Fearless Faith

One of the most intriguing items in our kitchen/household junk drawer (c’mon, you know you have one) implicates an iconic office necessity, the embossing label maker of old. It’s the one that uses stiff plastic tape and sports a rotary alphabet and number wheel atop a hand-held grip. No batteries for this baby. If you wanted to label something, you had to live with the hard work of squeezing a handle before moving on to the next letter or symbol. It was best not to allow interruptions while creating labels, for misspellings were uncorrectable, usually occurring just as one ran out of plastic tape, long before business supply stores being open into the evening or across weekends became the norm.

How is it that one hand held label maker could inspire such sedition in the household? It likely had much to do with the cost of the embossing cartridges and our propensity to burn through them with little thought. Labels popped up in the most innocuous places. It began with the obvious: tables, chairs, cupboards, tools, toys and pets (yes, pets). I was pretty convinced that my parents were aware we had a fish tank, but it couldn’t hurt to have it positively identified. One never knew what tomorrow might bring. When the inevitable line was drawn regarding usage of the labeler, we took a more pragmatic approach concerning the length of words we were willing to risk. We became masters of abbreviation long before texting shorthand made its entrance via the internet. It was a matter of necessity.

We are at our best as people of faith when we set aside time from label making to focus greater energy and resource where it is needed. Some labels are helpful in guiding us, roadmaps as such, to get us from one point to the next. It is easy to get wrapped up in the notion, however, that just a few clarifying labels are needed. We end up dropping labels that are inappropriate, at times, dangerous. We are people known for core values of temperance, tolerance, and moderation, and still, we allow excessive hurtfulness and distancing because of our reluctance to discard labels that injure and debilitate. They are engrained in us from the earliest ages, in schools, social settings, families and churches. They are easy to acquire and difficult to discard. You know and hear them daily as part of political processes around the world.

How ironic, as label making has developed and improved, it is still a metaphorical issue in far too many of our debates and gatherings, religious and otherwise. We learned at a young age the limitations of label applications. We see and hear it now more than ever. Technology that brings computerization to old processes gains little in our relationships with others if we do not respond faithfully, without rancor or vindictiveness. That requires, in part, a willingness to listen and to be heard as completely as the person next to us. Another way of living? As long as we put the old label maker back in the junk drawer.