All Boxed In
Many a mama has been relieved when an expert finally gives her a label for a child’s learning disability, such as dysgraphia or dyslexia or ADHD. She is glad finally to have an explanation for the difficulty the child has been having in certain areas of learning. In such circumstances a label can be helpful.
A person may have dysgraphia, but that doesn’t mean he or she should be boxed into a dysgraphia label that comes to define him or her as a person. How unkind that would be. Every child with every type of learning style is a person who is much more than a label. He or she is a whole person created in the image of God.
A Country Lad by Winslow Homer, 1873
Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution,
Gift of Charles Savage Homer, Jr.
Likewise, no one should be permanently labeled even by some sin they have committed. A major component of the good news of Jesus is that people can change. Drunkards become sober. Swindlers become honest business people. Adulterers become faithful husbands and wives. This is the message of 1 Corinthians 6. In verses 9 and 10, the apostle Paul lists several sins. Then he tells the Corinthians:
Such were some of you;
but you were washed, but you were sanctified,
but you were justified
in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ
and in the Spirit of our God.
1 Corinthians 6:11
People often label other people as selfish or bossy or stubborn or defiant or obsessive or rigid or insensitive or say simply, “She has issues.” We should be extremely careful about labeling people of any age. Sometimes a label feels like a box you can’t get out of.
If someone gets tagged with a label, the label should give us insight into how better to love and serve him or her. A label should never become a hammer used to crush them or fuel for flaming darts.
Affixing a label and allowing it to define a person doesn’t allow for that person to grow and change.
If a person lived for a while as a thief and went to prison for their crimes and later came out of prison a changed person who follows Jesus, is that person still a thief? Of course not.
We need to be careful to see past the labels given to children and adults and see each person as a precious individual God created. We all need transformation—those people with labels and those without.
Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.
Romans 12:1-2