by Claudia Barba

“You’re so sweet!”

The lady who said this to me meant it as a compliment, but in those early days of our ministry, I wasn’t flattered. Sweet meant syrupy and maudlin, sort of slushy, mushy, and squishy. I’d rather have been called capable, competent, or clever. I am wiser now. Now I long to be sweet, because to be genuinely sweet is to be like the One Who gave Himself “an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savor.”

But such sweetness, I have learned, comes from sacrifice and brokenness. The sweet fragrance of the cross, after all, rose from death. When I take up my cross to follow Him, I can expect to die, too. But I don’t die eagerly or easily, and I expect you don’t, either. The only way for either of us to become sweet is to let God do it.

First, I must present myself to Him as a living sacrifice. That’s no great gift, for “in me, that is in my flesh, dwells no good thing.” In my natural state, I’m more like one of those weird substances that perfume-makers collect as bases for expensive scents—odious, disgusting raw materials like ambergris (I’ll spare you the details). He accepts me, though, stinky as I am, and goes to work making me sweet.

The sweetening process involves brokenness. In a perfumer’s lab, herbs, flowers, resins, spices, and aromatic oils are cut, chopped, ground, shredded, crushed, heated, boiled, separated, evaporated, clarified, and concentrated. Those beaten and broken ingredients are then proportioned carefully and blended skillfully into the base until the final product conforms to the master perfumer’s ideal of perfect perfume.

And so the loving Master stirs into my days a precise medley of difficulties, sorrows, disappointments, and heartbreaks, adding them gently and in right measure until I am conformed to the image of the sweet Savior, Who Himself was “stricken, smitten of God and afflicted . . . wounded for our transgressions . . . bruised for our iniquities.”

Only God can make me sweet, but if I let Him, He will—not so that others will praise me, but so that believers and unbelievers alike will detect in me the sweet scent of Christ. As I diffuse His fragrance in every place, He’ll get the glory, not me. And when somebody tells me I’m sweet, I still won’t be flattered. I’ll be grateful.