Isn’t it funny how scents can trigger memories?  A summer breeze wafting past my neighbor’s cow barn transports me back to happy childhood summer afternoons playing in my Grandmother’s cow shed.  The smell of fresh tar immediately transports me back to the days my Dad sealed the outside of the basement walls of the house he built when I was four.   And if you open a box of crayons around me, my brain takes me back to the hallways of Flora List Elementary School.  

Today I walked through a classroom here at the church and something I smelled took me back to my Aunt Patty’s farmhouse kitchen!  I spent a week at her house when I was six years old and she made blueberry pancakes for breakfast.  I was startled when that whiff of something in the classroom instantly “took” me there and my mouth began watering, remembering her cooking.  

The sense of smell is an interesting thing that is directly linked to our taste buds.  Hold your nose and you won’t notice the taste of something that has an unpleasant flavor.  Yet, constant exposure to an odor will dull one’s sensitivity to it.  I have talked to people who live in towns with paper mills or oil refineries.  After a while, they don’t even notice the odor.

Just as people who smoke cigarettes don’t notice the odor of nicotine clinging to their clothing, or a pretty perfume seems to lose its scent to the person wearing it, we can easily become immune to the common smells that surround us day to day.  In the Bible days, a shepherd spent his life so close to his sheep that he would begin to smell like them.  I’m sure the shepherd didn’t notice the sheep-smell, but everyone else probably did.  

As Believers in Jesus Christ, we are called to spend so much time with our Lord that we begin to smell like Him.  We may not even notice it, but those who don’t know Him will.  My prayer is that we leave a fragrant scent of Christ’s love where ever we go, so that when people “catch a whiff” it will trigger a pleasant memory and make them hungry for more of Jesus, much as I am now hungry for my Aunt Patty’s home-made blue berry pancakes!