When Life Gives You Lemons

“Life is hard, and it might not get easier.”  These words are part of a worship song we sang years ago, and they were preceded by a declaration designed to keep us focused in the right direction when hard times come: “We believe in God, and we all need Jesus.”  These words still ring true, because how we respond when life is hard makes all the difference in our Christian growth.

Bad things happen to good people, and no one is immune this side of heaven.  In fact, God even ordains some of our troubles in order to grow us and help us become more Christlike.  That may be hard to understand; but God has a different perspective than we do – a perfect and loving perspective that wants only what is best for us and everyone our lives touch.  His purposes rarely look the same as ours.

Most of the time, we humans have to fight a self-centered viewpoint.  We tend to believe that anything we are experiencing has isolated purposes for us alone.  But, from God’s perspective, it’s not just about us.  It’s about God using our story connected with someone else’s story to complete his story.  When life is hard and doesn’t make sense to us, it is important to remember whose story is being told and to recognize the privilege that we have to be included in the telling of that story.

You see, when life is hard, we have a choice: we can choose to become better or we can choose to become bitter.  Becoming more Christlike through difficult times is not a given – and it may involve pain from our perspective.  That’s because the things that matter to God are so different and so much deeper than what often matters to us.  But we can respond in faith and choose to look beyond the present to focus on God’s ultimate work in us, “. . . being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion . . .” (Philippians 1:6). 

God is always faithful, even when life is hard.  He can be trusted to “work all things together for good” (Romans 8:28) when we love him and are seeking to follow his will.  And sometimes he will even choose to use our trials as part of our future ministry for the kingdom.  But this will only happen if we are willing to be used by God in someone else’s life as he tells his story.  This is how the body of Christ, the Christian church, was designed by God – each of us being used in each other’s lives to accomplish God’s purposes for his kingdom and to bring him glory.  Even our bad things and hard things, because God is sovereign and knows what he’s doing.