Identity Theft

I was thinking the other day and that was the 10th VBS that I have gotten to be a part of at Hessel…and I realized how quickly time seems to go by…in fact, I actually have my 20 year high school reunion coming up…I can’t believe 20 years has gone by…and it doesn’t seem like that long ago, but then I look back at things we used in the 90s…and it does seem like a long time ago…one of those items for example is the pager…what a useless device…we would pay 50 bucks a month…and have this pager hanging out our front pocket…and someone would page us a number…and none of us had cell phones…so we would have to go find a phone somewhere and try to call that number…and if you were the person who paged someone…you would just have to sit at the phone…and wait for the other person to get to a phone to call you…pointless…and I remember in high school we didn’t use computers…we used electronic typewriters that weighed like one million pounds, and every time you made a mistake you would have to get the whiteout out and paint over it…which was horrible because if you are in a typewriter class with 40 other kids like I was…and you are all learning to type...there are lots of mistakes happening…and so everyone is using whiteout…and at Ukiah there is no windows in the classrooms…and that stuff smells so strong it makes you high…I not sure how many mistakes were just from learning to type, and how many were the result of being in a drug induced white out haze…and then there was the fashion of course…which really speaks quiet loudly for itself…is your shirt really that colorful or am I still tripping on white-out….I just got out of typing class…as long ago as the 90’s seem though…there is still one piece of technology that we still use today…and it is this…

a labelmaker…and it very simply makes labels...we actually use several label makers here at church as a way to check kids in…the kids get a label sticker with their name and an alphanumeric code that matches a label that prints up for the parents…so we can make sure the child goes home with the parent who brought them…it is kind of like dry cleaning but with children...you drop them off with us…you get a tag…and hopefully when you pick them up they are a little more godly…I was listening to a message by Andy Stanley the other day and he said that everything has labels …our clothes, our cars, our Bibles, our food, our phones, our watches…everything has a label on it…in fact we will even label each other…if you get a group of people together…we will give each other labels…for example when I go to my 20 year high school reunion…we will all have labels we were given in high school…the athlete, the popular kid, the nerd, the class clown, the rebel, the music geek…everything we have is labeled, and we even label each other…and we do it without even thinking about it

However, there is one important question that we never really stop and ask…and that question is this…Who has the right to label something? I want you to think about that for a second…Who has the right to label something? There are actually three entities that have the right to label something…

a. 1) Manufacturer – labels on shirt, shoes, underwear, the phones we use…we expect the people that make stuff…labels are everywhere on our stuff…and if the label is cool people will pay more for the label than for the product…I remember last year when rapper Kayne West sold his hip hop plain white tshirt, for 120 dollars, and it sold out instantly…it is a plain white tshirt people…but it’s all about the label…

b. 2) Owners - if you own something, you can label it…cause you own it…if you don’t own it…you can’t label it….I mean how weird would it be if I came to your house with a label maker and started labeling things like kitchen, dog, mother, sister, even if I was right, I wouldn’t have the right, because I am not the owner…visitors don’t have the right to label things

c. 3) Purchasers – when you were a kid, what was the first thing your parents told you to do. You coat, you baseball glove, your backpack….write your name and phone number on it…

So, the entities that have the right to label something are the manufacturer, the owner, and the purchaser…they are the only ones who have the right…to give something a label…which leads us the next question, and this is one of the most important questions you could ever ask yourself because how you answer this question greatly affects how you will live your life… and the question is this…Who has the right to label you? Who has the right to label you? Because the truth is we all have labels that are stuck on us…some we stick on ourselves, and some are stuck on us by other people…and those labels will affect, sometimes greatly, how you live your life…for example…me…speaking of labels, and high school reunions coming up…