Saltness

Before anyone reads this, it will be helpful for you to understand a few things about me.  First, I'm not a scriptorian, at least not yet.  I hope to get better and do better, but right now, I'm still learning and I don't remember everything I learn.  I do love what I feel and what I learn when I do invest the time in the scriptures, though. Second, I believe that there was life before this life, and there is life after this life.  I believe we lived with our Heavenly Father as His spirit children before we came to Earth as part of our learning journey, and that the journey will continue afterward.  And third, I love words.  I enjoy poetry, I enjoy writing, I like learning about how words and sayings came to be, and I tend to notice spelling and grammatical errors or peculiarities.

So I was reading in Mark 9 a few days ago, and I noticed something I'd never seen before.  I've heard the "salt of the earth" scripture quoted many times, and the idea of "salt losing its savor" makes sense to me.  But the way it's worded in Mark 9 made me think about this in a whole new way.  Verse 50 says "Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his saltness, wherewith will ye season it? Have salt in yourselves, and have peace one with another."

Saltness?!  What an unusual way of putting it.  I started to think about how adding "ness" to the end of any word basically characterizes how it what it is.  "Superheroness" would be what makes a superhero super.  "Katie-ness" would be what makes me who I am.  And that thought stopped me and led to my next epiphany. 

So the Savior has been talking to His apostles about being better, doing better, choosing to "cut off" parts that are keeping them from their divine potential.  In Matthew 5, when He gives the sermon on the mount, He's explaining to everyone how to be their best selves, a higher and holier way.  But I never thought of this as being 100% true to the "ness" of who we ARE, not who we are right now here on Earth, but who we always have been.  If salt loses its saltness, it has ceased to be what it is.  If we each individually lose our "ness", we cease to be who we truly are, who we were destined to be, who we TRULY are and would be proud to have become.

It is such a beautiful, but perhaps not the most obvious way of telling each one of us, "Don't lose who you are.  Don't let go of the true you, who you really are and have been.  Hold onto yourself and have peace one with another." 

I just loved this whole concept.  It makes the idea of living righteously seem so much easier to me (not that it suddenly becomes easier to get my family ready for church or takes less time to study scriptures) but instead of feeling like I'm reaching for something I'm not, it feels like I'm reaching for something that I truly AM.