If you’ve ever been to a non-industrialized country, you’ve smelled the smells of humanity. Every day in America we enjoy a cacophony of scents, from our body soap to cologne, perfume, hair product and air fresheners. Things smelling like things actually smells is frowned upon. There are too many easy, and cheap, ways to remedy those kinds of smells.

In the ancient Near East, things were not so. Fabricated scents were for royalty – or at least the ultra-rich. Each day was filled with common smells, normal scents. But every once in a while you would come across the smell of something sweet. A fruit, or some flowers, and it was beautiful. Almost indescribable.

So Eden, this perfect garden, was filled with everything that smelled pleasing in the world. Fruit, flowers, trees, grass – and everyone imagined how amazing a place like this must smell.

Also common in Jewish folklore was the comparison of Eden to Heaven.

So, pleasing aromas were lacking in the cultures that came up with these tales, and Eden was the place those aromas filled the air. And Eden is a model of Heaven. What if Heaven is an endless supply of all the beauty we’re missing on Earth?

Most of us seem to be doing fine on smells (most). But there seems to be a general lack of peace, hope, grace, forgiveness and love in our culture. What if the air of Heaven is full of the breath of peace, hope, grace, forgiveness and love?

And most importantly, what if it’s the Church’s job to fill the Earth with the aroma of Heaven?

So what would it take to change that? Maybe it starts with the Church becoming obsessed with beauty.

Taken by the beauty of its own diversity.

Of course this would require a lot of sacrifice. Pet theologies would need to go. Narrow views of what a church service looks like would have to be gone. But after the dust clears, what if every church looked at every other church and saw beauty? Saw that different ways of worshipping and viewing God aren’t just the way things are, they are they way God designed them to be.

Captivated by the beauty in the world.

Could it be that the church’s job isn’t to bring God to a place, but to go to that place and point out what God is already doing? And if that’s so, maybe there is beauty woven in to every part of the Earth. And maybe the Church’s job is to love that beauty. To find that beauty. And to point that beauty out to everyone they can find.

Consumed with unleashing the beauty within every person.

Maybe the idea of Jesus in your heart has been so overused we forget the power of the metaphor. If the God of the universe – in all his infinite beauty – has come to reside inside of someone, it should be the church’s job to unleash that beauty from within those people. Can you picture the world bathed in the beauty of God as it overflows from his people?

What if the church was obsessed with beauty?

What do you see?

What story does her face tell?

Do you believe there is a God who has a plan for her life?

Here’s her caption from the NYT Photo Blog: Indian sex workers held candles as they celebrated International Sex Workers Rights Day organized by the Dubar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, in the eastern Indian city of Calcutta. The International Sex Worker Rights Day began in 2001 when more than 25,000 sex workers gathered in India for a sex worker festival.

Now what do you see?

If you have 99 people who are pouring into what you’re doing and one person who walks away, you let the one walk and work with the 99.

Unless you’re trying to live like Jesus.

Because for some reason Jesus was obsessed with the one. Really you could say it goes deeper than that: Jesus was obsessed with helping the lost become found.

He developed this concept with three consecutive stories: a lost sheep (one of 99), a lost coin (one of ten) and a lost person (one of two). For the religious elite, these stories ranged from baffling to infuriating – because in each story the things that were found were left by the master in order to find the things which were lost. For the master to do something favored those who were out over those who were in was ridiculous in their minds.

But that’s the beauty of God.

And it only gets more beautiful when we find that we are the ones who have fallen away.

That he would drop everything he is doing and come after us.

Pursue us – even in our wandering.

To know that he chases after the one.

Anyone not questioning their faith is not authentic – or their god is too small.

Either way, I’m not interested in following them.

The God I follow is immense and multi-faceted. His totality is unknowable – so no branch of human thought will ever completely understand him.  No one theology will be able to explain him.

Which is why he’s so amazing to follow.

And why we should still have questions.

Maybe the people that try to make those of us feel guilty when we doubt, question and wonder are just trying to control and manipulate us to think like they do – and maybe their view of God is monochromatic and incomplete.

So keep questioning. Let doubt spark curiosity. Embrace the wonder of God.

The seven year old wanted the four year old to obey her. The four year old wanted anything other than what her sister wanted. So they yelled, threw things and hit each other. Of course, while all of this is unfolding the only other adult in the room sat quietly watching them. And I thought to myself, what a terrible mother.

At the height of the fight she shooshed them. What makes that bad of a parent?

Then the door from the office opened and out walked the girl’s dad and mom. They put jackets on the girls and walked out of the office. Leaving me sitting with the other woman I thought was their mother – and all the judgmental feelings I had fabricated.

We live in a world where information moves faster than reality.

I had the information that there was one woman and two children in the room and I immediately associated them together. But it happens everywhere – remember that UFO-esque balloon that every cable network in America paid to have a helicopter follow for the better part of a day?

Jesus didn’t seem to live this way.

When an angry mob was ready to stone an adulterous woman (according to the Law as written in the Hebrew Scriptures), Jesus drew in the sand.

He slowed the moment down.

He found the thing behind the thing – that all sin is adultery, and therefore either everyone needed to be stoned, or no one needed to be stoned.

Instead of a flash of judgement, we saw a waterfall of mercy.

A few moments of thought changed the outcome entirely. Which makes you wonder what would happen if we lived like Jesus – quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry.

Lent is a journey where we give up things that distract us from God and focus more time to prayer. So as we think through what to leave behind, we find things that distract us the most. Fog our clarity the greatest. Clamor for our focus the loudest. And we eliminate them.  In this spiritual act, we experience God in deeper ways because we’ve transferred our pursuit of freedom from our own hands into the hands of Jesus.