Never Lose Your Savor

"Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men." (Matthew 5:13). This life is meant to be savored and enjoyed. It is meant to delight and deeply move us. If we have allowed our life to lose its savor, then what good is it? When we take a bite out of our cinnamon toast, do we ever pause to consider that for the amount of cinnamon we just ate, kings hundreds of years ago would have paid fortunes and waited months for caravans to make journeys of thousands of miles through deserts and wartorn countries and pirate infested waters just to deliver a tiny amount of precious cinnamon. In 1903, the New York Times predicted that it would take between one and ten million years to develop the ability for man to fly. Nine weeks later, Wilbur and Orville Wright made the first manned fight. When we book a flight, do we spend our time angry about the fees for our bags, or wishing we had a little more leg room, or yelling when we're stuck on the tarmac for another three minutes, or do we marvel that we are flying through the air, a feat that a century ago was seen as a complete impossibility. We can buy apples and cucumbers and strawberries 365 days out of the year. We can pack everything we own into a U-Haul and drive from Boston to Portland in less than three days, but 150 years ago, pioneers traveled for months and often died trying to make the same journey. You can post an idea on social media and have people comment on it from San Diego to Buenos Aires to Johannesburg to Oslo to New Delhi to Sydney, in fact, from every single continent and every single time zone. Without even lifting a finger, you can ask Siri or Alexa or Google anything about anything and be instantly informed. We carry around in our pockets a device with more computing power than NASA had at their disposal when they put a man on the moon. Living in an imperfect world, it is so easy and natural to find and focus on all of the flaws and imperfections around us. But it takes so little effort to find and focus on all of the amazing and wonderful things around us. Pick any King or Emperor or Tsar or Pasha from history and it would be all too easy to find a dozen, a hundred, a thousand ways in which the lives of the lowliest bag boy or bricklayer or burger flipper or barista are so much better than theirs. When we have lost our ability to notice and appreciate and value and give thanks for the tender mercies and everyday miracles and little wonders, if we continue along this cynical and jaded pattern of thinking for long enough, we will inevitably come to the conclusion that our lives are good for nothing. When the salt loses its savor, it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and trodden under foot of men. God doesn't want us to cast the precious gift of life away. He paid too dear a price for it. Every time we take a moment to enjoy and relish and sincerely and honestly give thanks for something good or great or wonderful, we put the savor back in one grain of salt. We don't need to restore the savor to the entire bag of salt all at once. We can add the savor back one grain at a time, one wonderful, appreciated, savored moment at a time.