THE SCENT OF HEAVEN

“Something sinks around here,” she said. And something did. So we set out to look for the cause and when we found it, we did our best to remedy it, whatever that cause was. It happens all the time. Food goes bad, an animal sneaks in and then has the audacity to die and leave a smell: the list is endless. Things, everything really, eventually go bad. They outlive their life expectancy or something happens to hasten that process.

Yet nothing ever starts off as bad. Everything is good in the beginning. Everything, if you will, has the scent of heaven in it because everything is initially from God, a creation or a creature of God. This, from Jack, a good friend of mine who was geology professor at a local university for more years than he would like to count: “In my geology classes, I always said that the rocks and the landscape ‘talk’ to you. Everything you see is telling you a tale if you know how to ‘see’ and how to interpret what you're seeing.”

That is deep science but it is also deep theology and deep spiritually if you know how to look and, if you will, smell. The scent of heaven, God, is everywhere and in everything. Yet, if you are like me, it seems that our nasal passages are always stopped up. Not only that, my guess is that Jack would also say that our eyes are blind and our ears are deaf if we allow them to be. And, sadly, we often allow them to be.

As Jack’s geology students had to be intentional about what they were doing when examining rocks and landscape in order to understand what they were seeing, so we must be intentional about understanding what we are seeing or smelling or hearing. We intentionally search for the bad smell and learn why what smells so bad does and we react accordingly so as to eliminate the smell.

That is true in all aspects of our life especially in our relationships with one another. The scent of heaven is in everyone because, again, we are all children of God. The problem, of course, is that sometimes it is difficult to detect the smell of God when it seems what we are smelling in the other is anything but godly, heavenly. But that scent is there somewhere if, in Jack’s words, we know how to see and smell in order to interpret what is actually present and not just what we first observe.

As Jack’s students learned, that takes work when it comes to rocks. That takes even more work when it comes to people. When we look into the mirror, there is more to what we see than the image that is staring back at us. There is more to us than what is on the surface. We have to dig deeper, sometimes, to find out what is really there. And what we will discover is that there is a scent of heaven, an image of God, looking at us.

It is only when we see that image of God, that scent of heaven, in ourselves and in everyone we encounter, no matter our first impression or how bad the smell, that we will be able to live fully the life God created us to live.