It has been wisely suggested that when life hands you a basket of lemons just make lemonade. Lemons are not a citrus I prefer to snack on regularly, but when they are squeezed, sweetened, and diluted into lemonade they take on a new nature -- those sour lemons are transformed into a refreshing treat!

I suppose most of us at one time or another have felt like life has awarded us a great big basket of the most sour lemons imaginable. Without a doubt, life has its ups and downs, but hopefully we are learning that by trusting God we can make it. A good Biblical account of this is found in II Kings 7. It is the story of four men who took their lemons of life and made them into some mighty fine lemonade.

II Kings 7:3-4 says, "Now there were four men with leprosy at the entrance of the city gate. They said to each other, "Why stay here until we die? If we say, 'We'll go into the city'--the famine is there, and we will die. And if we stay here, we will die. So let's go over to the camp of the Arameans and surrender. If they spare us, we live; if they kill us, then we die" (NIV).

These four gentlemen were in about as bad a situation as in about as bad a situation as

they could have: there was famine in the city of Samaria so severe that the people were turning to cannibalism for survival, and they were stricken with a horrible disease that made them outcasts. When a person is not even welcome in a city overtaken by famine, there is little hope! But these four refused to give up and die. They acknowledged that life had given them lemons, but they still looked for a way to make lemonade!

There was both a preventable and an unpreventable element in the difficulty that prevailed in this story. The preventable part had to do with the cause of the famine. Because the people in Samaria refused to repent, God allowed the Arameans to lay siege against the city, thus resulting in famine. This could have been avoided if they had simply followed and obeyed God. The unpreventable element was the condition of the four lepers. They neither asked for nor caused their physical condition, but they still suffered the consequences of it.

Those two things are essential for us to consider when life deals us a tough blow. When adversity comes,

the first thing we can do is the first thing we can do is

allow God to search our heart allow God to search our heart

to see if God is trying to get to see if God is trying to get

our attention to let us know our attention to let us know

that there is an area that He is displeased with. The obvious answer is to allow Him to forgive and correct us where we have failed. But when we have sincerely and diligently sought to follow Him and troubles come anyway, we must assume that He has a higher purpose for allowing us to walk through hardship. It is then that we must trust Him fervently, allowing Him to teach us and use us to accomplish His will. Above all, we must not give up and lay down to die.

The lepers in II Kings 7 did not allow their circumstances to dictate the outcome; neither should we. Read the rest of the story--it comes to an uplifting conclusion; they turned their lemons into lemonade. With God's help, you can, too!