What is Salt & Soil?

What is Salt & Soil, and why are we making this podcast?

In this short introductory episode, we share a little about who we are, what led us to bring our conversations here, and what you can expect from the podcast moving forward. Salt & Soil isn’t about having all the answers or convincing people of what we believe. Instead, it’s a space for thoughtful, honest exploration of Scripture, faith, and the questions that arise when we try to live those things out in everyday life.

Throughout the podcast, we’ll dive into topics ranging from biblical word studies to spiritual practices to the deeper themes that run through the Bible. 

Whether you're rooted in your faith, exploring, or simply curious, you're welcome here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Welcome to the intro for our salt and soil very first episode. We wanted to tell you a little bit about ourselves and why we picked this podcast and why we picked the podcast's name and kind of who we are and what we're about. Go ahead, Rachel.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Take it away. Take it away. Well, I think important to start with, we're doing this podcast together. We're not here to try to present or Yeah, or even like convince people. Right. We are exploring and learning together. So what was happening was we started to have a lot of really great kind of exploratory conversations that eventually we started to feel like maybe someone else needs to hear some of this.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

So yeah, like we would sit together at a restaurant or on the lawn with our kids and we'd be talking about scripture and the Bible and like this is a cool connection, or like, what does this really mean? This doesn't make sense to me. And then we're like, I bet if we're having these questions, other people are too. And so we're not theologians, we are moms with our own backgrounds, but we are very curious little creatures. We are so we're not experts and so sorry.

SPEAKER_01 1:49

I think also we want to just say that anybody is welcome to be listening to this. Totally, right? It's not this is not if you are a Bible expert and you want to dig deeper. If you are, yeah, great. If you're not even a believer, right, great. There's lots of stuff in the Bible, there's a lot of questions around the Bible, and there's thousands of years of history. So we're just trying to explore that together. Yeah. Yeah. Anyone is welcome on that ride with us.

SPEAKER_00 2:19

Totally. We really love language roots, context, and how it all works together, but we're not like gonna be just centering on Greek and Hebrew philosophy, for instance. It's kind of like how do we apply this to our lives and to the world now? And like, for example, with our first episode, Submit, like we want to talk about how does that actually look in modern times. So and what does it even actually mean? Exactly. And like what does it mean? So that's kind of like the cadence of why we are here. So we want to talk a little bit about why we picked the name Salt and Soil.

SPEAKER_01 2:49

First, let's talk about the fact that salt and soil is actually a new name. We originally had a different name.

SPEAKER_00 2:57

Yeah, we originally had river and vine, which we had done some work with before. We love a good river and a good vine. We do. And the scripture behind it. However, there was something that just grew us to the saltiness of salt and soil. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

I and I think so. Well, when we started with river and vine, it was a little bit more about spiritual fruit and mindful Christian living. Totally. And uh, as we started to dig into some of these podcast topics, we actually ended up being a little more curious and it became less about how do we mindfully live and more about exploring some wild questions.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

Yeah, it just changed the meaning a little bit for us as we went. And so salt and soil. Rachel is the creator of this name, and it was like the first one we came up with, and it's like, that's it. I love when that happens. I know God's like, here you go.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

Lots of options. So salt is obviously very important in the Bible. It was very important in ancient times. I think our grounding verse here is Matthew 5.13. Yeah. I love this verse so much. So this is Jesus talking. So Jesus is telling us this. This is not Rachel talking, in Matthew 5.13. You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? How indeed? So we want to stay salty. Yeah. Biblically salty. So in the Bible, salt symbolizes preservation and flavor, and that it's like an essential seasoning. It symbolizes purity and also covenant.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Yeah, absolutely. It's yeah, it's important, it's an influential presence. It's always there, I feel like, but it might not always be like the main talked-about thing, but there's always this kind of thread throughout, and I like that. And for soil, we just love plants, anyways, but there's this idea of cultivation growing.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

There's in Matthew 13, there's the parable of the sower where Jesus actually describes four kinds of soil that represent different conditions of humans' hearts, which is interesting. Yeah. So if the soil represents our heart, we want the soil to be fertile and nutritious and good for growth.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

Yeah. And it's like the general idea of scripture being planted and not performed. Like we're like as Christians, we're not like performative. It's it's definitely a personal experience, at least in our opinions. Yeah. Comes from the salt and soil idea as well. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

There's the idea to write scripture on your heart. So we're trying to have healthy soil and we're trying to sprinkle salt on everything around us.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

Yeah, exactly. So again, this isn't, you know, a sermon podcast, or really even this is the correct answer or the wrong answer, but just this is what the Bible is saying based on some scripture references, based on Hebrew and Greek, and following the themes throughout the Bible. But it's not a place where we are saying someone is not faithful enough or wrong or bad.

SPEAKER_01 5:59

Yeah, we always want to be love forward. We're not here to judge, we're not here to classify. And we don't know everything. Like we said, we have different backgrounds, we're not religious study backgrounds.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

It but at the same time, I think we understand that scripture holds more depth than we were often taught to look for, or that often people don't know to look for.

SPEAKER_01 6:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

In like understanding these threads and how they there's a lot of callbacks, a lot of cool things that uh you don't catch until you like really kind of look into it. So that's what this podcast is and is not. And we also have some rabbit holes we go down and get a little distracted sometimes as we are learning things together in real time. Yeah. So um a little bit about us, though. I am a therapist and a mom of two girls, two young girls. And I've always loved helping people. I've went to the church at a young age. My grandma took me to a Baptist church in New Mexico, and I grew up in that church. But when we moved, there was a good amount of time that I didn't go to church. I always believed, but I wasn't necessarily applying a lot of what I knew into my life. But I always wanted to get more in my faith. I always felt like this calling. Now I know it was like the Holy Spirit trying to like shove me back to church. Yeah. But I never found a really like a church home. And then when I had my daughters, I'd been living here a couple of years. I was praying, like, I hope like somehow a door opens to where I can get back into church. But it kind of seemed impossible with like two kids and yeah, just the dynamics of life, right? And then Rachel popped in. Hello, who also hadn't, she'll tell you her story, but she had just recently came back to church and she just kind of randomly brought it up one day, not long after I started praying about wanting to go back to church. And so she said, Let's oh, I don't know if you want it. And I was like, I'll be there. I was a little surprised. I thought I was gonna have to be like, No, I really want you to come with me, please. Yeah, and I was like, I'll be there Sunday. And then I never stopped going, and it's been a couple years now that we're we're both really back at the church. So yeah, like what is your story?

SPEAKER_01 7:51

I grew up in an Air Force family, so I lived in Germany for a long time. Growing up as a kid, we always had we were always sort of a Christian family, and we did all the holidays. Yeah. We would, when we were visiting family in the states, we would do Easter church, and I was just around Christianity, but we didn't go to church a lot. Yeah. We lived in Germany, and so it was just a different environment. I started, we started going to a Baptist church when I was in middle school, and I got involved in the youth group, and that's when I was saved and baptized. But I think what happened with me was that I did that because that was the right steps that I was presented with. That's what you were supposed to do. Almost like the performative angle of like, oh, these are what we do. Yeah. So I was understanding Christianity as here is a set of beliefs. Yeah, we're telling you that it's the truth, and you can accept it and go to heaven, or you can not accept it and go to hell. Your choice. Right. So obviously, we all wanted to choose heaven. So when I was saved and baptized, what I did not understand was it's not that simple, it's not that transactional, and I didn't really have a lot of like sort of fostered education after that. Right. So I didn't even know what to do with it. I didn't feel any different inside. I had obviously the peace of mind, so to speak, that now I get to go to heaven and not hell. Yeah, yeah. But as I got older, I started having a lot of questions that weren't adding up. And when I would try to ask these questions, I was getting either just sort of brushed off, like, well, that's not what you should be focusing on.

SPEAKER_00 9:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

Or because that's what the Bible says. So that's what it is. So stop asking. Eventually, that sort of being shut down and those questions, I was like, okay, this doesn't make sense. No one's trying to help me through it. Yeah. So I sort of just put everything on hold. I do believe that God was with me, even though I wasn't necessarily with him. And for a long time, probably 20 years, I just was I was just turned the other way. I didn't want to explore anymore. Like I was done with that. Yeah. I didn't want to have any more questions. And so it was just nothing. We tried to go to church a couple times and it just didn't feel right. And so I was fine to just kind of float along and I would call myself a Christian, but I wouldn't want to talk about what I believed or why with anybody.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

Because you really probably didn't know what that meant.

SPEAKER_01 10:30

Yeah, I didn't know. So in probably 2022, maybe quite literally, I think God was just like it's time, and it feels like he just kind of came and grabbed me. And like it, you you read in the Bible sometimes it's like he wants people to like turn their face to him, and like if you seek, you'll find him. I wasn't trying to turn toward God, I was not trying to seek, and it was more like he came and was just like I will turn you for you because you're not doing it. Yeah, and we started back to church through a different friend. Yeah, and I didn't want to go. He was just like, Why don't you guys come to church? My husband was like, Yes, let's go to church. And so our daughter was probably three at the time, and I just remember I did not want to go. I almost started crying that morning because I was like, I can't handle this. I don't want to it's Sunday, like I don't want to put on nice clothes, I don't want to see strangers, I don't want to worry about my three-year-old being in the child. Like, I didn't want to do any of it, but we did it. The church was a good fit, and it was just very different. So those why questions were actually almost encouraged and welcomed.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:37

And so we just kept going and kept learning, and then the more we dug into it, the closer you get to God and Yeah, the more you see and hear him.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

And and I think our church is very like accepting and uh love forward, and it does want you to ask questions like dinosaurs in the Bible. Right. It's not just like, oh don't like worry about that. It's no, let's actually talk about what that means. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:59

And so one thing I've learned about myself is having those questions about why. What's important is not actually clearing or resolving those questions. Totally. It's actually being able to have the space to explore them, and then that's what actually kind of allows God to work in my heart. Right. If I'm not exploring, not being curious, then back to the soil thing. Then my heart is just my soil is just like gross and rocky, like nothing's happening in there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

So it's more about having the space to explore. Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting too because in a period of my life where I wasn't going to church as much, I was probably in grad school or something. I had been I was baptized at nine, and then I had been given a necklace. It's like a silver necklace with a it's a cross with turquoise in the middle. And we had been robbed, and I had kept that necklace in my jewelry box, and that jewelry box was taken, obviously. And I was always so sad that I had lost that necklace. And we even were calling pawn shops to see because it was just an important thing. To try to find for me to try and find it. Also, we were like, that's a really specific thing, like if we can find where some of our stuff went. And so, like, months went by, months went by, and then I was digging through an old arts and crafts bucket, and the necklace was just sitting in it. And I would have never put it in there. Wow. Because it was an important thing for me, I would have never just like thrown it in a I mean, how is that not just God being like, you will not be stealing this necklace today? Right. But it's like affirming, right? It was almost like a message, like I'm always here, even if like you're not going to church, you know, connecting and all that stuff. So that was kind of important, like, turning point for me too. Um, but it did take a couple years for you to be like, no, come on. Yep. But I think it it was in God's timing, right? Like, I don't know if it would have worked going to any other church at any other time. And at the time we were in New Mexico, we would have had to leave to come here. You know, I mean, I just don't think it would have worked.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

Yeah. I think that's part of why for me it happened not when I was looking for it. It happened when it was the right time.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 13:58

Because I had not been looking for it for 20 years.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

Exactly. And now here we are and making this podcast. So it's interesting to see God's timeline that we would have never maybe picked for ourselves. But um, yeah. So that being said, what is your background?

SPEAKER_01 14:11

Oh yeah. So I am a graphic designer. I went to school for graphic design. I've done it now for almost 20 years.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

Rachel's like a big deal though, guys. Like she did stuff for like, can I even say? I'm not that big of a deal. She you did work for NASA, Unilever, yeah, Disney. I'm your walking resume.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

Yeah, I have some big brands, but I've done a lot of different types of design. Yeah. And I think the reason I love doing what I do is it's taking somebody's sort of purpose or their goal or their mission and then putting it out in a way that connects to people.

SPEAKER_00 14:48

Yeah, like you're good at knowing the person, what they really encompass, their style, and then you can make that for them.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:55

And there's something about that that kind of works with even like us being curious about religion and the Bible, right? It's like, how can we apply this to like our lives now? It's an interesting connection, kind of. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, with that being said, and she also has a daughter, obviously, because our kids like to frolic together.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

Yes, we are neighbor friends, neighbor friends, and our kiddos are neighbor friends, yeah. And school friends.

SPEAKER_00 15:15

And so I think with our backgrounds, like my background as a therapist and kind of having this social work background, and Rachel coming from her like really good people-centered graphic art skill, and just she's just a good artist too. I think we come with interesting backgrounds that are different from each other and different perspectives, but like we complement each other, I think, in that way too.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:34

And so it's always we never have fear-based messaging. We never want people to leave feeling like I'm doing religion wrong, but maybe to leave feeling like, oh, now I have context over this and I can have grace. Right.

SPEAKER_01 15:47

Or even leaving with your own questions to go follow and explore. Totally.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

Yeah. So if you've ever wanted to explore scripture without feeling like you needed all the answers first, or even knowing where the question came from.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

Yeah. Or even finding the answer in the end. Like, spoiler alert. Sometimes the answer is we don't know, or the answer is actually, I learned this from Diana at our church. Sometimes the question itself is just not focusing on the right thing.

SPEAKER_00 16:17

Or yeah, or you're not asking the question in the right way.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

So have the question, dig into it, but you might find that there is no answer.

SPEAKER_00 16:25

Yeah. And we usually conclude it somehow, but whether that's an answer, I don't know. I guess we'll just all find that out together. So our first episode will be on the word submit because we do like to delve in deep to some of these more hot topics, I guess. I don't wouldn't say hot topics, but like we like to dive into things Yeah, and they're serious topics.

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Right. Yeah. The word submit is a big word and it has a lot of cultural context for us today. Yeah. It had a lot of different context when it was written in the Bible. So it's looking at what's the Bible actually telling us? What is it not telling us? And what do we do with that today? Because our today looks so different than the Bible's today looked like.

SPEAKER_00 17:05

And we use that formula kind of throughout. Second episode will be idolatry on the Holy Spirit. We do some work on plants and the meaning, kind of the deep meaning of plants in the Bible and weird plants. And weird plants and soil and salt. Yes. And all the fun things. So yeah, I hope you guys stick around to learn and discover with us. Get salty with us. Thanks for joining.