“When men are called unto mine everlasting gospel, and covenant with an everlasting covenant, they are accounted as the salt of the earth and the savor of men;” (D&C 101:39). It is interesting that salt is often used to represent covenants. We're all familiar with table salt, the white stuff we sprinkle on our food. But salt is actually a much broader term in physics and chemistry for any chemical compound that is made up of an assembly of positively charged and negatively charged ions that form net neutral ionic bonds. So salts are full of these positive and negative elements that nevertheless are bonded together and work in harmony with each other to establish a stable equilibrium. It makes so much sense why salt is used to represent our covenants with our Heavenly Father. Our covenants are full of positive blessings and negative consequences that are bonded together into a stable equilibrium in the salt of the covenant. There will be both positive and negative aspects of walking the covenant path, but that isn't because God wasn't clever enough to create a covenant that was all positive with no downsides. The bonds only work because the positive and negative have what the other needs. We offer up our sorrows and pains to our Savior Jesus who willingly bears that burden for us, and thus a covenant bond is formed. We suffer in His name and He blesses us for it and thus a covenant bond is formed. Positive with negative and negative with positive. I know we wish we could just be all positive all the time, but if we had too strong of a positive charge, then we would never be able to form bonds or covenants with anything, but would instead simply repel anything that came too close, including other positive things that might enrich our lives. And the same is equally true with negativity in our lives. I know that some of us find ourselves getting sucked into these black holes of negativity, but if we are just relentlessly critical and cruel to ourselves and won't accept that we have anything positive to contribute, then are high negative charge will only repel everything else around us and make it impossible for us to form any bonds. If we want to keep our covenants, then we have to find the positive in any negative situation, and embrace the negative as a necessary part of life but a part that was never meant to overshadow or chase away completely the good and the positive. Only when we find that balance can we have strong covenant bonds.
