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8. When life gives you lemons . . . use as an all-natural, organic astringent Dealing with the problem of pain from proposed book, When Life Gives You Lemons . . . sell 'em on eBay © James N. Watkins Pop quiz! Take out a clean sheet of paper and a pencil for this multiple-choice test.
1. Which of these fruits has more vitamin C:
2. A single lemon tree can produce how many lemons per year:
3. A lemon will yield twice as much juice if you
4. Putting salt on a lemon half
a) Takes away the sour taste
5. Ancient cultures used lemons to
a) Poison their enemy’s water supply Okay, exchange with your neighbor to grade your papers. B is the answer for all the questions. Yep, putting salt on a lemon half cleans the lime build up right off sinks and faucets, as well as shining copper bottom pans. And, ancient Avon ladies were offering as a monthly special, lemons to lighten, exfoliate, and tone skin. (Guys, I had to look it up. "Exfoliate" is to scrub off dead and dry skin. And "astringent" is a facial cleaner.) In fact, Patty Moosbrugger has written a book, Lemon Magic: 200 Beauty and Household Uses for Lemons and Lemon Juice. The lowly lemon is an awfully amazing little fruit. And, the lemon of pain in our lives also produces some amazing results.. Now, before we go on, let the record show, I do not like pain. Instead of "No pain, no gain," my philosophy is "No pain, no ow-ies."
And I’d really rather listen to that TV evangelist with the comb-over hair who
is always casting out "foul spirits" of asthma, blindness (but not baldness),
cancer, diabetes, eczema, and the rest of the anatomical alphabet, than author
Henri Nouwen who writes:
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt." "Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?" "It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said
it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only
smiled. Pain then, Yancey argues, is a gift from God. Without it, we wouldn’t have clue we were sitting on a hot stove or a rat was gnawing on our leg until severe damage had been inflicted. I received such a "gift" several years ago. I had just settled into my warm waterbed after a long day, when suddenly it felt as if a semi tractor-trailer with snow chains and a load of rolled steel park on my lower back put life into perspective
As my wife drove me to the hospital, I tried Lamaze breathing as I dug my
fingernails into the van’s armrests. All the focusing on the hood ornament and
the pattern-pant breathing of "Hee, hee, hee, ho" we had learned in childbirth
classes were summed up in a limerick I had written after the birth of our first
child:
Finally, the ER staff, which must have been on a union-guaranteed break, returned and announced that I had a kidney stone. And every woman I’ve talked to who has had a baby and a kidney stone, would choose forty-eight hours of back labor over a kidney stone. While tapping away at my IV pump’s game-show-type clicker ("I’ll take PAIN KILLERS for 1,000 cc, Alex"), I began to appreciate morphine-like -and pain. My kidney would have failed within a few days if God hadn’t put half of our pain and pleasure receptors in our plumbing. Normally, it takes arterial bleeding or a compound fracture to send me to the doctor, but within half an hour, I was out of our warm bed, out into the November cold night, dashing through the snow, and peeing into a paper cup at the ER. And since I was tethered to an IV pole, I had a lot of time to think and journal about pain. I still don’t like it, but straight lemon juice, it’s good for me. Pain produces perspective Although I had a deadline for my weekly newspaper column that next day and was finishing up a book (I had nearly all the pages colored), those things were suddenly at the bottom of my "To Do" list. It wasn’t even important that I was unshaved, un-showered, and wearing my grubbiest sweats when I stumbled into the ER. And though, I’m the type who always locks the bathroom door--even when no one is home--I checked my modesty at the hospital's front desk. After three surgeries in three hospitals in two months, doctors were finally able to pry the stubborn stone loose. The experience provided a whole new way of looking at life. Every morning that I don’t wake up in a hospital bed is a great day. Every day I can avoid stitches, IV needles, or the dry heaves is terrific. And after having "Delhi Belly" in India (you don’t want to know the details, trust me), just living in a country where you can drink the water and breathe the air is wonderful! In fact, here are top ten things for which you can be thankful right where you are. Even if you’re reading this in an Intensive Care Unit or the back seat of a Bombay taxi. 10. You have a book in your hand (or someone is reading it to you). Thanks to Guttenberg's press and the World Wide Web you have access to more information today than all previous generations combined. 9. You live in a country that either a) allows freedom of the press, b) at least allows access to my ramblings in print or online, or c) hasn't arrested you yet for reading this book. 8. You can read this book. According to UNICEF, 885 million people in this world can't read. That's nearly one in six of every person on the planet. 7. You can comprehend this book. Okay, maybe not a good example when it comes to my writing, but you have a brain that can translate black ink spots on white paper (or pixels on a computer screen) into a coherent message. Again, this book may not be the best example of coherency, but you get the point -- and for that, you can be thankful. 6. You can see this book. Worldwide 45 million people are blind and 135 million people have low vision (World Health Organization). If you're legally blind, you can be grateful that someone is reading this book to you, that it’s on audio cassette, or that you have one of those high-tech scanners that reads for you. 5. You're conscious. Again, perhaps a bad example, but before you started reading this book, you had the mental and physical ability to pick up this book, open the cover, and get to this point of the chapter before nodding off. 4. You're breathing and your heart is beating. Yep, 99.9999 percent of you are breathing and beating without assistance of any kind of extraordinary medical procedure. Even if you're reading this hooked up to a ventilator and IVs, you can be thankful for the medical advancements that allow you to do just that. 3. You're reading this book at this point in history. My friend and fellow columnist, Michael Fraley, reminds us, "As attractive as the TV show 'Little House on the Prairie' made pioneer life, the truth is that life was hard and often short. People died because of diseases that we no longer worry about. Women couldn't vote. People of color were separate and definitely not equal. Etc. etc. . . ." 2. You are appreciated! Thank you for buying this book. And even if you borrowed it from a friend or your library, thanks for sharing this time with me 1. You're half way through this chapter! Lemons teach us to be grateful for the many things in life we do enjoy. Pain produces perseverance The New Testament reports that St. Paul was given the power to heal the sick and raise the dead. Pretty impressive pain relief! But somehow God chose not to heal Paul’s "thorn in the flesh." Commentators and speculators suggest he was suffering from either malaria, poor vision, an especially powerful libido, or all three. Now if I were Paul, I’d be pretty discouraged. Here I am working 24/7 healing lepers and paralytics, as well as raising a few corpses now and then, and I can’t even get relief for my own pain. But Paul wrote: "Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope" (Romans 5:1-4). Helen Keller, blind and deaf, became an inspiration to millions of disabled people. Corrie TenBoom sat by her sister’s side as she died in a Nazi concentration camp, yet went on to write and speak internationally about forgiveness. Joni Erickson Tada, paralyzed from the neck down, paints watercolors, hosts a nationwide radio show, and speaks at conferences throughout the world--all from the confines of her motorized wheel chair. The most positive, loving people I know have histories of great emotional or physical pain and yet they have persevered. As my Dad used to remind me, "What doesn’t kill you, just makes you stronger."
One of the things that keeps me going besides Ibuprophen (for a pain in the
neck), Lipitor (for the cholesterol level of Jack Sprat’s wife), Claritin (for
living in the pollen capital of North America), and Prozac (for being a
freelance writer), is the assurance of Romans 8:28:
Okay, mister smarty pants author, you may be thinking. So what is God’s role in pain? Does He cause our pain much like a dentist or personal trainer does to bring a greater good? Or does He allow tragedies so He can come and pick up the bloodied pieces and make something good? I can say with the utmost confidence -- and I have a degree in theology—I don’t have a clue! I do know, however, that whether God causes, allows, or simply takes a "hands off" approach to pain, He does work it for our good. I’ve spent a lot of spiritual perspiration trying to answer the questions of "why" in my life, but I’ve come to the conclusion that’s a fruitless effort. I probably will never understand the reason why my second-grade Sunday school taught us "Happiness Is The Lord" one Sunday and committed suicide the next Saturday. Or why I was laid off from the perfect job in publishing. (Maybe so I’d have time to write this book.) And particularly, why bad things happen to such nice people as you and me. But I think God is more than willing to answer "how" we can use these tragedies to conform us into the people he desires us to be. (We’ll talk more about that in later chapters.) He has used physical pain to move me past annoyance with old people’s complaints ("Come on, Gramps, stop obsessing about your colon!), to a real empathy for anyone in pain. Yep, God even works together for good stubborn kidney stones, double-hernia surgery, flexible sigmoid exams, and central serous chorioretinopathy (which simply is a $200 an hour ophthalmologist’s term for looking at life just a bit differently than normal people). Now, I even get false labor pains whenever I visit the Maternity Ward. But more than physical pain, God has used emotional pain to make me a more loving, understanding person. When I started out in youth work during the Polyester Age, my counseling philosophy was simply, "Get over it!" Now that I’m diagnosed with clinical depression, I have much more empathy for people who I used to think didn’t have any willpower or control over their thinking processes. I might as well tell a diabetic, "You don’t need insulin, just a better attitude toward your blood-sugar level!" I don’t credit (or blame) God for any of this pain or planned obsolescence. (I’ve noticed my face is sliding off my head and collecting under my chin. If it weren’t for my belt, my chest would be around my ankles.) But I do praise Him that He has used times of physical, mental, and emotional pain to chip away at my sharp edges. And it has allowed me to provide real comfort for others losing their looks, their jobs, or their health. And so when life gives us lemons, don't ask why, but ask God how He can use them to cleanse and exfoliate us of the oily, greasy buildup in our lives.
© James N. Watkins from proposed book, When Life Gives You Lemons . . . sell 'em on eBay |
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