How Little Plastic Boxes Kill Community. (J4: Isolation to Community)

I used to play with MatchBox cars when I was kid. I think a lot kids did. We'd take these little metal cars with their plastic wheels, each about the size of a chicken nugget, and we'd hurl them as hard as we could across the linoleum floor of my grandmother's kitchen.

I'm not sure how one of us grandkids never lost an eye. We used to take wooden blocks and construction paper and build ramps on the kitchen table. We'd line up our car and, with the passion of an MLB pitcher, we'd throw these cars up the ramp to see how far across the house we could get; usually crashing into walls and televisions and leaving chips and scratches all over the wall and trim to my grandparents dismay.

When I got done playing with these little, stubby artillery shells, I'd put them away in my official MatchBox car storage box. It looked like a car on the outside of it and when you opened it up, it contained about 20 or so little cubicles for each of my cars. I used to pretend it was my parking garage. I felt like Jay Leno before I knew who Jay Leno was.

All my life I've been an organizational hypocrite. My backpack was always a mess full of scrunched and torn papers smashed under unread books and broken pencils. In college, the carpet of my bedroom was always protected by a thick layer of clothes, cd cases, and torn pages from notebooks. Even my car is a wasteland of fast food wrappers, halves of cd cases, and random handouts from church and work.

But there are some areas where I am very organized. I like to keep my books organized by topic. I like to organize photos--not scrapbooking--just that I like photos to be in an order that tells the right story. I like to organize my food cabinet. Soups with soups. Boxes with boxes. Junk with junk.

And when it came to my MatchBox cars, I was the same way. Each car had a specific part of the storage box it went in. First were the power cars. The ones with skull shaped hoods and praying mantis eyes for headlights. They went on the top rows. Then the expensive looking cars. The glamour cars. The ones with giant, singular plastic bubbles for roofs and flames on the sides of them; they were in the next row. Each row had a theme and each car got its own cubicle.

Eventually I got too many cars and some had to bunk together. The bunkers were usually the bottom row cars because the bottom row cubicles were bigger and usually my least favorite cars went there. My MatchBox set was meticulously organized. Each car had a label (sports, power, glamour, junker, etc.) and each label defined its position in my storage case.

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Sometimes I treat people like my MatchBox cars. I like to know what I'm looking at when I look at people. I mean, there are 6 billion of them, I've got to be able to distinguish them from each other.

Now, you could be crude about it and label people by skin color, gender, nationality, or age--but that's like the novice wine connoisseur who is limited to four labels: red, white, bottle and box.

A real connoisseur of people--the kind that MatchBox kids grow up into--knows that there are more subtle ways to distinguish people from each other: musical tastes, clothing, extracurricular activities, sense of humor, vocabulary, home life, etc.

A lot of Christians have gone so far to label people based on the bumper stickers on their cars, whether or not they say grace before every meal, and the size of their Bibles.

And I don't think that this has as much to do with ranking ourselves above others as much as it has to do with comfort and simplicity.

If I look at John Doe and John Doe is a 48 year-old pastor of a Methodist Church in a town of 300 people, it easier to lump him together with my idea of what a middle-aged, traditional, small town pastor should be based on what I think I've experienced. It doesn't even have to be anything close to a truth to be a stereotype. It only needs to be a perception.

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When I resort to stereotypes and labels, I take the lazy way out of community. I don't need to get to know people if I think I already know them. I don't need to get to know the old people, because I already know they are lame. I don't need to get to know people who are different from me because I already know who they are. And they probably know who I am. We've taken God's calling for Adam to name the animals a step too far.

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If there is one label that we should tag each other with, it's this--the tag that says, "Fearfully and wonderfully made by the Creator, saved by the Son, and chased daily by the Spirit." Although that is a pretty long tag. Maybe we should make it a t-shirt instead.

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When I label, I rob. I rob others of the chance to be known and to be understood. I rob myself of the chance to see God work in another life.

When we get to Heaven, the MatchBox cars will have no cubicles. They won't be organized in nice, neat little rows. In Heaven, cars with skulls and flames will hang out with cars Model-T cars. In Heaven fast cars will sit around with slow cars and the cool cars--well there will be no cool cars.

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I believe that God doesn't want us to wait until Heaven before we experience the type of mixed up, melting pot community that He dreams for us. And each day that we choose to label and we choose to assume is another day that we choose to not live like Jesus and another day that we choose to look like asses.