out of your pajamas, and you hope that somehow you can get away with doing a whole bunch of nothing again the next day. You’re paralyzed by the thought of having to accept what has happened, make a plan, and move on with life. Things don’t just seem overwhelming, they truly are overwhelming. You cry, and then you cry, and then you cry some more.
Eventually a day comes when all those tears, and all that prayer have brought you to a place of acceptance. It doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve forgiven. It just means you want to. Until that day comes, you just have to believe that there is some lesson to be learned… the lemonade that comes from all those lemons. In the moment, that’s hard to see and even harder to believe, but it’s true. God has a plan. We don’t have to like it, and we don’t have to understand it. We just have to be willing to accept that the path He calls us to take will always be worth the change, worth the risk, worth the effort, simply because He has chosen it for us. When He finally gets us where He wants us, we’ll wonder why we wasted so much time and energy being upset and trying to figure out why we didn’t get what we thought we wanted. We will be sitting around sipping on the most delicious lemonade imaginable, and we won’t be able to imagine anything better… it’ll be hard to remember what it was we thought was so great about where we were before.
“Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him and He will make your paths straight.” Proverbs 3:5-6
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