When Life Gives You Lemons, You Don’t Always Have to Make Lemonade

A few Sundays ago, I was just about to leave the church when the phone rang. It was that familiar internal tug-of-war: answer or let it go to voicemail. I hesitated for a moment—but only a moment—and picked up.

The voice on the other end was soft but urgent. A nurse from Foothills Hospital, calling with a request. She wondered if one of the ministers could possibly come visit a patient. It was a long weekend, the hospital chaplains were off duty, and the social worker wasn’t available. “I drive by your church every day,” she said, “and the signs out front—they always make me smile. So I thought I’d call.”

I told her I was just on my way out, but I could pop by in ten minutes.

When I arrived, two nurses greeted me with a whole lot of gratitude. But I quickly realized this wasn’t about the patient. It was his wife who needed someone.

She was lovely. Heartbreakingly lovely. The kind of person who still says thank you after telling you the worst parts of her life. She sat beside her husband’s palliative bed and shared a story soaked in grief—how she had already lost a child, her first husband, a grandchild, and now, slowly, her second husband.

She looked at me with tired, searching eyes and asked: “Why would God do this to me? What did I do to deserve all this pain?”

No seminary course prepares you for that question. There’s no clever theological spin that makes it okay. I took a deep breath and reminded her—and myself—that we don’t always get to know.

I thought of Job, that ancient tale of suffering and silence. Job, who lost everything and demanded answers. And God, who finally speaks—not with explanations, but with more questions. Job isn’t comforted by answers. He’s comforted by the presence of the Divine in his whirlwind of grief.

We are not puppets. We are not being punished. We live in a world where things happen—things we would never choose, things no one deserves. Free will, broken systems, bodies that fail us, and randomness beyond our comprehension.

My life is nothing like that woman’s. Her grief dwarfs mine. But last week, my little family hit a rough patch—a sudden mental health crisis that left us reeling. We cancelled our long-awaited trip to Europe the day before departure. There were tears, silence, brokenness and that familiar ache of plans unravelled. Life felt heavy.

And I remembered a quote I once underlined in a book and tucked away for moments like this:
“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”

It’s Nietzsche, I think. Or someone who sounds a lot like him. But the point isn’t who said it—it’s that it rang true.

Only, I’m not sure we always need to find meaning in suffering.

Sometimes, life gives you lemons, and the best you can do is hold them in your hands and weep. Sometimes, the juice stings your open wounds, and the last thing you need is someone chirping, “Make lemonade!”

There’s a kind of cruelty in forcing joy too quickly. In rushing past grief.

Here’s what I believe, especially on the harder days:
You don’t have to be grateful for everything to still be faithful in it.
You don’t have to find a silver lining right away.
You don’t have to transform your pain into a lesson plan or a Pinterest quote.

Sometimes you get to feel all of it—sad, angry, disappointed, depressed.
It’s okay to sit in the wilderness for a while.
It’s where you linger that matters.

If we stay there—forever—that’s when suffering becomes despair. But if we let ourselves be there, without shame, we create space for something real to bloom. Not optimism, necessarily, but compassion. For others. For ourselves.

That woman at the hospital reminded me that pain doesn’t always make us stronger. But it can make us softer. And sometimes softness is its own kind of strength.

So if life has handed you something sour and you’re not ready to add sugar and call it a blessing—don’t.

Just hold the lemons.
And let yourself be held.