aroma

Not long ago, I found a new recipe for spaghetti sauce. Scanning the list of ingredients, I snorted when I saw that it called for two cloves of garlic. Two? Two isn’t enough. Two is cruel. It’s just enough garlic that you know it’s in there, but not enough to provide a real bite. So I put in five cloves. I would have stopped there, but that left two lone, pathetic, abandoned cloves on the counter. So I mashed ‘em up and tossed ‘em in.

The sauce burped and bubbled and emitted a wonderful, fragrant, garlicky steam that drifted about the kitchen and down the hall. It smelled so good it drew my husband to the table prematurely. He had to wait while I cooked the noodles, and he did so with all the patience of a hungry two-year old. Before he headed out the door for a Friday night men’s conference, he ate two enormous helpings.

When he came home several hours later, I could smell him coming before he hit the front porch. He reeked, but I didn’t have to point that out to him. He said it all for me.

“I stink!” He shook his head. “I ended up sitting smack dab in the middle of a row of twenty guys, in a row that was smack dab in the middle of the auditorium. Everyone in a six row radius could smell me.”

He went on to describe how the aroma of garlic emanated from his body in a near-visible cloud and went swirling about in a hot, massive wave while he sat there squirming and sweating. “There wasn’t a thing I could do.”

Next time I’ll stick to the recipe. Maybe.

There’s a spiritual lesson in that little spaghetti sauce story, and it’s this: if you want the fragrance of Christ to precede you wherever you go and linger wherever you’ve been, you have to partake heavily of Christ. You have to sink your teeth into the meat of the Word, drink deeply from the well of wisdom found in its pages, and let the truth of scripture permeate every cell in your body until you just won’t be able to help it—you’ll carry His essence everywhere.

We bring a fragrance with us into every room, every conversation, every encounter. Hopefully, that fragrance is Christ.

So how’s your appetite today?

Now thanks be to God who . . . through us diffuses the fragrance of His knowledge in every place. For we are to God the fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing. To the one we are the aroma of death to death, and to the other the aroma of life to life. 2 Cor 2:14-16