Just The Right Amount
Just The Right Amount
It was the awkward couple of days before Christmas Break, when the changed schedules create a bit of free time between passing periods and students choose a classroom to just hang out. I was at my desk with much to grade, seeking peace with soft-instrumental praise music playing, when this lovely girl comes into my room shouting, “Mrs. Weston, I am coming to hang out with you!” I looked at her and became captivated by the huge smile on her face and the contagious joy with which she began telling me all about her Christmas baking.
In front of me I had this very elegant-well-spoken-brilliant-7th grade-beauty from India, who is incredibly talented, giving me details on how to use just the right amount of salt to obtain just the right amount of rising in bake-goods.
I couldn’t help my mind shifting from bake-goods to people when I heard a heavenly whisper echoing, “just the right amount of salt to obtain just the right amount of rising.” The whispering continued by reminding me, "Let me tell you why you are here. You're here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth. If you lose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness?”
If it’s not just the right amount, whatever I choose to season with salt, is either going to be tasteless or disgusting and will definitely have to be thrown away! In the same way, if I don’t pour just the right amount of “GOD-Seasoning” on the people around me, my witness becomes weak and overlooked or repulsive and maybe disregarded. So how do I know what just the right amount is? I believe it is loving God's way:
“If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love…
Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best, Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.”
This kind of love, of course, is not something I can possibly give to others out of my own power nor natural tendency. I have learned... and still learning that this is not my own love to give, but rather God's love! It is the supernatural-UN-failing-UN-conditional love of Jesus, which I can not possibly give out, unless I long for it, pursue it, experience it, respond to it, and overflow with it!
