You Are The…High Speed Internet of the Earth

From today’s reading…

Words mean different things to different people in different parts of the world, the country, and time periods.

Growing up in the South, it’s quite common to hear…

Allow me to translate.

This person has a friend named Boudreaux and he is telling his friend that he is running an errand to a convenience store or a grocery store and is asking him if he would like a soda, a pop, a sugary carbonated beverage.

When Boudreaux affirms that he would like such a drink, his friend asks him to confirm the exact brand.

You see, in the South, asking someone if they’d like “a coke” is like asking someone if they’d like “a beer.”

But in other parts of the country, if I asked “Hey, would you like a coke?” and you said “Yes,” you’d expect me to pick up a Coca-Cola® for you. Not a Sprite® or a Dr. Pepper® or anything else.

If we have this type of confusion about a readily available item found in abundance in one country where we all speak the same language, how much more confusing might it be analyze what someone said in another language, in another country, 2,000 years ago, and it was then translated into another language before it was translated into ours?

And even if we know what the word is, do we know its full meaning? Its significance?

It’s like the Southern phrase, 

The speaker could be expressing sympathy for the grandfather of a dear friend who slipped and broke his hip or they could be calling the kid pushing on the door that says “Pull” dumber than a box of rocks.

Same words. Drastically different meanings.

Context and delivery and knowledge of the culture is everything.

Do you understand the value of salt in the Middle East—or even the world—2,000 years ago?

There was no electricity or central heating. There was no refrigeration or deep freezers or vacuum sealing of food. Firewood was tough to come by in the arid region around Jerusalem. There were no paved roads, no freight trains, no FedEx or Amazon or Uber Eats or Cordon bleu chefs to deliver heating blankets or hot meals or firewood at a moment’s notice.

So salt was used to make up for all that was lacking.

It could preserve meat, which meant you could live! It gave flavor to otherwise bland food. It could be used to extend the life of a fire, which also meant you could live. And it could be used in place of money for bartering.

But unlike high-speed wireless connectivity, which is so abundant it’s literally free almost everywhere you go, salt had to be mined under hazardous conditions, harvested from salt flats and transported hundreds of miles across the deserts and mountains under threat of constant attack, or laboriously collected from evaporated seawater.

Heck, the word salary comes from the Latin word salarium, which has the word salt as its root. In ancient Rome, salarium was the amount of money given to Roman soldiers to buy salt. That’s how rare and precious salt was.

So imagine if someone said, 

You’d feel pretty good about yourself, wouldn’t you?

Jesus said this to a large crowd of disciples—not just the Apostles—who had gathered. He went up a mountain a bit, probably so He could be heard, and told them this right after He taught them the Beatitudes.

So this is an important concept you need to internalize. You bring warmth and flavor and nourishment and life to all you meet, as long as you…

Stay the course. Keep the faith. Endure.

Now go sell something.