When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.
Simple.

What if life gives you something much less pleasant than lemons? What if life gives you something you don’t feel like you can handle?
I mean, lemons aren’t that surprising, or scary. I kind of like lemons. They aren’t too hard to handle, and you can make lemonade pretty easily.
Any kind of fruit is fairly nice, actually.

But what if life gives you a venus flytrap? Or quicksand? Or an earthquake? What do you do then?
What if you get that stuff, and you never, ever expected it, never planned for it, and you’re standing in a place of uncertainty, fear, and frustration?

Life is unpredictable. It’s scary. And it’s not always going to give us lemons. Our response isn’t always an easy one. It’s often difficult, and we have this awful and yet most beautiful thing called a choice.

Jesus talked about this when He told the people around Him a story about two different men. He said one of them built his house on sand. The other, on solid rock, a good foundation.
Life is unpredictable, and in this story rains came, streams rose, and the wind blew and beat against both houses furiously.

The house that was built on the sand came down with a great crash.
Although it had a beautiful view of the ocean and was constantly surrounded by beautiful people enjoying themselves on the beach, the foundation was weak, and when life threw a curveball, the house went down.

The house built on the rock? It may not have had as beautiful of a view, and it may not have had all the pleasures as the house on the sand, but it stood tall and strong.

When life becomes unexpected and surprising, what matters is the foundation.

We will build a foundation somewhere. Our roots will go down to something. We will drop our anchor.

We have the awful and most beautiful grace to choose a good and solid foundation. We can choose to believe that building on truth and love, grace and mercy are worth far more than what others may think of our house.

One of the sure signs of the goodness of Jesus is that He promises to give us His Spirit, and from that comes good fruit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control.

I think we want life to give us those.
We can have them, we just have to build on a strong foundation.
When the unexpected winds and storms come, when the waters rise, we’ll be able to stand, and something beautiful will be in the aftermath.

Usually, a rainbow.