All day, a strange odor wafts through the entryway, the kitchen, the living room, and the hallway. I’m actually on my knees, sniffing to discover the source.
“Can you smell that?” I ask everyone who comes by the house.
Finally, I trace the odor to the corner of the garage where I spy a tiny hole in the wall. My husband comes home, and I just point my finger and declare, “Something is in there.”
I run to safety inside the house (I’m a chicken) and leave my brave and wonderful husband alone in the garage. With a flashlight and tools to cut into the wall, he finds the source of the impossibly foul and impressively permeating smell.
A tiny, deceased chipmunk.
Within a few minutes of removing the odor source, the entire atmosphere changes.
All morning, I consider the power of that one small thing to overtake the whole environment. That little thing became impossibly foul and impressively permeating. I thought of my own life and those small things that inevitably change the atmosphere: negativity, complaining, gossip, suspicion–all the not-flair that can overtake a life.
I’m on a mission to search and root out the smallest things that I imagine cannot really harm. Actually, they do. They quickly become impossibly foul and impressively permeating. Living with flair means removing that odor source. I pray God shows me quickly and thoroughly.
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Journal: What foul smelling thing do we need to remove in our lives?