Happy New years to you!
We just made it through a big Holiday season and some of us may still be celebrating or still recovering?! I thought it might be good to share some biblical advice to help us continue to navigate difficult conversations or situations with our family and coworkers. I wanted to suggest that we add some salt to our conversations and interactions with others. I'm not suggesting that we be “Salty”, but did you know that adding salt to our speech is actually biblical advice?
Tensions can run high if we have differing opinions and views with those we find ourselves spending any amount of time with. This definitely includes our friends, family, and our co-workers. Knowing we have barely anything in common with these people can leave us feeling a sense of dread whenever we try to find the right reply or topic to discuss. It could be our cousins we see once a year, or our Aunt whose always cornering us to gossip about the family who hasn't arrived yet. You may like different sport teams or have conflicting
political views than your step dad and that always has the potential to trigger someone within ear shot.
Have you ever felt like dropping out of a conversation or a situation you felt was going nowhere good? I feel like many of us have at one point or another and for many different reasons. Some of us are more prone to flight instead of fight. Some people appear to be wired to enjoy debating with others while some of us have learned to hop off the conversation wagon before it takes a nose dive off a cliff for the greater good of all involved.
A lot of what determines how we handle and cope with certain situations depends on where we are at in life, in that moment, and also where we have been. Whichever cause or reaction you might feel fits you, one thing is sure, and that is that the bible says in Colossians 4:6 to “Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.”
Salt? Why Salt you ask? ( I assume you wondered because I did!) Salt has so many awesome uses. Salt not only helps improve the taste of bland foods but it also preserves food from rotting! I thought it was pretty cool that Collossians 4:6 tells us to make sure our speech is full of grace and seasoned with salt because what we say and how we say it is very important when preserving relationships and warding off rotten conversations. So, wherever we find our conversations going as we venture further into 2020, I think we definitely want to make sure we keep the salt handy!!