Personal Meditation no. 216

“Don’t lose your saltiness.”

Be the Change.

Being salty is tossed around in the vernacular these days. Folks like to equivocate saltiness with bitterness and jealousy and anger. BUT salt was once a valued commodity. It wasn’t a part of the diet of most folks. It wasn’t a source of evil. It wasn’t prevalent.

I get strange looks when I tell folks that I drink a gallon of salt water a day because they believe that I should be dead. I assure them that since I have been drinking salt water for over two years, I am quite sure it isn’t as dangerous as they believe. And that is because folks simply don’t understand that when you strip away a lot of the sugar from things they eat and drink, and there is a lot of syrup and fructose and sucrose to strip away from a western diet, the other additive that remains is some sort of preservative. And rather than using a preservative that was created in a laboratory with a seven syllable name that is hardly pronounceable, I tend to recommend using something natural like salt. Real salt is important for getting electricity to flow in your body. Like Brawndo, it’s all about the electrolytes.

BUT before salt became such a common and ordinary thing, it was important for preserving foods. If you have ever had an old ham in St. Mary’s County, you will understand the great process it takes to get that saltiness out of a cured ham that has been hanging for years. Salt is also one of those main taste centers that our brain craves. We love the salt and sweet and savory connection and companies work on hitting the right combinations of marketing those flavors to our pleasure centers in the brain. And we live in an over-salted society.

As a child of the 1980s, I remember a concerted war against table salt and salt in home kitchens. Salt was the enemy. And we have generations of folks that have abandoned home cooking, natural ingredients, and real foods for things created in a lab. We have a society that has faith that science is better than nature. I always thought that the purpose of science was to understand and help nature. BUT science has gone off the rails. And now we are living in an age where plastic is becoming part of our body BUT nature, salt, and God are the enemies?

Bless your heart. Have the day you want. I hope you find whatever you’re looking for.

#ThinkBetter #BeBetter #MyBodyMyChoice #MakeYourselfGreatAgain #BeTheChange

Personal Meditation no. 215

"Everyone chooses their level of involvement. We might share the same place BUT that does not mean we share the same space. Not everyone in the congregation is Christian."

Be the Change.

It was a busy end to the week around the plantation. My oldest daughter graduated and is off on her first vacation with her friends. The youngest son became a Webelos and we did some weekend stuff to get him more independent and ready for scouting. The youngest daughter was busy with dance recitals and my oldest son was part of the graduation ceremony and is performing this afternoon. So, a lot of moving pieces around the plantation this weekend.

Everyone needs to work on what is going to get them happiness. I can no better choose for a stranger what will make them happy than I can for a family member. I can guide and counsel and mentor BUT the choice is ultimately up to the individual. And as a person in the vocation of teaching, that seems a rather foreign concept in a system designed to make folks into more of the same. Just a bunch of folks that think and act in accordance to a set of subjective rules. And the longer I am in the system of education, the more I just shake my head and laugh. There are so many folks that just want to mold folks into those non-questioning, order-following automatons. The kind the system needs to keep on chugging along. And there is never a shortage of those folks.

I don’t know anymore. I see a system that says a lot about critical thinking and independent learners and does everything to stifle dissent and creativity. I see a system that says a lot about making choices and being an individual and does everything to mandate choice and silence voices. There is a dichotomy of hypocrisy that is out there that takes very little to uncover. I am no longer able to voice my opinion without it being shouted down because of my faith. I get to pay for bad choices BUT I can not voice my disapproval for those choices. There is a hypocrisy in freedom that this system and this society does not see as ironic. There is a society present that bullies and suppresses truth. And nothing has made that more clear than the past fourteen days.

We have all seen folks that we thought were righteous and outsiders that completely fell in line with the state. The country of Israel convinced the descendants of Israel to walk around with papers in their homeland with The Holocaust not a hundred years in their past. We have seen folks work with the state and the system to report neighbors or stand by and watch. It is all out there in the past fourteen days. All the worst things that can happen when individual governments work together to control folks. And there are all the signs that since this was rather simple the past fourteen days, then why give up on that control?

I know this is a bit all over the place this morning BUT there is a lot on my mind about the fear that is being placed into people. The fear that has them worrying about all sorts of things that are not as scary as a life without the Almighty. I see a lot of folks out there afraid of things that God promises to provide. I see a lot of folks looking for temporary solutions to eternal problems. I see a lot of children swinging blindly in rage and panic when they can have peace. When you are not healthy, you make poor choices about your health because your brain isn’t thinking well. And we are surrounded by folks that are unhealthy physically, mentally, and spiritually. And we need to live the truth for them. We need to be a guide, a beacon, a testimony to what can happen if they simply give eternal control to their temporary problems.

And for years I thought that meant being another bully about my message. BUT that isn’t the case. The world has enough bullies out there shouting and screaming and acting foolish. We are supposed to be different from that. We are supposed to be unified. We are supposed to be one. So, that doesn’t mean telling them they are wrong. That doesn’t mean telling them they are going to Hell. That doesn’t mean emphasizing the negative. This world is negative enough. We have to be the positive. We have to be the light in the darkness. We have to be the change. Because we can’t expect anyone to change if we haven’t already done the work.

I hope you find that peace in change. Embrace and be the change.

Bless your heart. Have the day you want. I hope you find whatever you’re looking for.

#ThinkBetter #BeBetter #MyBodyMyChoice #MakeYourselfGreatAgain #BeTheChange