The Aroma of Heaven: Leaving a Legacy that Spreads the Fragrance of Christ

Dear Friends,

This month I’m thinking about the type of legacy I want to leave. As I do so, I think about the people in my life who have been an aroma of heaven to me. I’d love to hear from you: who are the people in your life who have left an aroma of heaven? You can leave a comment here.

My Grandmother

She smelled like Tollhouse cookies, Parker house rolls, and Lanvin dusting powder. That was my grandmother’s scent. But her aroma, the legacy she left me, was of a safe and secure place, a place of comfort and rest, a place of hospitality and feasting. It was the aroma of heaven.

Widowed in her early sixties, my grandmother continued teaching fifth grade after my grandfather’s death. When she retired, she became active in the Retired Teacher’s Association. She also served as the president of the Baptist Women’s Association. She cared for her mother, my great-grandmother Mama Mac, in her home until Mama Mac’s death at age ninety.

As a child, I never thought of my grandmother as a widow or as a working grandmother or as an association president or as a caregiver. To me she was just “Grandmom.” She baked tray after tray of Shake ’n Bake and served it up to her two hungry grandchildren with mounds of fresh corn and garden peas and dozens and dozens of her famous rolls. For dessert there were peach parfaits and chocolate cake, Tollhouse cookies and chess pie. She was Grandmom, who kept us for a month every summer and took us to church and Sunday school and VBS and the church library. She was Grandmom, who provided lined paper pads for me to practice my penmanship and all sorts of supplies to play my favorite game, school. She was Grandmom, who fed me, who taught me, who played with me, who created for me a home that smelled like heaven.

Later, when I became a Christian at age fifteen, I knew my grandmother as my kindred spirit, my ally, the one person in my family who read a Bible and went to church and prayed to God above and did “Christian” things. She was the one I could count on to be excited about my growing faith, the one who encouraged me by example, the one who lived as a fragrant offering to Christ.

Now that I am a grandmother, I wonder how my grandmother felt when her only son got divorced after eleven years of marriage. Now I wonder how she felt about her only two grandchildren growing up in a home where the only Bible sat collecting dust on a bookshelf.

My grandmother, grandfather, brother and me, circa 1966,

A Living Sacrifice

Though I don’t know how she felt, given my grandmother’s fierce determination, I can guess what she did. She lifted the incense of prayer to the heavens. She came home after a day of teaching fifth graders and prepared a feast for her grandchildren. She helped her mother wash up for the night and then, though she must have been exhausted herself, made sure her grandchildren got baths before bed. She said prayers over them before collapsing for the night. She became a living sacrifice, and in so doing, “spread the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere” (2 Corinthians 2:14). This was my grandmother’s legacy.

I don’t know about you, but this is the kind of legacy I want to leave. In a world in which the focus of leaving a legacy is often on making a name for ourselves, I want to throw off the stench of self-centeredness so that I can spread the fragrant aroma of heaven. How do we become people who leave a legacy that is less about our small stories and more about the One who wrote our stories into his Big Story? We do so by becoming sacrificial offerings, pleasing aromas to God (Ephesians 5:1-2). We do so by living out our unique giftedness and passions in ways that draw others to inhale the fragrance of Christ. We do so by repenting when we sin and by living lives characterized by seeking and granting forgiveness. We do so by exhaling the pure, fresh air of our righteousness in Christ.

Living Our Legacy

We do so by asking God for the power to live the legacy we wish to leave, as each of the following women do.

I know a woman who prays aloud every time she passes a car accident, asking God to heal the broken, comfort the traumatized, and help the rescue workers. Her family and friends learn from her example that prayer is the first, not last, resort in times of crisis.

I know a woman who, at ninety-years-old, still makes it to Bible study most weeks. With trembling hands she turns the tattered pages of her worn leather Bible, finding today’s passage. The women in her group long to love God’s Word as much as she does.

I know a woman who at eighty-two-years-old used to hobble her way through a downtown Atlanta park to attend the monthly service for the homeless held there by her church. When she died, one of the homeless women who had known her for years sent her family a song she had written and performed, honoring this woman’s compassion for the downtrodden.*

I know a woman who still says a four-letter word that starts with s (almost) every time she runs her head into a cabinet or has to come to an abrupt stop in traffic. She blames her cussing on her childhood and neural wiring and prays the word won’t slip out in front of her grandchildren. But when it does, she frankly tells them that Zizi is a sinner and has used her tongue for much worse purposes. She asks their forgiveness and urges them to pray for her to use her tongue wisely and well. She hopes, by God’s grace, that her grandchildren will remember that their grandmother was a sinner, but a forgiven sinner, and that their grandmother’s story will give them hope for their own struggle with sin.

Each of these women is leaving a legacy that spreads the aroma of heaven.

In his book on growing “deeper” into the love of Christ, Pastor Dane Ortlund urges us to “oxygenate” with the Bible, breathing in the steadying and steadfast good news of the gospel. He urges us to “exhale” in prayer, “[speaking] back to God your wonder, your worry, and your waiting.” He encourages us with this hope, “As you do, you will grow. You won’t feel it day to day. But you’ll come to the end of your life a radiant, solid man or woman. And you will have left in your wake the aroma of heaven. You will have blessed the world. Your life will have mattered.”[i]

At my grandmother’s funeral, I delivered the eulogy. I wanted to make sure that everyone knew that my grandmother’s life mattered, not because she won the Teacher of the Year award, not because she cooked delicious yeast rolls, and not even because she was a loving grandmother. My grandmother’s life mattered because she wore the fragrance of Christ, and she left behind the scent of good news. This is the legacy that makes life matter. This is the legacy I hope to leave. What about you?

Who in your life has left the aroma of heaven? How did they do so?

*This woman was my mother.