February: Salt — The Identity You Already Carry
Day 56 — 25 February
Still Salty After All These Years
“They will still bear fruit in old age, they will stay fresh and green.” — Psalm 92:14 (NIV)
What will you taste like when you are seventy? Will the salt you carry at thirty still be present at sixty, at seventy-five, at eighty-three, on the morning when your knees take longer to straighten and the stairs require a negotiation they never demanded in your younger years? Will the rooms you enter in the final quarter of your life still shift when you walk through the door, or will the substance that once made you consequential have quietly evaporated across the decades, leaving behind a person who occupies space pleasantly but seasons nothing?
These are questions that most people never ask in their twenties and thirties, because youth carries an illusion of permanence that makes long-term thinking feel unnecessary. When the body is strong, the mind is sharp, and the future stretches ahead like an open motorway with no visible horizon, the idea that your potency might diminish over time feels abstract, almost theoretical, the kind of concern that belongs to a later version of yourself that the present version cannot quite imagine. And yet the Psalmist wrote about precisely this concern, and the picture he painted was designed to settle the question before the anxiety ever arrived.
Psalm 92 is a song for the Sabbath day, a hymn of worship composed for the weekly rhythm of rest and reflection that marked Israel’s communal life. In verse 12, the Psalmist declared that “the righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon” (KJV), and in verse 13, he placed these flourishing trees in the house of the LORD, where they would thrive “in the courts of our God.” The imagery is botanical but the meaning is biographical: the person who is planted in the right soil and nourished by the right source will grow tall, grow strong, and produce fruit across the entire span of their life.
And then comes verse 14, the verse that refuses to let age have the final word: “They will still bear fruit in old age, they will stay fresh and green.”
The Hebrew rewards the attention it always demands. The word translated “bear fruit” is nava (נוּב, “to bear fruit,” “to produce,” “to be fruitful”), a verb that appears only in this psalm and in Proverbs 10:31, giving it a rarity that draws the reader’s eye. Nava is productive language, harvest language, the language of a tree whose branches are heavy with something the world wants to eat. The word translated “fresh” is deshen (דָּשֵׁן, “fat,” “rich,” “full of sap,” “abundantly nourished”), the same root we encountered yesterday in Proverbs 11:25 where the generous soul is made “rich” (dashen). And the word translated “green” is raanan (רַעֲנָן, “fresh,” “flourishing,” “luxuriant,” “full of life”), a word used elsewhere to describe trees in full leaf (Jeremiah 17:8), thriving and vigorous, displaying none of the brittleness or barrenness that age is expected to produce.
The Psalmist was painting a picture of a person who, in the season when the world expects decline, produces the most abundant harvest of their entire life. The branches are heavy. The sap is running. The leaves are green and full. The tree shows every sign of being in its prime, and yet it stands in the soil of old age, surrounded by other trees that long ago stopped producing and now serve only as reminders of what they once were. This tree is different. This tree is still bearing fruit. This tree is still deshen and raanan, still fat with sap and luxuriant with life, and the watching world has to adjust its expectations because this tree is doing something that the calendar insists should have ended years ago.
Does Salt Expire?
Here is the scientific fact that turns the Psalmist’s poetry into a statement of chemical truth: salt has no expiry date. Sodium chloride, stored in reasonable conditions, retains its chemical potency indefinitely. Archaeologists have recovered salt from ancient Egyptian sites, from Bronze Age storage jars in the Levant, from Roman military encampments along Hadrian’s Wall, and in every case the salt was as chemically active as the day it was sealed. The crystalline structure remained intact. The capacity to preserve, to season, and to interact with organic material was undiminished. Three thousand years in a jar had altered nothing about the substance itself. The world around it had changed beyond recognition, empires had risen and fallen, languages had been born and gone extinct, entire civilisations had migrated across the face of the earth, but the salt was still salt, as potent and as ready for service as the morning it was first harvested from the evaporation bed.
This is the truth that your salt-identity carries into the question of ageing. The substance you bear has no expiry date. The preservation you carry at twenty-five is the same preservation you carry at seventy-five. The flavour that seasons your conversations in your thirties is chemically identical to the flavour that will season your conversations in your eighties. The healing that your presence brings to wounded environments at forty will be the same healing at seventy, because the salt is the salt, and salt does not degrade with time.
What changes with age is the body that carries the salt, and the body’s changes are real and deserve to be honoured with honesty rather than dismissed with breezy reassurance. The knees stiffen. The eyesight dims. The energy that once seemed inexhaustible now requires management, rationing, and the wisdom to know which expenditures are worth the cost. These changes are genuine, and a devotional that pretends otherwise insults the reader’s intelligence and dishonours the lived experience of everyone who has crossed the threshold of middle age and discovered that the vehicle is showing signs of wear.
But the vehicle is the body. The salt is the identity. And the identity, like the substance it takes its name from, does not degrade with time. A person whose body has slowed but whose salt remains potent is like a jar that has aged and weathered on the outside while the contents inside remain as chemically active as the day they were sealed. The jar may be cracked. The label may have faded. The shelf it sits on may wobble. But open the jar and taste what is inside, and you will discover that the salt is as strong as ever, as ready to preserve, to season, and to heal as it was on the first day of February when Jesus declared over your life: you are the salt of the earth.
Consider the people in your life who embody this truth. The grandmother whose words still carry more weight in a single sentence than the entire output of a week-long conference. The retired teacher whose former students, now in their forties, still quote something she said in a Year 9 classroom three decades ago. The elderly man at the back of the church whose quiet presence during the prayer meeting carries a seasoning that the younger, louder, more energetic voices in the room cannot replicate, because his salt has been refined by decades of faithful living and the flavour it carries is deeper, richer, and more complex than anything youth can produce.
These people are the living proof of Psalm 92:14. They are still bearing fruit. They are still deshen, still raanan, still full of sap and luxuriant with life. Their bodies have slowed, their diaries have emptied, their public profiles have diminished, and yet the rooms they enter still taste different because of their presence. The salt held. The decades tested it, and it held.
This is the promise that February carries into the later chapters of your life. The identity you are exploring this month is permanent. It was placed on you before you achieved anything (Day 38), it was sealed with a covenant that has no expiry clause (Day 33), it was proven in valleys designed to test it (Day 39), and it was refined by fire that burned away everything except the genuine substance (Day 46). This identity does not retire when you do. It does not diminish when your energy diminishes. It does not lose its potency when your body loses its vigour. It remains, because salt remains, and what remains is still capable of doing everything it was created to do.
You are going to be salty for a very long time. The decades ahead of you are decades of continued fruitfulness, continued seasoning, continued preservation, and continued healing, because the substance that makes all of this possible has no expiry date and the God who placed it in you has no intention of removing it. The tree is still green. The branches are still heavy. The sap is still running. And the world still needs what you carry, whether you carry it at thirty or at ninety-three.
Stay fresh. Stay green. Stay salty. The best fruit often grows on the oldest branches.
Declaration
My salt has no expiry date. The substance I carry today is the same substance I will carry in every season that follows, because salt does not degrade with time and the identity God placed in me does not retire when my body slows. I am deshen and raanan, full of sap and luxuriant with life, and the rooms I enter in my later years will taste of my presence with the same potency they carry today. I bear fruit in every season, including the ones the world expects to be barren. My branches are heavy. My leaves are green. My salt is as chemically active as the day it was first placed in my jar, and the decades that lie ahead of me are decades of continued service, continued flavour, and continued fruitfulness. I am still salty, and I always will be.
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