Does love smell like candles and roses or pot roasts and potatoes? Or perhaps, something quite different?

The stench of urine was strong as I opened the office door--intense, out of place, as if I were entering a primitive privy. I followed the odor to its source; an early teen sitting on her father’s lap. She was content, secure. He was oblivious, carrying on a conversation with another person while gently holding his daughter. She looked briefly at me and returned to her own world. He interrupted himself and greeted me. And I remembered what he had told me on another day.

A serious health crisis at birth had left her without the hope of ever being normal physically or mentally. Diapers were the way of life and midnight hospital runs were not uncommon. He spoke, surprisingly without embarrassment, of having to care for her very private needs as adolescence changed her body from a child’s to a young woman’s. He loved her, cared for her, and thoroughly enjoyed her as she was. I had thought him to be a great father and now I knew it to be true.

That chance encounter has troubled me. I know what it implies and I don’t like it. It’s as if Jesus had spoken a parable that turned everything upside down, as He often did in the Gospels: the outcast is the friend; the last is the first; the pauper is in paradise while the rich man is in Hell. The human parable seems clear: I am the girl who reeks of urine. I am the one who can offer nothing and costs everything. I am the one who should be an embarrassment, but am cared for and loved. And respected—not for what I do, but for who I am—a child of the Father.

I know of only one verse that speaks of “rights” specifically given without respect to a position of responsibility. Dignity and value are strongly implied for all because we are made in the image of God. The poor, the orphan, the widow, and the prisoner deserve our compassion and care, but do not have a “right” to it. We are commanded to treat them well and to not do so angers God. And in the Bible, there is no right of free speech, or to assemble, or to bear arms. There is a much more important one…

Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—(John 1:12)

I thought I had many rights, but I really have only one. Scholars can write learned books about it, preachers can speak about it. But a disabled girl and her daddy explained it to me. I have the right to become a child of God, to be loved by Him and to give what love I can in return—however flawed it is.

In this parable, love smelled like urine. It looked like a daddy who didn’t choose to notice. It felt like security and peace in one who was unable to deal with any of life’s complexities. The reality of being a child of God: Unexpected. Disturbing. My highest privilege, my only right.