The Pastor’s Piece – Pastor Kevin Cernek, FCFI Chaplain
March 8, 2026
“Making Sense of the Scents”
There’s a lady in our church that wears a certain perfume that my wife likes. My wife would frequently tell her how good her perfume smelled. One day I received an email from this particular lady with the name of the perfume and where to buy it. I was not expecting that, but my wife’s birthday was coming up, so I thought, “What a good idea. She’s sending me this so I can buy my wife some of that sweet-smelling perfume for her birthday.” So I went online and ordered it.
Well, later that day, my wife was looking for a certain email from a place of business and she couldn’t find it in her email so she wondered if maybe they had sent it to me, so she checked my email. Oh, I forgot to mention, our nephew was staying with us for a couple of months, so I had them send the perfume to our address with his name on the package. That way, my wife wouldn’t inadvertently open it and ruin the surprise. While searching, she saw the email and thought our nephew had ordered some expensive perfume. She asked me why he would be buying perfume, since he didn’t even have a girlfriend and she wondered how he could afford to pay so much for it. (It wasn’t cheap, but if you can’t splurge on your wife’s birthday, when can you?) She thought he had a secret girlfriend he wasn’t telling us about. I told her she would have to talk to him about it.
In the meantime, I let my nephew know what had happened. He said, “Don’t worry Uncle Kevin. I’ve got this.” So that night over supper, sure enough, she started interrogating him about the perfume.
“Who is it for? Why did you buy it so early before Christmas? How can you afford it? Why did you have it sent here?
He wasn’t lying, at least not yet anyway – he was ready for her. He told her he bought it for his mom for Christmas. It was sent to our house because if he put his address on it and tried to hide it, his mom would find it because she’s good at finding Christmas presents. He bought it early because he didn’t want to forget and then have it arrive late. He could afford it because he and his dad were going in on it together for his mom. And he had it sent to our email because he didn’t want her to find out about it.
In the meantime, I was able to thank the church lady for sending me that email.
“Because of that email,” I told her proudly, “I came up with the idea to get her that perfume for her birthday.”
“What email?” she said rather curtly, “I didn’t send you an email. I sent that to your wife.”
It turns out, she sent it to me totally by accident. She had no intention of dropping hints to me about what to get my wife for her birthday. I thanked her just the same.
When my wife’s birthday rolled around, I gave her the perfume and told her the story. She was impressed to say the least. Sometimes that’s how God works too. This whole situation started with a mistake and what looked like confusion at first, turned into a perfect gift. The end result was that my wife received something she truly loved, and the whole story made it humorous and even more memorable. God sometimes lets us live through confusing chapters of our lives so that the final outcome becomes a greater blessing than we expected.
(Kevin Cernek is Lead Pastor of Martintown Community Church in Martintown, Wisconsin)