Labels

How many labels a day do you see? I'm not talking about the labels on your food. I'm not talking about the labels on your clothes. I'm talking about the labels we place on people and the ones placed on us. I have been thinking a lot about labels lately. I remember going to the Women of Faith conference and seeing a sketch (skit) done of a lady who was highly organized and labeled everything. Her label maker was her best friend. It turns out that she was mentally labeling people too. For some reason the thought of that skit came back to my mind recently. Why do we label everyone?! I brought this subject up with a small group of teen girls that I meet with and they confirmed that from a young age they have had labels placed on them. Some good, some not so good. These things that people say or imply about us last for years.

I noticed right after Hurricane Irene came through that there were piles and piles of debris on the side of the road. This is normal after a hurricane on the coast of NC and normally I wouldn't think anything of it. I drove through a neighborhood and thought about how just a day before that debris had been called a tree. Probably a beautiful tree in some cases. Oaks, pines, willows. Pretty simple, I konw. Then I thought, all it took was for one big storm to come along and what was once labeled a beautiful tree is now called debris. What an ugly sounding word. Say it outloud. The storms in our own lives sometimes name us the same thing or worse. I guess what we chose to do with that name is whether it'll stick around our entire lives. I pray that when the storms of my life come that my actions and reactions will cause the tree of my life to grow new branches that will grow and become stronger for the next storm.