Selah. I'm grateful for selah. If you are going, "what?!" let me define it for you. Selah: pause and think on that, interlude, pause. Got it? Basically it is a word that says, "Hey *this* is important to stop at and consider and think through or think about. Rest on *this* for a moment before continuing." I'm so grateful for selah. If I didn't have selah moments in my life then I would just speed through without ever noticing anything around me. Selah gets me to "stop and smell the roses." I first discovered selah when reading the Psalms in the Bible. You might have seen it to the side or underneath a verse before continuing on to the next. It's saying, "whoa, that was important so think about it a little before just moving on." So I started doing that, with the verses in Psalms and the verses in the Bible overall. Then I started doing it in my life with moments and relationships and conversations, even with work related things. It makes a difference to not just blow by someone or something but to stop, pause, and think on them or it. Try it, you may like it. Then we can be grateful together for selah.
There are two probable origins for this idiom and I think both are equally plausible. The first one is that when you spread butter on bread you are buttering it up like one would do when trying to flatter someone. The second is in ancient India there was a practice of throwing balls of butter at statues to ask for favor, i.e. buttering them up. ( source ) When we use the phrase today we generally mean that extreme flattery is used to gain information or favor. It's not always necessarily a compliment.
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