Fragrance

For the last couple of days, I've been walking out the door at work and stepping back into my childhood. 


Let me explain.  In my neck of the woods, it has been like living in the oven. When you spend time out of doors, it is like being blasted with heat similar to when you open the oven door to take out your lasted baked creation.

Lately, the temps have cooled and the humidity has went down. It has become bearable.  In fact, the last few days have been downright pleasant.  I suspect that it has something to do with the trees in the yards around my workplace, but when I step outside it smells like my schoolyard at good old Lincoln Elementary. When I smell that smell, I am a kid again.

Fragrance is powerful aid to memory.  Certain aromas can propel you back to different times in your life.  For example, when I was a young child, we drove to church past a tire factory.  Now, whenever I smell burning rubber, I'm instantly propelled to sitting in the back seat of my parents' car in my church clothes.

The smell of diesel fuel exhaust takes me back to Dade City, Florida.  We moved there when I was 13 years old.  The first time I smelled diesel fuel exhaust was from buses at Pasco Jr. High. I had always walked to school before.  Now I lived in the country and bus-riding became a part of my life.

Actually, there are a lot of smells associated in my mind with school:  chalk dust, new textbooks, gym lockers, the smell of the lunchroom when they served certain meals.

Did you know that our actions can be perceived as a fragrance? Have you ever heard misbehaving children referred to as "little stinkers" or they have been described as rotten? How about persons who are nasty and use terrible language?  They're called foul. Sounds like a bad fragrance to me!

The Word says we can be a pleasing aroma, or a dreadful smell of decay:

"But thank God! He has made us his captives and continues to lead us along in Christ’s triumphal procession. Now he uses us to spread the knowledge of Christ everywhere, like a sweet perfume. Our lives are a Christ-like fragrance rising up to God. But this fragrance is perceived differently by those who are being saved and by those who are perishing. To those who are perishing, we are a dreadful smell of death and doom. But to those who are being saved, we are a life-giving perfume. And who is adequate for such a task as this?" (2 Corinthians 2:14-16)

May our fragrance be a good smell, a life-giving smell!  How can we do this?  By acting like Christ would everywhere we go, at our jobs, in the marketplace and especially in the home. If you act like a stinker at home with your family, just because you can get away with it, eventually you'll smell like death to them. If you can't be Christ-like with those around you, your religion is dead.  And dead things stink.