How Your Disappointments and Trials Can Create a Pleasing Aroma for God

June Hunt is an author, singer, speaker and founder of Hope For The Heart, a worldwide biblical counseling ministry.

Summer is in full swing, accentuated by the beauty of nature. It’s warm breezes carry the delightful scent of roses, the nostalgic sweetness of honeysuckle, and the captivating whiffs of gardenias. Heavenly bouquets beckon us to linger for just a moment longer to delight in their lovely fragrance. The flowers will fade too soon, but there’s a way to capture their fragrant aromas. …

Perfume. One spray from a perfume bottle can pleasantly permeate a whole room. Have you ever wondered how perfume is made?

There’s a few ways. One way is to gather flowers, wash them, dry them, and crush them. After the finely-crushed petals are mixed with distilled water and alcohol, the result is poured into a beautiful bottle. Another way to make perfume is to boil and simmer the rinsed petals. The flower mixture is then poured through cheesecloth to remove the impurities, allowing only the purified floral water to pass through. So to make perfume, you have to crush or boil flowers. To create the beautiful aroma, it first must go through an intense process that involvesheating or crushing.

So why do I share this? The process of perfume-making mirrors the process we go through during a trial. Life may seem sweet one moment but then a trial comes and we feel crushed … we feel the heat! But could God be using our disappointments and trials to create a pleasing aroma for Him?

God’s purpose for our trials and our suffering is to produce maturity in us …

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” (James 1:2-4)

The apostle Paul says something similar … “rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope” (Romans 5:3-4 ESV).

God can use trials to produce in us maturity, endurance, character and ultimately, hope. Now these qualities are a pleasing aroma to God!

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SOURCE: The Christian Post
June Hunt