Our senses of smell are much better than we think they are. Humans can smell an odor-producing compound that exists at a level of 2 parts per billion of the air around them. Humans can actually smell at lower densities than dogs can.¹ We just don’t know it. 

I was listening to an interview with a perfume expert and she told this story:

I was at a party, [and] a woman came in who was hugging everybody and she smelled really good. A number of people told her that she smelled good. And I said, “Okay, I can tell you that she’s wearing this particular brand. And it’s from this many years ago. And the reason that she smells cozy and snug is because it’s got a lot of ionones in it. And she smells sort of like orris, which is the aged root of the Florentine iris flower. And it’s got a sort of a powdery feeling so she smells like a hug.” And everyone’s looking at me and I was like, “I’m not smelling any more than you are. I just have the words to tell you what the brand is, when it came out, and what’s in it.”

I’m not smelling any more than you are. I just have the words to tell you.

All of us have a much more powerful sense of smell than we tend to realize, the issue is that we don’t have a good vocabulary for it. Because we don’t know how to talk about it, we undervalue it, and miss out on a whole world around us. 

All of us who work in church work should recognize this problem. 

My husband and I were driving home from church a few weeks ago, and we were talking about the service. It had been incredibly powerful, with the normally reserved mainline congregation interrupting the preacher with amens, and spontaneous applause bursting from the congregation at the sermon’s close. I remarked to my husband that I was deeply moved, that I hadn’t seen the Holy Spirit show up so clearly in a service in a while, talked about how I could almost feel the moment that our pastor seemed to transcend the words on his notes, and be completely aligned with what he was called to say to that room. How the music leader joined in on the movement by changing his communion hymn, and how the congregation, unprompted, sang along. 

My husband (who is a programmer, not a pastor) looked out the windshield, deep in thought. I asked him what was on his mind. He said,

“It was a really good sermon… I’m trying to play it back through my head, because I’m realizing I don’t know how to see what you see.” 

It occurs to me now that I wasn’t smelling any more than he was, I just had the words for it. 

In academic work, my professional work, and my relationships with other church leaders, I have spent enough time talking about, thinking about, and reading about all the ways that God shows up in a room that I have honed the sense for it. 

This isn’t meant to be any kind of personal brag. I am confident that the church leaders reading my description of the service knew exactly what I was talking about. If we’re lucky, we’ve had the experience of preaching, teaching, or praying where we knew what we needed to say, or what we needed to do, and have felt a room move in a way that can’t be described away by good worship design. We have seen lives change in a way that can only be explained by the work of our good God. We felt calls into ministry, and calls into new ways of doing it, and to so much more. All of us, to at least some extent, have enough vocabulary and practice to notice, describe, and understand the meaning of what’s happening when the scent of God wafts into the room. 

My husband is a good and faithful Christian, but he struggled to identify the movement of the Spirit in a room he was in because he didn’t have the words to describe it. Being able to notice the movement of God, is sense you hone, something built more on vocabulary and practice than on talent or intuition. And it is a skill worth honing. Being able to notice the movement of God provides us not only guidance and comfort, but a richer, more powerful understanding of where God is acting in the world around us. It allows us to understand the world with a whole new dimension of compassion, purpose, and grace. 

So how do we hone this skill in ourselves, and how do we teach it to others?

1. Introduce it early

 This sense of God is something that is more easily acquired as a child. Children have a natural penchant towards this kind of meaning-making, but it is often drowned out by pressures towards concrete answers as we age. Allowing children to wonder out loud and with adults about where God is at work, and responding in kind, is the best way to build a foundation for noticing God in the world. If you’re interested in resources, our friends at the Center for Youth Ministry Training have developed an entire curriculum series around this concept.² 

2. Practice on your own 

This is a skill best honed by consistent practice. If you have a journaling or spiritual discipline practice, adding in a time where you describe where you sensed God’s movement throughout the day (and how you could tell) will help build both your capacity to notice it, and your vocabulary to describe it. 

3. Normalize it in daily conversation 

Perhaps I was alone in this, but when I worked at a church, I didn’t actually talk about God that much. I talked about lessons, sermons, programs, pastoral care concerns, the leak in the ceiling, but the actual ways I felt God moving in my life and my work didn’t come up often, even among a workplace full of people that I knew would have been open to talking about it. If you’re lucky enough to be in community with other Christians in your friend groups, your home, or your workplace, don’t make the same mistake I did. There is so much to learn by noticing God with the people around you. Like sommeliers comparing tasting notes, we can help each other taste new things.

In the interview I was listening to, the scent experts explained that when you develop this sense, this skill, a whole new world opens up. We have a whole new dimension to use to engage with the world. This new sense of smell can transform how we perceive the world and unlock layers of meaning, wonder, and joy we would have completely missed. 

If that’s true about our noses –  how much more must it be about our sense of God? 

1. Articles of Interest, Season 2, Episode 9, “Perfume” ↩︎
2. This is not an affiliate link, we don’t get a kick-back for this. ↩︎