Categotry Archives: Meanderings (look it up)

In a recent post, “Label Schmabel“, I talked about how I no longer feel comfortable with most of the labels I once associated with my faith. I won’t go into it all again here; read it if you need to catch up. 🙂

But toward the end of the post, I mentioned that there was one label I was still okay with–the word “Christian.” And I thought today I’d like to ‘splain why.

I’ve recently come to realize that I’ve been having a bit of an identity crisis.

(And all the regular readers said in unison…”DUH!”)

No, really. I mean…I know I’m feeling the “being over 40” thing, but I’m not really talking about “mid-life” crisis here. Although it’s pretty amazing that this is happening at this stage of my life. Talk about timing. 🙂

You see, I’ve spent my whole life wearing some sort of label, some identification tag by which other people (especially Christians) could know what camp I stood with, what I believed, what the practice of my faith looked like. Actually, I’ve worn quite a few of these labels, so it’s not like I’ve stuck with one my whole life. I’ve changed name badges numerous times. Even so, I’ve felt okay as long as I was wearing some label. Or maybe it wasn’t the label itself, but the group of people that the label identified. Wearing the label made me feel…like I belonged.

As we’ve been discussing church leadership this week in general, and the clergy-laity thing in particular…I’ve expressed a lot of thoughts about what leadership in the church should not look like. I’ve offered the opinion that despite the abuses we’ve seen, human leadership is still Biblical–but I haven’t given much detail as to how such a thing is fleshed out. And I guess primarily that’s because I haven’t got a stinking clue because this is still formulating in my own heart as I’m in the beginning stages of re-learning.

One thing about delivering flowers is that you often get to see people in their natural habitat. When you go to someone’s home with flowers, they usually aren’t expecting you, so you’re seeing the “real deal”–what the house looks like when they aren’t expecting anyone, what they look like when they aren’t expecting anyone–you’re catching life as it happens for them. And I’ve seen some very interesting things along the way. 🙂

Take, for example, the last delivery of the day on Friday. I pulled up to a fairly small piece of property in a rural area, fenced in with wire fencing, plastered with signs that read, “No Tresspassing”, “Keep Out”, “Armed Guard on Duty”, “Beware of Dog”. (Yes, all those signs were there.) Enclosed by the fence was this chaotic, junked-up enigma of a place–sheds that looked like they were made of scrap metal, the remains of a stripped car sitting in the tall grass, and so much clutter you couldn’t even tell if there was a house back behind it that someone could live in. I don’t think it was officially a junkyard, but it could have been.