Day 21 - salt

First day of spring and the gritters are out on the roads!   Snow is forecast and the temperature has plummeted.  Typical eh?  I planted some bedding plants the other day and now they are probably all going to freeze to death.

I was driving home from Belfast last night behind the road gritter and it made me think about the verse in Matthew 5

“You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.''

No doubt Jesus was talking about the salt we put on our food and use as a preservative but last night I started thinking about the salt we throw on roads and paths in winter.  It is not refined, certainly not edible, but it is salt nonetheless and it is incredibly useful.   I just happen to live near one of the three areas in the UK which has salt deposits under the ground.  Up to two million tonnes of salt can be spread on the roads of the UK in any year - so the mines are busy carving and blasting out the rock salt all year round and stockpiling it to be used on the roads in the winter.  ( or in the spring !)  There is a depot not far from our house which stores mountains of pinky red road salt in big warehouses and its where the gritter lorries live when they are not out salting the roads.

You are the salt of the earth.

You might not feel like it, but God says you are.

Maybe you have thought about that verse and reckoned that you dont add much flavour to the world around you.  You dont seem to be able to stop the world from going rotten.  Maybe you have worried that you have lost your saltiness.  Or that you never really had much flavour in the first place.   But perhaps you arent that sort of salt!   Maybe you are the rough diamond, the rock salt, the sort which God uses to gently melt things and people which are frozen.   Maybe you are quietly going about being you , unaware of the fact that your very presence on the road is going to enable others to walk that road more safely. Without slipping up.   

Our world in these days seems to be spiritually cold, dangerous, hopeless , in need of rescue. Like Narnia when Aslan is absent it can often feel that it is ' always winter but never Christmas'.   But God is using us wherever we are and whatever we are doing , to bring about a thaw.  Because He has made you salty, just by being yourself you are affecting those around you in ways you probably dont ever see or appreciate.  This Lent why not ask God to use you to melt cold hard hearts.  To add flavour to dull, lifeless situations and to purify things which are going off.   He loves to answer prayers like that.