We’ve all heard the phrase “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade” and it basically means that when bad things happen try to find the good or the lesson in the situation and learn and grow from it or simply make the best of a bad situation. While this is a good mantra to remember from time to time, life doesn’t always happen this way. Sometimes life can beat us up so bad to the point where we don’t feel like making lemonade or trying to discover and understand the lesson behind it all. Sometimes we want to just sit with the bad and not work through it because working through the bad times can be hard. Sometimes lemonade may not be the answer! And sometimes we don’t really care enough to do anything with the lemons. So when life gives you lemons, do what you want with them! You don’t have to make lemonade. If you want to give yourself time to cry, grieve, be angry, be sad, do just that! Or if you want to give yourself permission to not care or do anything, do that! Sometimes there’s too much pressure to get over a situation or to turn a bad situation into a good one and not enough focus on the heart which includes healing, processing and just doing what you feel is best for you. Every bad situation we encounter doesn’t need to be quickly turned into something good or we don’t need to quickly look for the lesson. Why can’t a situation just be bad and we deal with it or not?

When life gives you lemons…

You can make lemonade if you want

Sometimes trying to make the best out of a bad situation or finding the good is a great way to keep yourself from being stressed or anxious. For example, when I travel I almost always experience some type of delay, I even missed my flight on a recent business trip. Instead of being upset that my plans were changed, which I was initially, I chose to look at the situation as a blessing in disguise, took advantage of the extra time I had at home to catch up on sleep and looked at it as possibly God’s protection from something. So, in that case I decided to turn that lemon into some lemonade. I definitely think it’s a case by case thing, don’t you?!

You can let those lemons sit until you decide what you want to do with them

You really don’t have to do anything right away. You can take time to process the difficult times. For instance, a breakup or the death of a loved one. You may not mentally or emotionally be in a place to think happy thoughts and that’s okay. You may and do need time to process, sort through your feelings, pray and may even need to seek profession help to process and deal with the pain. You can take time to decide what you want to do with those lemons and how you’re going to choose to learn and grow from the situation. Depending on the situation you are going through, it may take some time before you do anything with those lemons.

You can make something else

You may choose to cut up those lemons and put them in some sweet tea or grab some strawberries and make strawberry lemonade. It’s kind of like when you trip but you play it off and twerk as if that what you meant to do. You may mess up on something and others may not even know you messed up, but you work that thing out as if you meant to do it! It could be decorations, your hair, your outfit, when you mess up just turn that thing into the new thing and rock it out! No one will ever know 😉

You can toss ’em because you don’t even like lemonade

You can choose to not even deal with the lemons because you really don’t like lemons or lemonade. Say for instance someone comes to you with some drama, maybe something someone said about you or just some straight foolishness, why deal with it when you don’t have to?! You don’t like drama or negativity so don’t even bother.