#2 - Lemons
Rule: Life gives you a lot of lemons, just don’t forget the taste of sugar when you get it.
The saying, “when life gives you lemons…” sounds harmless at first, almost childish. It is the sort of saying you’d see on a coffee cup at a craft store, or stitched into a decorative pillow as though lemons were light enough to laugh at. But underneath the phrase lies something more ancient and sinister: it is the inevitability of suffering. Lemons are bitter, sour, and sharp, and the undeniable fact of human life is tragedy, limitation, disappointment, and pain. Plans collapse, bodies weaken, trust is broken, disease spreads undetected beneath healthy skin while ordinary mornings continue as if nothing is wrong. Children bury parents, parents bury children, siblings bury each other, bank accounts drain, marriages collapse, and dreams decay slowly in the dark, all the while responsibilities continue demanding your attention every morning when the alarm clock goes off. That is not a flaw in the system; that is the system itself at work in every person’s life.
You can respond to this lemon in a multitude of ways, some to your bitterment, others to your betterment. You get to choose. You can become resentful for a moment, and understandably so, deciding that because the world is flawed and unfair, it is therefore unjustifiable. That decision doesn't usually arrive all at once; it creeps in silently and quietly, undetected like carbon monoxide. It begins as disappointment, turns itself into frustration, and eventually gives birth to a posture of hatred toward existence itself.
You begin to keep score, reliving in your mind over and over again what was taken from you, what should have been, if only others were more careful, if only we had gone sooner, if we would have made a different decision, if only you could have really trusted those who hurt you. You keep score, and eventually that score becomes the lens through which you see, and everything else is filtered through it.
It is only a small step from there to withdrawal. You withdraw your words, you withdraw your thoughts, you withdraw your participation from the world. You isolate, you dissociate, and you desensitize yourself from the world because you view it all as a game, and if the game is rigged, why play? If the world is broken, why build? So you become resentful, and that in and of itself is some sort of dark comfort because resentfulness tends to relieve you of responsibility. It allows you to stand back and criticize rather than step forward and construct. That thought, however, comes at a cost because demonizing the world and rejecting it as unjustifiable also leads to you rejecting the possibility that anything within the world could be meaningful. The door doesn't just close on hope; it closes on faith, effort, courage, and growth.
For those who have tasted the bitterest lemons, you know and understand that resentment, hatred, and dissociation do not fix what is broken, lost, or dead. It just ensures you remain bound to it. It keeps you focused on what is gone rather than what could still be made right. It narrows your sight until all you see is the flaw, and in doing so, it blinds you to the moments of goodness that still exist, fragile as they may be.
Here lies the problem: if left unchecked, it turns inward. What began as a judgment of the world becomes a quiet erosion of one’s self. You become more unwilling to carry the weight, less able to find meaning, and less open to the possibility that, even in a flawed, hurting, and unjustifiable world, something worthwhile can still be built.
If one can recognize and truly understand the hard truth that suffering is not the end, then the bitterness of life does not invalidate meaning, but rather gives rise to it. Suffering can be the very condition upon which meaning grows because without resistance, no matter how unfair or how much it hurts, there is nothing to overcome. Without loss, we do not know what to cherish. Without setbacks, there are no reasons to strive forward. The truth is suffering draws connective lines that give shape to purpose; it forces you to choose, to act, and to decide what is worth carrying forward and what must be let go.
In this new sense of your life, when you realize that pain, suffering, and lemons are not merely an obstacle in the way toward a meaningful life, but rather the very terrain on which meaning is built, it begins to sharpen your awareness. It deepens your gratitude and reveals the weight of your values. What you have endured, what you are willing to confront, and what pain you have to bear and still smile through are the places where meaning takes root. This is not, of course, because suffering is something good in itself, but because it demands something of you. It calls you into responsibility for the future. When you answer that call, not perfectly, not knowing what is to come, but honestly, that is when you can begin to taste the sweetness of sugar. That is when, no matter the suffering and pain, your life starts taking on a new meaning.
That is when the question begs to be asked, “What is the meaning?” Not in the shallow sense, but fundamentally. It is the urge, and perhaps the decision, that what you are doing with your life matters no matter the difficulty. If there were no lemons, no resistance, no adversity to overcome, there would be no need for courage, no opportunity for strength, no need for faith.. Meaning, at its core then, is not found in the absence of struggle, pain, or loss, but in the willingness to pull yourself up from your proverbial bootstraps and confront it head-on. It is to reorder yourself in this new life and carry this undeniably heavy weight. No
This is not superficial advice. We have, as humans, a remarkable and at times dangerous capacity to adapt, not just to suffering but also to blessing. What is good quickly becomes invisible. What was once miraculous becomes ordinary. What you prayed for and received is no longer a blessing but another mundane day. This is what psychologists call hedonic adaptation: our tendency to normalize goodness until we no longer recognize it as goodness at all. If this is left unattended and allowed to fester and grow in yourself, you begin to see life as nothing other than lemons because the sugar never registers.
Things fall apart, check engine lights come on, job loss happens, plans fail, people leave, bodies decay, the phone rings late at night, kids grow up too quickly. What you love most is vulnerable to loss. You can allow this to harden you or give you a whole new sense of love for the sugar life can bring. This is not a passive experience. It is an act of God. It is to taste the sourest lemons and make something resembling lemonade. This is not optimism for optimism’s sake, but a deliberate and determined act of reorientation. This is not something you can do alone; it is by bringing, however painful it might be, what is bitter before God and trusting that even what wounds you now is not outside of His reach. If you lose sight of the sugar, then suffering collapses into chaos, and chaos eventually spreads outward. Why? Because, hurting people hurt people.
This is an important factor that will, if you let it, change your perspective of the lemons you have received. It is that sugar is not just something ahead of you, something waiting in the future that you hope to taste one day. No, when you allow lemons to change your meaning without changing your perspective, you are given a gift. That gift is realizing that the sugar is just as much behind you as it is before you.
It is the life you have already lived, the quiet evidence that goodness has already existed. Moments that passed through your hands so ordinary you barely noticed them at the time, but in memory bring you more joy and sugar than you could have imagined.
It is the stories of laughter that come easily. The songs you sang at family dinners or dance parties in your living room. Getting lost in the streets of Rome without too much care in the world. The happy years of marriage. The sugar is the food you used to be able to eat before you became too sick, or a child who accidentally stepped in a Thanksgiving dish on your way to dinner. When your little one, who is not so little, asked to be held. Friends who were there for you in your time of need. The love you once had for a spouse, the sandwiches your mom used to make, or the day your dad used to call to ask who he loved the most. Or just enjoying the final cup of coffee the day before the world crumbled around you. Mundane days that never announced themselves as sacred, but in retrospect were.
That is the strange and tragic beauty of life: you often recognize the sweetness not in the moment, but after it has passed. Nobody tells you you are in the good old days; you only know when you’ve left them. That realization can either trap you in what is gone or teach you how to carry it forward.
Because now the task at hand is not simply to notice the sugar when it arrives. It is to remember it, to bring it forth in such a way that memory itself becomes nourishment rather than regret. Memory, when rightly oriented, when placed in the hands of God, is not merely a record of loss. It is a way of tasting sugar again when, in the present, there may not be any to find.
You see this most clearly in grief.
When someone you love dies, bitterness is undeniable. There is nothing you can do to remove the weight of grief or to fill the hole of loss. It is one of the sourest lemons you will ever be handed. The shared moments, the fragments of a life that intersected with yours in a way that cannot be undone or duplicated. You, of all the people in the world, of all the people in existence, had the pleasure of knowing this person. Now they are gone. What remains, what you are left holding, are stories and memories. And they hurt because they mattered.
Here is the paradox: those memories wound you and sustain you simultaneously. But those memories also redeem the pain because they testify to the fact that something good, something sweet, truly existed.
You don't just mourn the loss; you remember the presence.
In doing so, something miraculous happens. You re-enter those moments, however briefly they may be. You feel them again, not in their pure presence, but enough to recognize they were real, that they shaped you, that they still live within you. The sweetness is not erased by the ending. In many ways, it is intensified by it. It is like tasting sugar again after the lemons have been squeezed dry.
So the sugar is not only what you hope for, but what has already happened. It reframes suffering entirely.
Because now, even when everything falls apart, and it will, you are not left empty. You are left with something to remember and a story to tell. And storytelling isn't trivial. It is one of the primary ways human beings have brought order to chaos since we have been able to communicate with each other. When you tell a story of what once was with honesty, not distorting it, you are refusing to allow your memories to become sour. Instead, you are saying there is sugar.
You are saying: I would do it all again, even knowing the pain, because I knew your laughter.
You are saying: The risk was worth it.
You are saying: This life, with all of its fractures and complexities, contained something worth keeping.
If you can do that, if you can hold that past not as a graveyard of what is gone, but as a reserve of what has been, then suffering cannot defeat you. It refines you. It changes you. And in the end, you come to realize something almost offensive in its simplicity, and yet undeniable in its truth.
The sugar justifies the lemon.
Memories are sweet, but they cannot replace the present and the future. Memories cannot be your home. We are not built to live in the past because we cannot retreat into what cannot be recovered. But you also cannot discard it because it holds immeasurable value. The discipline is to remember it rightly, to let it inform you without letting it imprison you, to allow the sugar of the past to strengthen you to move forward with hope and expectancy into the future.
Your present suffering does not have the final word. Pain is real, and it has to be confronted, but it is not ultimate. There is something here, even now, that can be built, that can be chosen, that can be appreciated. Sometimes the sugar in the present is not overwhelming joy, but something quieter: a moment of peace, a friend sitting beside you, a spouse reaching for your hand, waking up in the morning to your older child in your bed because they had a bad dream and needed you for comfort. Sugar in the present is often quiet, but it is still there.
If you can learn to see that, if you can train yourself not to ignore bitterness but also not to be blinded by it, then something shifts. You become capable of holding two truths at once: that life is difficult, and that life is still good. That suffering is unavoidable, but meaning is still available.
From there, hope becomes possible again. Not a naive hope that denies reality, but a guarded one, rooted in understanding that if God allowed sugar to exist in your past, He can and will allow it to exist in your future.. There are still moments ahead of you that will be worth remembering and stories worth telling.
And this is where it ties all together.
The lemons are inevitable. But the sugar is not an illusion. It is not a trick of perception or a temporary distraction. It is real, present, remembered, and still to come.
Your responsibility then is to hold all three in proper order:
1. To remember the sugar of the past without living there.
2. To endure the difficulties of the present without being dominated by them.
3. To move toward the future with the quiet and steadfast conviction that sugar is still to be found.
Because when you do that, when you refuse to forget the sugar even as you taste the lemons, you do something remarkable.
You justify the lemons with the sugar.
Not because it was easy. Not because it was fair.
But because, in the midst of it all, you found something worth living for again.
That is courage, that is faith, and maybe that is what it truly means to taste sugar while living among lemons.
Because lemons are not going anywhere.
Neither is sugar.
