Monday, August 15, 2005

Email Imitating Life?

Recently I made the conversion over to the great and mighty GOOGLE EMAIL--cleverly called G-Mail. The frustration with receiving hundreds of SPAM a day on my Hotmail account was just too overwhelming for my DELETE button . . . (plus Hotmail only gave me 125 megabytes of space). Anyway, I made the jump. I sent out the all too common "I'm changing my email" mass email, saved my address book, forwarded a few key emails, and started setting up my folders. This is where it got weird.

After making the switch to a new email service, the folder making process is one of the most important steps for me. Due to limited amounts of space, only the "chosen" are given the privilege of residing in my cozy world of folders. The others . . . well . . . DELETED. Then comes the grueling process of finding which emails are worthy of this invitation. Will I need this later? Put in the "Might Need to Remember" folder. Is this forward funny enough? Put this one in my "Made Me Chuckle" folder. What if I need to remember it AND it's funny? Which one then? Do I need to save this one because the sender is a close friend? Or do I save that one because I haven't talked to this person for a long time? What if it's a close friend that I haven't seen in a long time? Ahhhh . . . the list. Well, G-mail hugged me with its 2.4 gigabytes of free space (that's almost 2000% more than Hotmail), it comforted me with it's nice email search feature, and then . . . it sent me into the absolute chaos with . . . (are you ready? you might want to sit down for this.) . . . NO FOLDERS!!!! Quickly, g-mail grabbed my shoulders and said, "Hey, it's alright. We have "labels" instead." Whew!!! That was a close one.

Instead of categorizing an email in just one folder, they give you the option of placing numerous labels on any given email. So if it needs to have a "Something From My Buddies" label AND a "Something I Shouldn't Buy, But Probably Will" label, then I can put both on them. WHAT A CONCEPT!!!! It seems only logical to have labels. Finally, email imitating life.

We, as humans, have a multitude of labels placed on us each day . . . husband, co-worker, sister, boss, tenent, mother. Some are more objective . . . joyful, iffy, the funny guy, reliable, hoo-hum, depressed, lazy. Whatever labels we are tagged with, these are the ways we handle different situations. We cannot be placed into just one folder. We are not one dimensional beings. These labels give us our personality. They make us react the way we do to any given situation.

As Christians, Jesus Christ, himself, has given us labels of his own such as care-givers, disciples, teachers, humbled, listeners, joyous, dedicated, empowered, sharers, patient, and the list goes on and on and on. One of the greatest labels Jesus gave to us is found in John 13:35 "By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." "Disciples that love." What a label!!

What are you doing today to make sure these labels are the labels the world sees? If you walked into a room which label would people see?

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