I’m trying to be a little more honest and vulnerable here so I think that I need to confess something to everyone. This is something I’ve struggled with my entire life and I am sick of hiding. Here it goes (please don’t judge)…

I’m a picky eater.

It’s true. I eat the most boring foods and I always special order at restaurants. I eat only cheese pizza and I don’t stray too far away from vanilla ice cream. I don’t eat candy bars. I don’t use condiments. I avoid fish at all costs. I don’t put syrup on my pancakes and I don’t butter my bread. I am convinced that this condition goes beyond pickyness and into something more like a psychological condition.

I have a video of me when I was about a year old. My grandmother is feeding me tiny pieces of a biscuit. As she gives me a piece she says (in a great grandmother voice), “Oh, Micheal. We’ll put some jelly on that and it will be so so good!” My mom tells her that she has tried to put jelly and butter on biscuits for me before but that I wouldn’t eat them. To this day, I cannot tell you the last time I ate a biscuit with jelly on it.

You can also add salt to the list of things I don’t put on food. Obviously, I eat food that has salt in it. I just don’t reach across the table for the salt shaker. I just never add salt to anything.

Maybe that’s is why I have always found Jesus call to be “salt of the earth” a bit confusing and disconcerting.

Like Alan’s comment from the last post, I too have always been taught the old “salt is a preservative schpeel”. However, that explanation has always left me wanting.

A key tenet of hermeneutics is that an interpretation should match up with the whole of scripture. I just cannot find a commandment or a teaching that calls Christ-followers to preserve the world around them. Let’s be honest, I would be out of a job and there would be no youth ministry if I were to challenge students to stay where they are in their faith.

I think we can do better than that. I think we owe it to the world to do better than that.

Salt does more than act as a preservative. It adds more than flavor.

Salt transforms whatever it touches.

Tomorrow: Moving from Checklist to Transformation