And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? Luke 18:8 (TJANT)
Labels Are Like Material Possessions – Widows and Judges Series – Part 6
Go to PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5 | PART 6
To wrap it all up, a final word on labels.
Every single day in a thousand different ways, tragedy, terror, hatred and violence fill up the space between souls. On a more subtle and less tangible level, we hold our differences up against each other like barriers, convinced of our separateness. Convinced of our personal “rightness.” Convinced that we are owed.
And we’ll do anything to make sure we get it.
“Labels are like material possessions: they are necessary, but we don’t need to give them as much meaning as we often do.“ – The Minimalists ( Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus).
Labels are necessary. Our brains receive up to six billion bits of information PER SECOND! (yep). But cognitively, we can only process around three thousands bits of information per second (ready for a break now).
Labels help us file all this information in our brains efficiently, but they get tricky when we rely on them too heavily with one another. There is always more to a person, a story, life, culture, religion, than their/its label.
Our great challenge as humans trying to live the best we can in this crazy, beautiful, multifaceted world where we believe in free speech and freedom of religion and the right to be treated with dignity, is to live beyond our labels of each other. Dig into them. Find out the story, the detail, the personality, the situations, and circumstances. There is so much MORE to you and me than the labels we get filed under in the minds of others, and the labels we file others under.
I’m a Christian. Yes. It’s a label that can be applied to me, stuck to my chest. But it's a label I sometimes loathe to wear. To be honest, there are some who share this label with me, yet we share little else – our faith and lives and ideas and values and stories and practices couldn’t be further from each other. But if you only stick to labels, you wouldn’t know it.
You have to ask deeper questions of people. You have to get interested in what's under the label. What lives and breathes and moves in the blood, bone, and breath of a human.
We have to ask: is there more to the widow, the judge, and justice, then their labels?
And what do we do when we find out what that something “more” is?
That's why we need to be faithful to prayer; being awake, aware and alive to the presence of God in us and others. Why we need to challenge ourselves to dig deeper than stereotypes, and perhaps dig deeper when we want revenge; try and find something else to finish the story with.
So is it, that this parable about the Widow and the Judge, is a subversive tale of labels and justice, to keep on praying and be faithful?
Or is just that if an unjust judge can grant the weakest-of-the-weak favor, how much more so will the Divine who is not unjust grant all of us justice?
Perhaps as we turn the gem of scripture (a nod to Part 1 of this series) in the different lights of our lives and seasons, it’s both.
Written by Lizzy Milani
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