Have you ever had to leave everything you own, everything you've worked for, everything that you knew?  Some of you have!  I can't imagine how difficult it must have been for Lot and his family to pick up and leave.  Their lives must have been comfortable, like a well-worn shoe.  Of course they lingered?I would.  I would have been right there beside Lot's wife, looking back!
      As I contemplate this passage, I recognize that although I haven't had to flee my physical home, I have had to leave some of my past life.  If I had stayed, I would have been 'consumed' just as Sodom was consumed.  The situations and experiences of that past life kept me from the relationship with God that both of us desire . . . But, boy howdy, was it comfortable!
     I wonder, however, if sometimes I continue to look back and am, consequently, turned into a pillar of salt.  Salt is useful and useable as a commodity, but it certainly has no life of its own.  It cannot move either backward or forward.  When I look backward, I cannot look forward.  My relationship with God becomes stagnant.  (We know that another name for the Salt Sea is the Dead Sea!)  When I look backward, I cannot see the freedom of God's kingdom before me.  I can only recognize the comforts of my past, my own designed life, my own knickknacks.
      The angels' command to not "look back, or to stop anywhere in the Plain," was a command to look to the heights, toward God?the creator and provider of our lives.  When we refuse to look forward, are we relegating ourselves to the salt shaker? . . . I wonder. . .
                                                                Grace & Peace,   Pastor Anne