Resist the box

I
was reading in Donald Miller’s book Searching
For God Knows What and he was talking about how we had reduced the Gospel
to a series of bullet points for easier consumption–"The Roman Road"
or "The Four Spiritual Laws." And even though perhaps millions of
people over the last forty or fifty years had had a salvation experience
because of this simplistic distillation of a very complex idea—the fact remains
that the bullets are really only part of the story. Or as Miller states, “Those
would be the facts of the story, but that isn’t the story.”

I
have thought about this principle for years—not necessarily in the spiritual
context but in the human context. Reading the obituaries in the paper, the
writers try their best to encapsulate the essence of a person’s life in the
briefest of terms, “homemaker” “lawyer” “brick mason” “engineer”. I’ve
thought…how sad that the whole of your life should be reduced to fit into the
tiny box of a one word description.

The
eulogies sent in by the family members are only marginally better. They may
provide a few more facts and maybe a little context but nowhere near enough to
give the reader the real essence of a person’s life. Again, they may give the
facts of the story but they don’t tell the story.

To
say that Jesus is “Savior” or “Redeemer” doesn’t really do it—does it? I mean
both of those terms are correct. Yes, He is my savior and He is most certainly
my redeemer. But that doesn’t tell you the full story of who this man is or
what He really means to me. You have to get to know me…you have to hear my
story in order to really understand what Jesus means to me.

We’re
all guilty of constructing these types of shortcuts or “thin slices” (Malcolm
Gladwell’s term from Blink). We want easy “handles” with which to understand
the world (and the people) around us. How many times when meeting someone for
the first time do we either seek out or provide those one-word obituary
words—Father, Contractor, Pastor, Doctor, Postman? Once we’ve got a box to put
someone in we can make all sorts of assumptions about them. “Oh, you’re a
lawyer?” or “So, you graduated from Notre Dame?” or “Hmm. You live on the west
side?”

In
the same way that there’s no way you can reduce the full character and nature
and person of Jesus to one word, I maintain you and I can’t be boxed up that
way either. Remember, we were created in His image—with many facets, many
layers—a mysterious landscape just waiting to be explored.

Resist
the box. Resist the thin slice and the one-word tag. Don’t short-change
yourself (or others) by describing yourself that way and don’t buy in to the
assumptions when others use the short cut about themselves. What is your
story…the one you are telling every day that you live on this earth?

My
goal is to give the poor copywriter assigned to write my obit writers block. That
he’d sit back in his chair staring at the blinking cursor on his blank screen, scratch
his head and think, “how in the world can I put this guy’s life in just a word
or two?”