You vs. the Label

Broadly speaking, the problem with groups is that you’re just another member.

Why do we recoil from labels? Once pronounced, we carry them like scars etched irreparably across our bodies, unwanted signatures from unwanted experts. Whatever you’ve said, whatever you’ve cherished, is nailed neatly down like a taxonomist’s specimen. You confront columns of elaborate classifications: Democrat, Republican, Evangelical, Druid, Emergent, Organic, Generation Y etc. It all starts to sound like a term-paper in a freshman sociology class. You’re not so much a member as a statistic, a chart, a graph, a coordinate. Just look into the mirror and fill in the blank.

We know labels are inevitable. We know groups are as unavoidable as gravity. We know we can’t undo the fact that our family’s lives are so intimately interwoven with our own lives, we can scarcely see where our words end and theirs begin. We know we attend congregations with members whose interests coincide with our own. We know we drink the same coffee as our coworkers. We know that we all push the same glittering travesties up the pop-charts, and hum their glittering travesties in our heads when we go to sleep. Sadly, we know there’s truth in labels.

But we’re not just afraid of the label hiding who we really are from the world. Where not just afraid of being banished permanently to the shadows cast by academic graphs. What we really despise, I think, is the arrogance of the label. The gall of anyone thinking that this frail designation has any authority when it comes to the mystery of identity. When we don’t even know who we are, some smug sage fills in your blank face and turns the page to solve the next problem.

Labels will continue to whistle through the air like arrows. Some will find their mark. But who you are will remain the mystery driving much of your day-to-day toils. The amazing thing about identity is that the answer lies not with, but with others, with someone else. We cannot hope to travel perpetually inward and retain our humanity. We cannot hope to use our own wills as a shield against the way people live in our day and age. Contrary to much popular thought, dusty academics in tweed jackets don’t dream up labels, life does. It’s a relatively small planet, and before you know it, we’ve accumulated some group habits that become popular, and will someday act as mile-markers for later generations (there, I said it).

The Apostle Paul informs us that our lives are hid in Christ (Colossions 3:3). Much of who you truly are will remain a mystery to the world because Christ has chosen to protect it from the world. Your most essential qualities have been stored with the most essential of beings, and it is only once we have chosen to forsake ourselves, forfeit our lives, desert the battle of the labels, and seek His face alone that we will find ourselves because our lives are, after all, not our own, and they are most certainly not the world’s.