lemons

In the last two weeks, I've been handed a lot of crap. Like, real, "why-is-this-happening-NOW-of-all-times-God-I-can't-do-this-please-take-it-away" crap. Not even the kind of crap that you can pray about before you go to bed and wake up the next morning and look back on and laugh about because it was like one of those 24-hour flus that only plagues you for a day or two. No, I've been handed the kind of crap that hovers over you, shrouding every move you make in a black cloud of gloom. Yeah. That's where I've been for the past two weeks. Gloomland.

In the last two weeks, I've learned a lot about faith. See, when life gives you lemons, sometimes it's really really hard to round up the rest of the ingredients needed in order to make lemonade. (Ingredients that are necessary because lemonade made from just lemons is really very sour.) Sometimes the sugar is on the highest possible shelf, and the weight on your shoulders prevents you from reaching up to the fullest extent of your height to grab it. So you just have to hold onto those lemons, and after a while, they begin to become a bit of a burden (say that five times fast). I mean, individual lemons are pretty light I guess. But when you hold a bunch of them for two weeks straight without any breaks to stretch your arms out, it gets a little cumbersome, you know?

During those two weeks, I thought about God. I thought about how big and strong His arms are, and about how He probably doesn't need to take stretch breaks because He's, well, God. So I considered giving my lemons to Him to hold onto. But my pride got in the way. My incessant need to be independent and to figure life out for myself in order to grow from the things that are hard gorilla-glued those darn lemons right to my arms. And so I held on. And they got heavier, and heavier. And I cried. A lot, actually. And I prayed. I asked God to make me stronger so I could continue to shoulder the burden by myself. But strength doesn't come overnight, and a couple more lemons got added on to my load.

So today I gave in - which is different from giving up, mind you - and now God has my lemons. They're still mine, but at least I'm not alone in carrying them anymore. My arms are sore from holding on for so long, but that sensation will go away eventually.

Faith is when something feels so big, you get scared that it's too big for God, too. But you give it to Him anyway. Because, like we discussed earlier, God is God. As John Piper says in his book Finally Alive, "My feelings are not God. God is God. My feelings do not define truth. God's word defines truth. My feelings are echoes and responses to what my mind perceives. And sometimes - many times - my feelings are out of sync with the truth. When that happens - and it happens every day in some measure - I try not to bend the truth to justify my imperfect feelings, but rather, I plead with God: Purify my perceptions of your truth and transform my feelings so that they are in sync with the truth."

So tonight, that's my prayer. Not a prayer for strength, but a plea for recognition. God is God. My feelings should be in line with God's truth, which I believe to be this: The hard things are hard so that I can grow, but I don't have to grow by myself. I must grow with God. Because in the end, this life is His. And as crappy as it feels to realize that life, for the most part, is out of my control, it's a comfort to trust that everything happens for a reason, and that I'll get to where I'm going eventually. It's a comfort to know that even though I can't see over the next hill, He made that hill. And that's enough to muster up the strength to climb over it and keep moving forward. Lemons and all.