I don’t ever want to be someone’s “artsy friend.”

The sum total of who I am cannot be grasped easily, since much of the equation is hidden far below the surface and is not even understood by me.

A recent conversation (which was flippant and forgettable in every way) reminded me of the mechanism which allows us to collect people: We relegate them to a stereotype, sometimes almost listing them as credentials. Once they have a label, we can collect them.

We are both willing to label and be labeled, and it is often exhibited the worst by people who lay claim to being open-minded. The proof of open-mindedness is, seemingly, the ability to have a long list of friends and experiences according to these labels. The one with the best variety in their collection wins.

I make for a very poor collectible.

We’re encouraged to try everything and embrace everything  and look everywhere and wear every label and march to some kind of cause in an attempt to find our identity so that we may say “this is who I am, and this is what I do.” We are told to accept who we are and go with that flow. Nowhere are we encouraged to stop midstream and defy the current and say “I am not, and will not, even if I fight to the end.”

I refuse. I am more than I am not, for one thing. Labels are, if anything, useful for categorizing what is excluded.

This conversation was with a younger person, someone who has yet to learn to see people beyond the surface in that way that gets past all the accouterments and stubborn insistence and says “I can hear past what you’re saying, what you’re wearing, and what you’re doing.” This only comes through time, which has allowed me personally, at least, to find the labels I adhered to slowly sloughing off, seeing them as completely unfulfilling and worthless as a measure of who I am.

I know there is something more despite the constant insistence that logically, there is not.

We are more than our ethnicity, our orientation, our jobs, our religious beliefs or lack thereof — we are more. In some strange twist, in an effort to make everyone and everything OK, we’ve lessened our humanity and become a silhouette. Nothing was made richer or fuller, but we were willingly made into a stereotype.

To belong, we agreed to be categorized.

As a Christian, with a horrible tendency towards swearing, I feel some hurt inside when my beliefs are seen as mere restrictions on these kinds of identities. ”Christians don’t want anyone to have sex!” I was told in this conversation, to angry laughter. When I said that that wasn’t true, I was met with a cutting comment about having to be married, the derision evident and the supposed irrelevance of my beliefs made clear.

I guess that was part of the label as this person understood it.

Not angry, but saddened, I need to work to meet such confrontations in love. And because I do not view people as a thing defined so shallowly — “this is my drag queen friend!” or “this is my Wiccan friend!” or “this is my rich friend!” — so that I might be seen as having a fine collection of modernity and the ability to accept all things unquestioned, I have to wait patiently over time and true friendship for what is beneath all of that to be slowly revealed.

Our need to be loved, and our fear that we will not be. Our need to be loved when what is beneath the surface is finally revealed. Our need to be a part of something greater than ourselves, a purpose and destiny, a taste of knowing we are not random and alone.

At our core, we are not a collectible being because we are not so different from each other at all. These modern collections of people are really filled with the same person after all, merely wearing a different costume.

Don’t we see that by labeling people, even in friendship and kindness, we are not actually accepting them as who they are, but as a partial human being?  Labels are judgement, and a judgement is a judgement, even if it seems safe from any despised religious overtones. Oddly, they say “I accept you as you say you are” instead of “I accept you as who you are.”

What does Christ say, over and over in so many ways, but this: I know who you really are, despite all your protesting and facade and every distracting thing you try to hide yourself in, and I still invite you to follow me and have faith that you are exactly what I want. I came to save you, and who you are in this life isn’t the finished painting. If you pick up the cross and follow me, I’ll pick up the brush and finish it.

My beliefs and, consequently, struggles against who I refuse to be, are not some irrelevant cultural joke. I know who I am because of whose I am. My identity is found in a faith in someone who does not change according to zeitgeist. I am not bound by the unfinished painting.

And, in a complete reversal of this entire post, if you refer to me as your “Christian friend”, I would consider that to be a great honor and challenge.