“Where on earth is that smell coming from?” I caught the slightest waft entering the garage. But now, opening the driver’s side door, the cab of my truck seems a more obvious source. I don’t remember noticing the scent when I parked in the garage last night. And now that I’m sitting in the truck, the odor is gone. This olfactory experience—perfume-ish veering antiseptic—carries no there’s-a-dead-animal-somewhere-in-the-garage urgency, but it does pose the disquieting suggestion of masking something else.
Paul’s description of our scent, our odor, is also complex: “But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life.”
The distraction now dissipated along with the scent, I reach for the steering wheel. And there it is: the smell, and the reminder of its source. Earlier Sunday morning, realizing I did not have my own essentially odorless anti-perspirant, knowing I am just shy of hyperhidrotic when preaching, I rummaged through the medicine cabinet and quietly borrowed my wife’s (pleasantly) scented deodorant (a fact she is learning as she reads this). I am where on earth that smell is coming from.
And so are you. Christ wants everyone to sense his fragrance through us—a reminder of provision to the faithful, of need to the as-yet unredeemed.
To a week smelling more like heaven than the earth around us.