A Sweet Fragrance

When we first moved into our house over twenty-five years ago, I planted a little rose bush by the garage.  It did fairly well the first year, but I don’t think it was an ideal spot because it began to fail bit by bit, year after year.

Every spring I would look it over, trying to decide if it was worth saving.  I thought perhaps if I cut away the dead branches it would grow fuller.  I ruthlessly pruned, and for a while it looked better.  Inevitably, though, more branches would die off,  and it began to look hopelessly spindly.

We had a terrible drought this past summer, the worst on record.  At first I struggled to keep the rose bush, along with all the other flowers in the garden, alive, but as water restrictions deepened it was like fighting a losing battle.  Every living thing in my garden looked as though it could not possibly make it through that long, hot summer.

Then the rains came – refreshing, life-giving rains.  Overnight the plants  put out the most vibrant blooms I had ever seen.  It really was miraculous.  The flower garden looked lush and colorful, with the exception of my poor, little rose bush.  It was tall and scraggly with fully half of the plant nothing but dead wood.  I reluctantly decided that I would have to dig it up in the spring.

One morning as I walked down the sidewalk toward the garage, I noticed that there were two rose buds gingerly pushing their little faces out of the only healthy branch on the bush.  By the next morning they had opened those sweet faces to the sunlight and were dancing in the gentle breeze.  I walked up to them and buried my face into theirs, and the familiar fragrance just filled my senses.  There it was, the reason I could never bring myself to destroy that bush, the sweetest perfume I have ever smelled.

That old, ugly rose bush speaks volumes to me about my own life.  I am a child of the King, and no matter what my outward appearance – whether beautiful,  homely as the little bush, or somewhere in-between  – there should emanate from deep within my being a  beautiful fragrance.   A fragrance that draws others to the One who lives within my heart and bears witness that the life I live through Him is beautiful.

It is also a fragrance that rises up to the Father.  The fragrance of His precious Son, living in me.

” But thanks be to God, who always leads us in His triumph in Christ, and manifests through us the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place.  For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.”  II Cor. 2:14,15 (NAS)

Blessings,

Linda

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