On April 23rd 2016 mega celebrity singer Beyonce Knowles released her sixth studio album titled “Lemonade” to emphasize an emotional personal journey that she was dealing with at the time. On the album she quotes her husband’s grandmother Hattie White saying, “I was served lemons, but I made lemonade”. That powerful statement is a testament to what most of us need to hear and adhere to, which is why I borrowed that title. Each and every one of us has and/or will deal with being served lemons. Some may even describe it as being dealt a bad hand, but the question is, how will you play it? Sometimes we tend to over think a bad situation and don’t recognize the tools that we already possess to deal with and overcome that situation. We were all built to deal with being served lemons. The good Lord has equipped each and every one of us to endure the bitterness that lemons bring. The question is how? How do I access the sugar that’s required to convert lemons into lemonade? First of all know who you are! We have to learn to identify what God has given us. Usually it’s what captures our interest or what we tend to be good at. It can be one or the other or both. Know what you want! If you don’t have goals, you will be stagnant and stuck in a state of bitterness. Once you’ve identified those things, you have to pursue them. My mother use to always say to me as a teenager when I would complain about not having money, “a job ain’t gonna come knocking at your door”. We can’t say that we want to do something, never do it, and expect results.
Once we’ve established what’s required to make it we have to expect drawbacks, bumps in the road, and obstacles. This is the way of the world. It is a rare occasion when goals are accomplished without failing. This is where discipline has to be the foundation of your journey. This is where the true test of the best you is tried. This is where you really become better. I heard a man say one time that, “The smartest people are those who have failed the most”. If you’ve never been through anything how can you learn a lesson? Failure is not the end of the road.
There is what’s called, “the silver lining” in every bad situation. This is where we learn to utilize those tools that we’ve always had possession of from the start. This is where we learn to turn lemons into lemonade. This however will require some critical thinking skills, some creativity, and some ingenuity. I remember as a kid watching the TV show Macgyver. He had a solution for what seemed to be every bad situation he was in. I remember one episode when he had a radiator leak and didn’t have the proper means to fix the leak in that moment, but he did have access to an egg. He cracked the egg put it inside the radiator and patched the leak. We have to be like Macgyver and learn to improvise. Use what we already have and make it work. Many times we get served lemons and the objective is to make us turn sour faced from the bitterness, but once we learn to add the sweetness we can make lemonade and start our own lemonade stand.