“You can enter God’s Kingdom only through the narrow gate. The highway to hell is broad, and its gate is wide for the many who choose that way. But the gateway to life is very narrow and the road is difficult, and only a few ever find it.”

When we are onto something, or getting close to what we are pursuing that has been eluding us for some time, we might say, “We are picking up the scent.”  This comes from hunting dogs that would hunt and track, like foxhounds or bloodhounds.  These dogs are trained to pick up the scent and then they take their intelligence and inbred olfactory skills to do just that.  We’d like to think we can train people to pick up the scent of business success and decision making, but we can’t. We can provide pattern recognition, experience and training, but those who can pick up the scent are rare.  If we are lucky enough to have someone on our team who has this skill, don’t ignore them.  The scent won’t always be right, but it’s worth listening to what they have to say.

The world is full of scents and we must be careful that we don’t allow ourselves to pick up the wrong one.  This is another reason that Jesus said that the way to Him is narrow. The scents of freedom, independence, self-reliance, achievement while in themselves are not all bad, if they become our paths then we run the risk of moving astray from our Father and making decisions that are of our world.  Our enemy would like nothing more than today provide us a scent that pulls us away.

Reference: Matthew 7:13-14 (New Living Translation)