smelly.

Today I lit a new candle for the first time.  “Nag Champa” was the scent.  I can finally enjoy it again, because it’s in candle form.  It’s the same scent as an incense that I burned back in college.  The problem was, the smell of incense always stayed in my clothes.  When I wanted to go out on a date that night, Sarah would shrink back from me, NOT a fan of the smell.  So at some point, I stopped burning the incense.  Because my love for my (now wife) was stronger than my appreciation of “Nag Champa”.

The Bible tells us that we are “the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing.” (2 Corinthians 2:15)  Similar to the story above, it is by spending time in the presence of God and Christ Jesus, that we are able to naturally carry with us the “aroma”.  It’s interesting also, that the verse does not simply say “to those who are perishing.”  We are reminded that even people who we rub shoulders with at church (including ourselves) need reminders from time to time of what Jesus “smells like”.

How are your prayer times lately?  Is it a time of quickly passing from one thing to the next, so that no one who comes close to you later even knows you were in the room with Jesus?  Or do you set aside time and space to “be” in the presence of God…allowing his very “smell” to saturate you so richly, so that as you walk through the rest of your day, people are caught off guard, thinking to themselves – “Whoa, what was that smell?”

As you spend time in prayer this week, may you receive God’s presence so much, that his aroma is carried with you throughout your day.  After all, none of us smells as good as we think we do on our own. 🙂

ps.  Reminder to parents – we bathe our children, because they don’t realize they begin to stink. 🙂