I've read somewhere about how salt of the earth refers to salt added into the manure (fuel) to enable the fire to last longer. Now I'm beginning to see a glimpse of what He meant. You get rubbed in all the wrong places, you get in with the seemingly undesirable. It stinks and it usually hurts.

I'm tired.

For the past week I have been listening to someone so adamant against love, hope and change, it's draining. I also read that sometimes you live to change the world and sometimes you have to live to keep the world from changing you.

Some things are simply beyond me and my heart is allowed to ache and break. So I'm beginning to see the cracks. Common sense tells me to seal up the cracks with putty or superglue, but these cracks are good. Water leaks from a crack, light breaks into darkness and grass pierces concrete.

As cracks are good here, salt is good for the dung. Even when they don't know what gives the fire its flame, meals get cooked, people are fed and kept warm.

Today I left the office early and went for a walk with my camera. I didn’t have to walk for long, but walks are good when you have nowhere particular to go and no appointment waiting.

So I spotted an old couple with their beat-up VW Beetle. They looked sweet together... he was wearing one of the thickest black rimmed glasses I have ever seen and her nails were stained with chipped pink polish. Way fashionable for their age. She told me in a hush voice of how her husband absent-mindedly left the headlights on and now their battery is dead flat.

“He and that damned car.”

Her husband was busying himself with a spanner, trying to get the battery out from the bottom of the back seat like it weighed an ocean. I know nuts about cars, but gave the thing a go anyway. It’s not everyday that I get myself greased.

Then she asked, “What is your religion?” A little taken aback, I told her that I believed in Jesus.

“No wonder. I guessed it... Jesus’ followers like helping people.”

I felt my perspective shifted and put into place like tectonic plates from a graphical diagram in the National Geographic, sending little quivers and quakes down my spine but expressed outwardly in goose bumps and a smile. Unexpectedly humbling. We went on to talk about faith and her weekend date with her girlfriends.

The heavily salt-crusted battery was soon dislodged and we waved goodbye. I watched them as they walked home together with the car battery in a trolley. Cutest couple ever.

How lost, how amazed, how miraculous we are.