You Smell

You Smell

They named her Lois, and for two weeks she was the toast of my town. She drew rock-star-worthy crowds, who lined up with cameras in hopes of catching her in an over-the-top pose. And like a true celebrity, she teased them for a long time before she obliged.

Lois the corpse flower (a.k.a., amorphophallus titanium), an endangered Sumatran species, boasted a rather spectacular six-foot bloom that gave off the smell of rotting flesh when fully opened. In its natural habitat, the plant’s powerful odor attracts pollinating carrion beetles that come from near and far to lay their eggs in its stinking petals.

Horticulturists at the Houston Museum of Natural Science bought the bulb for seventy-five dollars from a North Carolina nursery specializing in exotic flowers. When it became clear six years later that the plant might actually bloom (not all of them do), they moved her out of the greenhouse, set up a twenty-four-hour webcam, opened the Museum around the clock, and sold buttons that boasted “I came, I saw, I smelled.” No kidding.

Zac, Lois’s caretaker, became something of a celebrity too, filling a Facebook page with his insights and tweeting updates about his smelly friend. But here’s what amazes me: people were quite literally captivated by this gigantic, stinking flower and her powerful, awful odor. One woman who stood in line to see Lois in bloom said, “It’s not a smell I was expecting . . . it’s like garbage, rotting garbage. It’s beautiful and it’s atrocious at the same time.”

Did you know Christ followers smell? They do. And apparently it’s a smell that is beautiful and atrocious at the same time, depending on whose nose is doing the smelling. To those whom God’s Spirit has enlivened, it’s a sweet, compelling odor. To those still in darkness, it reeks. It’s either uncannily inviting or terribly off putting. But it’s always there. And it’s powerful.

And just like Lois, it’s sure to draw out a strong reaction from anyone drawing close enough to its bloom.

We are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are an aroma that brings death; to the other, an aroma that brings life. And who is equal to such a task?

2 Corinthians 2:15-16, NIV