Can you smell it? Has its sweet fragrance reached you? Has it grabbed hold and transported you? Smells do that. Sweet aromas reach our senses and we taste an experience. We are taken back in time or place. We arrive in a completely different destination with a smell of the past.
Walking through the forest, around the garden, into the wilderness begins to open up possibilities, especially when we travel with our nose. We pick up on the sweetness of the honeysuckle. The water flowing down the stream smells of the freshness of life. The trees penetrate the forest with the gift of sap. We are alive through the smells of the earth. I find this even more so when I dig in the dirt. Some do not like the idea because the dirt can get under our fingernails or stain our hands. To worry about that is to miss the smell, the fragrance of life. Digging in dirt has the aroma of opportunity. Life happens from this very ground. Plants spring up. New plants take root. Transformation takes place deep in the soil before anyone even notices that this is a land of plenty. So much is missed when we do not take a deep breath of the soil of the earth.
The most amazing concept of the earth is that it has been springing forth life since the beginning. In the very beginning, the earth produced and yielded. It is still producing and yielding. We take it all for granted. But God saw something special in the dirt, in the soil, in the life of what was before him. We are told that God took dirt, a part of the earth, and breathed life. That breath is what gives us life. We are a part of the earth, a part of the soil, made from God’s breath of life. So maybe what we smell is life and a bit of God’s very breath. Breathe on me, Breath of God.
Focus Scripture:
Genesis 2:4-9
4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.
In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, 5 when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; 6 but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground— 7 then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. 8 And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Photos included in Devotions are captured by David Cain – The Cain Gallery. Photos are available for sale by contacting The Cain Gallery
SEEING THE EXTRAORDINARY 