As I pulled out my phone to video my granddaughters whipping up batches of brightly colored slime, ever-precocious Elle launched into a pitch-perfect imitation of a YouTube personality.
“Hello guuuys. I am Elle (big toothy grin) and this is (pointing to her cousin) Emmy. You may know her as a (several second pause) PERSON.”
I chuckled in the moment at Elle’s fall back on the obvious after struggling for a catchier descriptor of her cousin. But as I’ve re-run in my mind Elle’s word choice, I’ve not thought of a better, more generous identifier than to refer to Emerson as “a person.”
As William Taylor writes in his recently released book Simply Brilliant: How Great Organizations Do Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Ways, “People deserve to be treated like people.” He continues, “If I don’t know you and you don’t know me, then how do we have a real conversation?”
Or anything else of much consequence for that matter.
In the day-to-day, we jump to conclusions about the folks we encounter based on externals – their work, accents, skin color, education, marital status, political or religious affiliations, and the like. Labels serve as proxies for actually knowing something, anything, real about the people around us. What we see is what we go on and most of the time, we’re not much interested in digging deeper.
However, as Christ-followers we should know that relying on easy labels or shallow assumptions is not the Jesus way. As the Gospels tell it, Jesus didn’t come simply to seek and to save. He came to know, deeply and without reservation, the ones to and for whom he was sent.
Despite the urgency of his ministry, Jesus refused the temptation to go by the labels of his time. Jesus dealt with people as people, not as caricatures or archetypes. Where others saw a man lame from birth or a woman taken in adultery, a cheating tax collector of short stature or a thief on a cross, Jesus saw a person worth knowing, a person created in the image of God.
To have God say, “I know you as a person,” was, is, and forever will be enough.
No catchier descriptor needed.