| Finding the Way |
Chapter 23 |
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There is something very mysterious about perfume. No one can describe it. You cannot take a photograph of it. You cannot weigh it. Yet it is a very essential quality of the flower. The same is true of that strange thing we call influence. Influence is the aroma of a life. The most important thing about your life is this subtle, imponderable, indefinable, mysterious quality of your personality which is known as influence. This is really all of you that counts in its final impression upon other lives. No matter how a man may pose, how much he may profess, how he may assert himself – what kind of man he may claim to be – that which he really is, is what breathes out from his life wherever he is known, that which his name suggests to people whenever it is spoken.
Lebanon’s gardens and trees and fruits filled all the region round about with delicious fragrance. Every Christian life ought to be fragrant, with a smell like that of Lebanon. But there is only one way to make it so. Men gather the perfume from acres of roses and it fills only a little vial. Our influence, the perfume of our lives, is gathered from all the acres of our years – all that has grown upon those acres during all those years. If it is to be like the essence of then thousand roses, sweet, pure, undefiled, our life must be all well watched, clean, pure, holy, loving, and true. The evil, as well as the good, are gathered, and help to make the total of the influence of our lives.
We all know how easily one’s influence is hurt, how little follies and indiscretions in one’s conduct or behaviour take away from the sweetness of one’s reputation. The author of Ecclesiastes says, “Dead flies cause the oil of the perfumer to send forth an evil odour; so doth a little folly outweigh wisdom and honour.” We need to think seriously of this matter of dead flies. We are not always careful enough about keeping them out. There are many men, good in the general tenor of their lives, godly, prayerful; consistent in larger ways, but the perfume of whose names is rendered unsavoury by little dead flies in the ointment of their common life. They are not careful to keep their word, they are not prompt in paying their debts, they are not watchful of their speech, they are not loyal in their friendships, they are indiscreet in their relations with others, they are wanting in refinement or courtesy, they are rash in their speech, they are resentful – we know how many of these dead flies there are which cause the ointment of some good people’s names to send forth an unsavoury odour.
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