A Pillar of Salt

“Then God rained brimstone and fire down on Sodom and Gomorrah … - and destroyed these cities and the entire plain and everyone who lived in the cities and everything that grew from the ground. But Lot's wife looked back and turned into a pillar of salt.” [Genesis 19:24-26 - The Message Bible]

I”m sure we have all heard this story the follows Abraham’s bargaining with God that he not destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah if only 10 decent people can be found within them. Lot’s wife was one of the lucky ones that the angels saved when 10 decent men couldn’t be found. She has always been portrayed as someone who didn't follow the directive from God and so was punished by being turned into a pillar of salt.

Whenever I take the time to reflect on some of these ancient stories, I wonder just why they have been passed down for over three centuries. What is it about a particular story that has earned it a place throughout all this time? What lesson is it telling that the ancients felt was so important? Why does it have the staying power it does? Stories like Noah's ark, David and Goliath, Joseph's amazing technicolour coat, the talking serpent in the Garden of Eden, Esau selling his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of pottage, all have a lesson to teach us.

God no longer has to destroy cities by raining fire and brimstones down on them. We do a very good job of that ourselves with our weapons of mass destruction.'Mrs. Lot' being turned into a pillar of salt can speak to us today on another level. What strikes me about this story isn't that it resulted from her unbelief, but rather from her turning back!

So is that the message of this story? What if that story is that we must never look back… Often when we reach a new plateau of maturity, we find it is an uncomfortable place to be, filled with questions without answers, with new challenges, with unknown boundaries. We think fondly of the place we have just left where we were familiar with what was expected of us and we yearn for that feeling of familiarity. But if we give into temptation and turn back to the known, to the previous state of maturity, we will become ‘a pillar of salt’. That will be the end of our growing into a more mature person.

As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said: “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions”

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