You Are More Than the Label

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Sometimes the most dangerous thing we do to one another is reduce an entire human life to one single label.

And honestly, the world does this constantly.

We take complicated people and flatten them into categories:

Successful.
Failure.
Addict.
Divorced.
Too emotional.
Troublemaker.
Too much.
Not enough.

And once a label sticks, it can become very difficult to remove. There is always that sticky residue that comes with it.

As a pastor, as someone who preaches from the Bible, I see this often even within the ancient text. I see the way stories are perceived about communities and people who encountered God and encountered Jesus.

There are two specific stories I want to bring up.

The first is found in the book of Exodus.

The Israelites had just escaped slavery in Egypt after generations of oppression. They had finally walked away from everything that was familiar to them and stepped into the wilderness, hoping God was leading them toward freedom.

But freedom did not feel free immediately.

Because it was a desert.

They were exhausted. They were uncertain. And now they were in a desert with no water. Their children were thirsty. Their livestock were thirsty. So they turned to Moses, their leader, and asked:

“Is God with us or not?”

For generations, people have heard that one comment and labeled this community faithless, ungrateful, grumblers, complainers.

But honestly, if my kids were thirsty, I’d press for some really hard questions too.

If your family, your friends, or your loved ones were thirsty, you would probably ask those same hard questions.

Because this is not a story about bad people.

This is a story about thirsty people.

Real people.

And what does God do in that moment?

God does not meet them with shame.

God tells Moses to strike a rock, and water flows.

God meets them in the middle of their fear and uncertainty with grace.

There is another, more familiar story about labels we have placed on people. It is found in the Gospel of John.

Jesus is traveling through Samaria, a place many Jewish religious leaders avoided at the time because of deep social and ethnic divisions. There, in the heat of the day, Jesus meets a woman at a well.

Culturally, this conversation should never have taken place. A Jewish man speaking publicly to a Samaritan woman was already crossing major social boundaries.

But Jesus begins with a simple request:

“Will you give me a drink?”

Once again, a basic human need: thirst.

What follows is one of the longest and deepest recorded conversations Jesus has with anyone in all of the Gospels.

And yet, for generations, people have reduced this woman to a single label. People have assumed her whole identity can be summed up by her past relationships.

But if you listen closely to the story in John 4, if you really hear her whole story, she is thoughtful. She is smart. She is honest. She is spiritually curious. She asks deep questions about God, worship, and truth.

And by the end of the story, she goes back to her town and tells everyone about Jesus.

The label never told the whole story about who she was.

Because labels rarely tell the truth about who people and communities are.

I experienced this personally just a few weeks ago.

I was at a book launch event — the launch event for Cathedrals of Connection by Matt Mattson, the leader of this BETWEEN ministry. If you have not already ordered a copy, you can find it at cathedralsofconnection.com.

The book launch party took place in my hometown. And as I was in a room filled with amazing people, someone caught my attention.

It was my high school guidance counselor.

In that moment, memories flooded my mind as if I were 17 years old again.

High school was a very difficult season for me. It was a season when a lot of labels got placed on me and attached to me — some of them from other people, and many of them from myself. Labels I quietly carried.

You know how that works?

One familiar face. One familiar place. One scent. And all of a sudden, old stories start rushing back into your mind.

Before I could even process everything I was feeling internally, she made a beeline across the room and embraced me in the biggest, warmest hug.

She said, “I am so proud of you.”

And in that moment, the labels lost their grip.

I cannot fully explain it in words, but something shifted in me. For a moment, I was not being seen through the worst assumptions about who I was.

I was being seen as who I had become.

And even more, I was being seen as who God had been forming all along.

I think that is what we can glean from both of these stories.

I think that is why these stories matter so much.

Because every single day, we stand in the spaces between one another.

Between strangers.
Between neighbors.
Between generations.
Between political differences.
Between assumptions.
Between hurt and healing.
Between who someone was and who they are still becoming.

The world trains us to fill that space quickly with judgment, certainty, and labels.

But God invites us to something else.

We are invited into something more compassionate. Something filled with more presence and more love.

That is the holy work:

To resist reducing people to single labels.

To become curious about stories we do not fully know.

To leave room for grace to exist.

To believe people are more than the worst thing that ever happened to them or the worst thing that was ever said about them.

Because the space between us is sacred.

Amen.