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Your Minister's Musings . . . 
But [Lot] lingered; so the angels seized him and his wife and his two daughters . . . And they brought him out and left him outside the city. When they had brought them outside, they said, "Flee for your life; do not look back or stop anywhere in the Plain. . . ." but Lot's wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt. Genesis 19:16-17, 26
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
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