Finding Your Inner-Salt

I finally succumbed and purchased the best-selling book The History of Salt by Mark Kurlansky. I’d talked myself out of buying it for a couple of years but I found a discounted paperback copy and quickly began reading it. I’m fascinated by how a writer can take a seemingly mundane subject and turn it into a million-seller book. If George Clooney could play a pile of salt the movie rights would be up for grabs right now. The actual book, setting aside all professional jealousy, is a masterpiece. Salt was gold for more years than gold has been gold, if you get my drift. Salt literally ran the world for thousands and thousands of years.


Did you know that Egyptians used salt to make mummies (I think they used bodies primarily but salted them down really well)? Or, that salt was to the ancient Hebrews, and still is to modern Jews, the symbol of the eternal nature of God’s covenant with Israel? Did you know that for eon’s loyalties and friendships were sealed with salt because its essence does not change? (Even dissolved into liquid salt can be evaporated back into crystals). Roman soldiers were often paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression being worth your salt. The Latin word sal (salt) became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier. This is one literary lesson you should take with more than a grain of salt!

 The New Testament instructs us to be salt and light to our world. One of salts greatest early values was to preserve food. Another value was as a seasoning, something we continue to use today. It is the seasoning aspect we should translate into our daily faith lives to be true to scripture. We are told to live lives that demonstrate and provide an example that is different from the norm around us. We are to season life with holiness and positives that other people will want to have in their own lives. Something as mundane as salt can still transform the world.
 
Michael McCullar