What does love smell like?

A friend visiting our Sunday services had a bad three weeks. The electricity of the apartment block where he stays has been cut off for that whole period due to mismanagement. This, to put it lightly, is making it difficult for him to shower or cook. He has basically been living off bread.

I saw him again this morning and I was a bit frustrated with the difficulty I had connecting with him. We have many differences: background, skin colour, favourite sports, language, age, material wealth, the list goes on. Today I realised that my skills to relate across these lines have embarrassing deficiencies. To say even more (and this I’m not proud off), his body odour, obviously testifying of the tricky conditions of the past weeks, was offensive to me. I remembered something...

~~~

Zimbabwe in July 1998 - a group of us visited a town called Shishavane to support a small congregation. As part of the trip, we also visited the rural areas in Mberengwa for two days. There I lent a sweater to one of the locals on an evening that fitted the season quite well. Given the scarcity of running water, people in Mberengwa didn’t really shower too often. My sweater became the garment with which the stranger partied around the bonfire the whole night.

I got it back in the early morning hours as he went home. It smelled horrible! For a while there, I was totally disgusted! Feeling pretty akward, I offered a complaint/apology-combo to a good friend of mine, who wisely commented something like this: “Interesting this smell of, wait…I think its love!” I wore that sweater for the rest the night and the day after with a complete new appreciation of servanthood. And gratitude for what God is teaching me.

~~~

What does it smell like to love and to be unselfish? What does it smell like to be a servant? For a moment there this morning, I almost forgot that!