On love and labels

It was my first year in post-seminary ministry, and I had a man who I hardly know drop in my office. He was talking about his crumbling marriage, the challenges he had, how he met his wife in a Pentecostal non-denominational missionary organization. He spent a lot of time talking about spiritual warfare dynamics in his life. He kept talking about how the devil "planted" this thought or that the devil "placed" this opportunity before him. And it was all very interesting. I don't remember all the details of his spiritual warfare theology, except that it seemed that he put a lot of emphasis on angels and demons in his day to day life.

I discussed this with my senior pastor, who was also my most influential mentor in ministry. I compared this man's theology to a Frank Peretti book called this present darkness. Specifically I said, "I am not sure I know how to deal with how to council someone with this self-centered This Present Darkness Theology. My mentor said something back to me in a terse tone and then sent me on my way. He said, "If you want to learn how to understand and reach Larry, you need to understand that Larry does not have a This Present Darkness theology, he has Larry's beliefs." I pushed for more help. He responded, "You asked for my help. Thats it!"

It becomes easy to label people and pigeon hole them. And not always by conventional stereotypes. A lot of time it is by personal experience. As was the case for me here. All my friends in college read this one fantasy book on spiritual warfare and tried to apply it to everything in their lives. I then, in my ministry, quickly moved toward labeling other experiences in the same category. I cannot do that. I need to look at each person and each situation as unique and not compare it to a past situation or a future hope.

We all do the same thing. We compare people to other people in our past. Then we label them. And once we label them, as Kierkegaard said, we negate them. Whether that is in our romantic relationships, our relationships with our supervisor at work, or with relationships with larger groups of people it is easy to label based on our limited experience. We label new romantic interests in comparison to what has happened in the past. We compare one church in our past to the church we are in now. We compare one child to another child or another person. But nobody is just like so and so. They are their own person. And everyone needs to be loved and valued as unique individuals, not a category they are in.