“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” This has always seemed to me like one of those banally cruel pieces of advice. Sometimes it feels like we’re in a liferaft that’s on the verge of sinking and someone cruises along in a speedboat and asks if we’ve already tried bailing the water out, and then cruises off again. That’s kind of what the advice to just make lemonade feels like to me sometimes. Oh, your life is shattered into a million pieces? Have you ever tried making lemonade? But if we really get to the heart of making lemonade out of lemons, it is actually the only practical thing we can do. If we’ve been given a bitter cup of lemons, and we’ve pleaded with the Lord to let the cup pass that we might not drink it, and our Heavenly Father lovingly tells us that there is no other way, then why shouldn’t we try to make some lemonade? After all, what are the basic ingredients of lemonade - lemons, water, and a sweetener? The lemons we’ve got. And they aren’t going anywhere. And if we’ve made the brave choice to face the hard reality of our situation, and not try to deflect or repress or run away or drown out our sorrows with one vice or another, then we are going to have plenty of water in the tears we shed. We are not defective or cast out from our Savior’s grace if the lemons in our life cause us to weep because of how horrible and overwhelming our situation is. We are in good company. The shortest verse and yet one of the most powerful in the whole Bible is John 11:35 - “Jesus wept.” Tears are good. They help water down the bitterness of the cup we all have to drink. But there is one thing our tears can’t do. We can cry enough tears to fill the Pacific Ocean, but it won’t change the fact that life has given us lemons. We can’t feel enough sorrow or regret or self-pity to change the fact that life gave us bitter lemons and not sweet apples. We can’t go back to the way things were before the bitter cup was placed before us. We can’t magically overnight fill the hole inside of us when we have lost someone important to us. We can’t unring bells or put spilled milk back in the bottle. But we can make lemonade. We can water down our bitter lemons with our tears, and then we can add the sweet joy of our hope and faith in Jesus Christ. This hope is sweet not because it allows us to go back in time and make the tragedies as if they had never happened, but because it allows us to make something even better than we could have imagined. Christ’s Atonement does not take away the bitter cup from us, but He can sweeten it enough that we can drink it willingly and gladly and even joyfully. Yes, the lemons in our lives will still bring us to our knees and still draw the tears out of us, because the tears are a part of the lemonade. But when we face the worst moments of our lives with the tender mercies of Jesus Christ, we will find that we will be able to drink from the bitter cup, and we will taste the sweetness of the love of Jesus Christ so strongly that we will be able to bear the bitterness of the lemons. I know that when we are drowning in sorrow, the very last thing any of us wants to hear is that we should quit moaning and make some lemonade already. But I also know that Christ has a way of transforming our most exquisite and bitter agonies into our most exquisite and sweet joys. Making lemonade out of lemons may sometimes be our only option, but we don’t have to try to make it all by ourselves.
