The Smell of Hope and the Smell of . . . well . . . Something Else

A guest pastor at a church I once attended preached a sermon on hope. He spoke of hard times for his family and his people when he was a youth. But in the midst of that hardship, he said, there was hope. He knew this because he could smell it. Many was the afternoon when he would arrive home from school or from the fields to be welcomed by that smell. The smell of beans and cornbread cooking was, for him, the smell of hope. He went on to say that once he was eating those beans it was no longer hope. That was something altogether different.