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I Smell Smoke...

“The smoke of the incense, together with the prayers of the saints,
went up before God from the angel's hand.”

~Revelation 8:4~

Smoke always means something.   Sitting on our back porch recently, the smell of barbeque smoke captured my attention. Somebody was cooking up something really good, something inviting, and I wanted to follow the smoke and maybe make some new friends---- and maybe help them eat whatever tasty stuff was on the grill. I chickened out and let my thoughts just mingle with the powerful smell of the smoke.

I was thinking about recent conversations with friends who seem to be attempting a balance between the positives of life and the negatives of life, calling it being a realist.   Is being a realist keeping one hand on the negatives and the other on the positives?

I remember the day in Indonesia when one of the light switches wasn’t working, so I took it apart. Under the cover, I discovered a fried Gecko.    The little lizard had managed to put one leg on the positive terminal and the other on the negative and he became a fried gecko. If being a realist is about keeping a balance between the negative and the positive, I smell smoke.

The word “smoke” shows up 12 times in the book of Revelation. In Revelation 8:4 it is compared with the prayers of the saints. It strikes me that Paul said we should not be anxious, worried, or negative about anything but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, to present our requests to God (Phil. 4:6). That strikes me as living prayerfully positively charged. The Psalmist spoke of smoke as evidence of God’s touch when he wrote, “Part your heavens, O Lord, and come down; touch the mountains, so that they smoke” (Ps 144:5).

I’m thinking about those two pictures of smoke today, prayers of the saints and God’s touch. The rising incense like positive praise-filled prayers joined with the contact of God. That’s much more than just positive thinking, and its far better than the smell of barbeque.

“And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.”

~Revelation 5:8~

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