Wake up and smell the coffee! My husband bought me a Christmas present of perfume today, but I had to try it out. In between sniffing samples, we were offered a sniff of a jar of coffee beans to cleanse our sense of smell from the fragrance of the last perfume.
I had heard of cleansing the palate with bread or water between sips of wine, but I didn’t know about the coffee thing and was as surprised as Howard was. Since I usually can’t smell perfume (or anything else), I don’t buy it; however, my sense of smell has been with me lately, so I was agreeable to it as a gift.
When reading about this practice later, though, I found out it is not good to sniff something someone else has previously sniffed, for health reasons. In fact, it is recommended that you bring your own bag of coffee beans to sniff when trying out perfumes!
If only it were that easy to cleanse our minds and thoughts from harmful influences we may be exposed to in our everyday lives! In using the coffee beans, the intensity of the perfume is lessened, but a slight fragrance of it remains. No matter how hard we may try to remove unsavory images and words from our mind, there is always a slight impression that remains in our subconscious, only to surface when least expected.
How much better to live in such a way as to be obedient to the words of Ephesians 5:1, “Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; and walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour.”
In that way, we can keep ourselves unspotted from the world (James 1:27), and like the three Hebrew children, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who survived the fiery furnace, our garments will not even have the smell of smoke! Daniel 4:27b says, “…neither were their coats changed, nor the smell of fire had passed on them.” Now that’s a wake-up call!
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