A few years ago we put up a white picket fence around our backyard. A year or so later a particular corner was just crying out for a lilac bush to be planted there. I imagined it eventually towering over the pickets, the limbs bent over with the weight of the soft purple flowers.

It took two years for the plant to produce any blooms, but I still remember the excitement when I began to see funny looking buds in early spring. The two plants are now big and busy, at least seven feet tall, covered with heavy flowers. Just seeing the blossoms through the back door tickles me because I know what they smell like, even when their fragrance doesn't come through the glass.

This morning I took time to cut just two of the limbs, bringing them into the kitchen, trimming them and placing them in a vase to go on the kitchen table. As I got busy with chores around the house, I headed out to the garage. Coming back inside the house, as I walked up the basement steps, the fragrance was in the air. Heavenly. There's nothing that quite compares to freshly cut lilacs, unless it's peonies or roses. I thought of how my husband will enjoy the smell, when he arrives home tonight and comes up those same stairs, at the end of a workday. I wish I could store this smell somewhere, to pull it out and enjoy it next January when it's cold and snowy and my lilac bushes are bare of any leaves, let alone blossoms.

I wonder is this what Paul meant? Is it something like the fragrance that hit my nose when I walked into my house, when God hears me speaking his Word over a situation, or to someone who's struggling, or lonely, or lost and needing to find their way again? Or when I cry out when the someone who's lonely or lost or struggling is me? Or just praising him when I'm up early with a cup of coffee and my Bible?

"But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ, and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him. For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life." 2 Corinthians 2:17

Surely it must be something like the summer smell of lilac bushes, heavy with blossoms. Surely.