The world is obsessed with labels - designer tags, fancy-sounding job titles, social groups, personality types, even denominations... It's so easy to put someone in a box marked "geek", "old person", "drunk" or "delinquent".
Listen carefully and you will hear people handing out labels every time they describe someone. "She's a (fill in the blank)" etc. It certainly makes things simple. The label conjures up a picture and helps us find the right mental file for that person.
Those of us who follow Jesus are just as bad. We glibly label things "Christian" and somehow that makes them good??! Stop and think - you can probably recall a dozen other labels you've heard, or even used yourself to describe people.
I do it too. But the more I think about it, the more I want to rebel.
Labels lead to assumptions. We add two and two and we're sure we know the answer. That person must be successful. This person can't be trusted... and so on. We stop trying to understand because we are convinced we already know.
Labels lead to divisions. People in one group are "in"; others are "out". One group won't talk to another group because they bear a different label.
Even Jesus resisted being labelled. When the rich man called Him "Good Teacher", Jesus replied, "Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone."
So in VOX magazine we're going to resist simplistic labels. We recognise that life is complex - and people are more so. We won't always be able to pin everything down. And we don't want to file people away in boxes.
It might make things difficult, but at least we'll be dealing in three dimensions!
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3 comments:
Ruth, I love this piece!
Roberta
Labels are part of what it is to be human. As you can't possible expect to be able to commit the time to assess everyone in a completely unbiased way, you need the ability to be able to use past judgments and experiences based on people from similar backgrounds, ages, faiths etc. and use this as a yardstick. So I disagree that we should not use lables but I feel we should be more open to reassessing and changing these lables once you get a chance to know someone. It has been my personal experience that some people do not like to reassess because they are afraid that it might affect their own image and world view.
Thanks. This is a good point!
RGW (aka The Editor)
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