Feeling a Little Salty?
June 17, 2026
My grandma Frieda — the one whose house I live in — was an amazing baker.
She was the kind of country kitchen baker who didn’t bother with measuring cups, but made majestically towering meringue pies nestled atop impossibly flaky pie crusts.
As a child, there was no better place to spend the day than in her kitchen watching her work her magic. I loved everything about it — the sugar, the fruit or cream fillings of pies made from scratch. I especially loved sneaking little tastes whenever I could.
Thinking back, I remember being puzzled by the salt. Why put salt into something that was supposed to be sweet?
How goofy! If the goal was pie, why not just add more of the good stuff?
But Grandma understood something I didn’t. The recipe isn’t judged by a single ingredient, but by how the pie turns out.
More Than One Ingredient
Lives are a lot like recipes, and one of the great temptations of being human is believing our worst moments tell the whole truth about us.
The stupid mistake. The avoidable failure. The season of grief or the days of despair. The chapters we’d rather not revisit, but that show up all too often in the form of recrimination and second guesses.
We taste that one bitter ingredient and leap to the conclusion that we know the flavor of the entire pie. But lives, like recipes, are more complicated than that.
No baker worth her salt would judge a pie just by a spoonful of…well…salt! And yet, how many of us judge ourselves by a single difficult day?
The Salty and the Sweet
When I look back across the years, I can see both.
The sweet moments are easy (and lots more fun!) to identify: friendships, successes, and celebrations. The memories that still make me smile years later.
But there have been salty moments, too. Broken promises, losses, and all the mistakes. Dreams that didn’t unfold the way I imagined, and the seasons when everything seemed a jumbled mess.
I wouldn’t have chosen those ingredients, and given the opportunity, I know for a fact, I probably would have left most of them out.
But life doesn’t work that way. The recipe comes with both sweet and salty.
And somehow, over time, those ingredients become part of a larger story.
That’s is one of the reasons I appreciate Ordinary Time. Because Ordinary Time gives us enough days to become more than any one single moment. Enough days to find the proper proportions for sweet and salty.
Those dramatic moments in life matter! Christmas and Easter. Birthdays and anniversaries and life milestones matter.
But growth rarely happens during the event itself.
Growth happens in the days leading up and in the days afterward — in the ordinary days. The repetition. The showing up. The small, deliberate choices made over and over again.
Looking at the Whole Pie
A pie doesn’t become a pie because I’ve got the ingredients on the shelves in my pantry.
Instead, the ingredients get thrown together in bowls. Fruit gets cut up, diced, and smooshed. Milk and eggs are heated almost to the point of boiling. Butter, salt, and flour get pulverized, sprinkled with water, and rolled thin.
And so do we.
Maybe that’s why perspective becomes such a gift as we grow older?
We have that Ordinary Time to see more of the recipe. To resist evaluating ourselves based on a single bad day. To stop rest on the laurels of one exciting triumph. We learn one disappointment doesn’t tell the whole story, but neither does one success.
Truth be told, none of us are one ingredient pies. We are the whole recipe, all of it mixed together into something larger than any one ingredient could ever become on its own.
A Question and an Invitation
A Question: What ingredient are you allowing to define your story right now? A regret? A fear? A mistake? The grind that seems endless? Or the lightening you’re once again trying to catch in a bottle?
An Invitation: This week, step back and look at the whole pie, and pay special attention to those ordinary days. Let the fact that they don’t stand out be the thing that really makes them stand out!
Remember that no recipe is judged only by a dash of salt and no life should be defined by a single difficult season.
The truth of who we are is found not in any single ingredient, but in the whole recipe.
With you in the growing,
