I was maybe three years old. My brother, Robert, was maybe two. Rob died when he was three because he had cystic fibrosis.
I have always been the kind of person who has to look at things and analyze them. I have to turn them over and over again in my mind before I accept them. Rob must have been the same way.
We had found a bag of lemons that day in my grandmother’s kitchen. We looked at them. They looked pretty, all small and yellow. Surely, they would fit in our small mouths. We had analyzed them in our minds. We had turned them over in our minds. Now, we would turn them over in our mouths.
Being curious, we bit into the lemons. If my face looked like Rob’s, which I’m pretty sure that it did at the time, we looked just like we had been sucking on lemons.
“Blech!” we said.
One of us decided that we needed to throw them out. We lugged them out on the back porch. We began throwing the lemons out in the yard.
Mama came looking for us and saw us throwing the lemons in the backyard.
“Why are you throwing the lemons out?” she asked.
“They’re spoiled,” I answered, throwing another one in the yard.
“Yeah,” Rob said. “They’re sour.”
To our little toddler minds, just because they tasted sour, we thought they were no good. We didn’t think that anything that tasted so sour could be good.
It’s funny how our tastes change over the years. Nowadays, whenever I go eat at O’Neal’s, my sister Abbie’s favorite restaurant (and one of mine), I have to have lemons in my iced tea. When I go to Pizza Hut, I want lemons in my Diet Pepsi. I like the bitter taste and I can even eat a lemon straight, without making a face. (It’s a secret how I do it, though.)
Have you ever found yourself in a situation that has made your life sour? Perhaps you have found yourself hanging around with the wrong people.
When I say “the wrong people,” I’m not necessarily talking about people who will ask you, or force you, into doing things that are wrong. The wrong people I am referring to may actually be good people. They may be your best friends, but they can cause you trouble if you are around them too much. Perhaps, they’re the kind of people who constantly bring you down. They’re not like Nelly Forbush in South Pacific who proudly sang the song, “I’m a Cockeyed Optimist.” You can look in Webster’s Dictionary and see their photo there when you look up the word pessimist.
I’ve got to be honest. Sure, there are times when I’ve been down and I’ve expressed my feelings to my friends. Most of my friends are kind and will take the time to listen. It’s hard, though, to tell your problems to a person who constantly tells you about their problems. They don’t want to listen to you. They are consumed with their own problems. My best advice to you if you are having a problem that has got you down is to speak to a minister or a person who you know is a Christian or a licensed counselor.
“The wrong people” can also be those who are users. They use us up and then throw us away. We feel burned time and time by them, but we keep returning to our lemons.
In John, Chapter 4, we meet a woman who kept returning to her lemons. Nothing seemed to make her happy. She’d had five husbands, and she now had one at home that wasn’t her husband.
Marriage wasn’t her problem. It was the style of life that she had chosen to live that caused her problems. She met a man that day, however, when she went to the well who would change her life forever.
Jesus sat at Jacob’s Well. The story goes like this:
He came to a city of Samaria which is called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Now Jacob's well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour.
woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, "Give Me a drink." For His disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. Then the woman of Samaria said to Him, "How is it that You, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?" For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. Jesus answered and said to her, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, "Give Me a drink,' you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water." The woman said to Him, "Sir, You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Where then do You get that living water? Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?" Jesus answered and said to her, "Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life." The woman said to Him, "Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw." She wanted the water He offered. She wanted her life to change, but there were some other things that Jesus wanted to deal with her about. He told her to go get her husband and bring the husband to her. She said that she didn’t have a husband.
Jesus told the woman He could tell that she was being truthful with Him and that He, who had never seen the woman before, knew that she had been married five times before and that she wasn’t married to her current husband.
The woman threw all of her lemons out the back door that day. Her life changed. I don’t know if she went home and kicked her man out the door, or if she went and told him about Jesus and he repented and married her. I just know that the woman’s life was never the same again.
An interesting thing about the story in John, chapter 4, is that it says that she went to the men in the city. The women there probably had their own lemons that they’d been sucking on and their faces were all perched up with disgust for this woman, because of the lifestyle she had lived. I wonder how they felt when their husbands went home, after they had gone to see Jesus at her behest. I imagine their lives were changed, also.
Have you got a problem that has caused your life to sour? Go, get a lemon, stand on your back porch, pray to God to take that problem away and just hurl that sour lemon as far as you can across the yard.
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