What I've learned, and what most people who cook and bake know, is that most everything we cook needs salt -- even the sweet stuff. Yep, you add salt to cookies and cakes and pies.
When my kids have helped me cook in the past I tell them it's a spiritual thing -- just like cooking, we need to add salt to all our conversations to make them cook right in people's hearts. Paul says it like this to the Colossians:
Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned, as it were, with salt, so that you may know how you should respond to each person.
Yet, there is an exception (or so I thought). You can ruin a perfectly good meal if you add too much salt. You can't take the salt back out after you've mixed it up. And not even a whole bunch of sugar is going to mask the salt (I've tried that). I would think about this in spiritual terms thinking that meant that if I added too much salt to a situation with another place I've doomed my relationship with that person.
Sometimes we can take these analogies too far.
It's never too late when it comes to people. Always something can be done (even after death we can at least come to peace with unfinished business).
And I found out last night that at least one type of meal can be fixed when too much salt is added (I am a slow learner). That would be soup (or stew). I made beef stew last night. It was very good, but my tongue wasn't working right when I tasted it and I added a bit too much salt. The first few bites of a helping tasted yummy, but then the salt would catch up with ya.
So I added some extra water.
And that helped. It made the stew perfect. My mistake was fixed.
It got me thinking in spiritual terms again:
If we have added too much salt in one of our relationships (like preached too much, said too much, shared the Word too much or even just somehow strained our relationship with another), maybe a bit of time and a bunch of water from the well of water (that springs) up to eternal life can fix what we messed up. That well is filled with living water (check out the story in John 4), water that should be written with a capital W. It's Water that heals, saves, protects, defends, makes life lovely and beautiful; and is absolutely free.
If you haven't gotten a cup of it, I recommend you take a trip to that well today.
Make sure you take a cup along (or maybe a bucket).