As a little girl I loved to examine the exquisite bottles on Grandma’s dresser. She would open one and let me smell its sweet perfume, or wipe a bit of its lotion on my arm. I remember smelling lilacs out of season, and rich aromas that couldn’t be named—except in the creativity of Avon, which made most of them.
One perfume bottle was particularly intriguing: a delicate glass snail, with gilded head and antennae, filled with a luxuriant amber liquid. I picked it up one day and twisted that head away so that I could breathe in its aroma. Grandma turned just then and startled me with her reproof: “No, don’t open that one! It will lose its scent if it’s opened.” Mortified, I hastily sealed it back up again and set it down among the other—evidently less precious—fragrances.
Within a year or two, when I was ten, Grandma died with that perfume still safely encased in the snail’s keeping. I asked my mom if I might have it, and she brought it home to me among the many other treasures she and her siblings had divided. It has sat on my dresser ever since, an ageless sentinel of inaccessible beauty.
After my mom died, I discovered that she, too, had similarly kept treasures she never seized the occasion to use: candles, bath soap, dried apricots, and more. I said then that whatever I kept, I would use. No more holding on for “someday.”
I wonder if something like this was behind Jesus’ defense of the woman who poured out that alabaster jar of very costly ointment (Matthew 26). “If not for me, when?” he might have asked.
Let’s have no more forever sealed bottles, treasures, secrets, churches, hearts. Surely all of those things can be—must be—broken open, and shared, and savored. Surely Christ calls us to that. “Go ahead. For me.” Yes, Lord, yes.
oh, how often do we hold on to things we refuse to use and enjoy and savor. thanks for the reminder. I wonder what I might break open today.