Sometimes the most beautiful things can stink

This is the Titan Arum, a very beautiful and gargantuan bloom that no doubt gives pleasure to many people, both because of its rarity and its colour. It can go for many years without flowering. In some ways it compares to the Biblioblogs top 50. No doubt, bloggers articulating complex, scholarly thoughts on a range of exegetical issues are adding colour to the varied hues that make up the theosphere and can be doing so for years. Blooming into fullness and bursting into the ranks of the Top 50 can be a rare thing and no doubt something to take great pleasure in. However, time there can be fleeting, you bloom one month but are gone the next, with your Alexa sap rising and falling, much beyond your control.

Now, what I did not tell you about the Titan Arum is that it is also capable of making the most almighty stink. Its smell is quite abhorrent and in this too I believe that it counsels us in its metaphorical application, for what is the point of joining this erudite and godly 'fraternity,' if you end up speaking words to one another which fail to exude the fragrance of Christ? There would have to be something quite deformed about you as the Latin name of this plant reveals. It is also known as the Amorphophallus, which, for those of you quite adept with your learned languages, takes little working out.

Another amazing feature of this plant is that it literally steams at night, generating heat all by itself, can I caution us that unlike the Amorphophallus, we should be producing light not heat.

The May list for the biblioblogging Top 50 is beautiful but a little stinky, much heat is being generated. No doubt this thing will soon die away and we will wait for 30 days to see who blooms next month but in the meantime 'let us reason together', as the prophet Isaiah teaches us else 'instead of perfume there will be rottenness' (Isaiah 3:24). And none of us want that.


Rachel