Living Well…
Jul 30th, 2009 by ljkim
A little bit of salt on your eggs tastes good, so how about a LOT of salt? A little bit of fresh ground pepper is nice, so how about a pound of pepper on your steak? Of course no one does that with food but we might do that with other things… The reality is that even a little too much salt really can ruin a nice meal. This is why, for people with more sophisticated pallets than me, cooking is an art. Imagine trying to explain to someone with a poor sense of taste why “this” much is perfect and “that” much is too much. He’d think you were making arbitrary rules. He’d accuse you of being stingy with salt, or worse, being anti-salt, a salt hater. He’d argue that the after effects of too much salt were one of the benefits of saltiness. When you weren’t around he’d tell his friends about how regressive you are with your salt, as though it were still the precious commodity people sailed the world for… But all you were trying to do is show him what tastes good.
Living well is an art that requires taste. Something that’s good in one scenario and in one amount can be awful in another. Like Tabasco sauce on ice cream, just because they’re good doesn’t mean they belong together. And when it comes to living, we’re not very good cooks. The people who can get anything they want (I’m talking about us here) tend to choose everything they want, or as much of it, as much of the time they can get it. Then we wonder why life doesn’t taste better.
The Bible’s word for living-well is “holiness.” The idea is to live well emotionally, socially, to have fun, to do good, to think and feel deeply, to love honestly, to laugh and cry and have everything you need. Just the way you don’t need warehouses full of salt in order to be a good chef, you don’t need trust funds full of money or fame or power or leisure…you just need the right amount. And chances are you have what you need already in your cupboard (or you can ask a neighbor) you just need to cook it up.
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Great and thought-provoking analogy…