Discarded People… Hello Hump Day readers. For the last two weeks I’ve been tallying people who have done so much good in our country but are now ‘out’ – discarded because of politics, religion, bigotry, telling the real truth, and so much more.

I find this despicable. Even worse, many who say they believe in God are the ones who are ‘discarding people!’ I wonder what ‘god’ they have because the God I know will never ever discard his precious people. I listened to a well-known pastor of a church that has 10,000 people. His words hit me so hard I cried. He said “We have to weed out those who are not fit for our church” and then he rambled on for almost 40 minutes trashing people, even using their names and degrading who they were. Honestly, I almost threw-up.

What is happening to us when we believe that “this person shouldn’t be-at your church, at your kid’s school, etc.?” Who are we to make the line-in-the-sand saying “you cannot walk over?” God calls us to change the way we look at people, not to see them as Gentiles or Jews, insiders or outsiders, liberals or conservatives, LGBT, etc. God says we DO NOT LABEL because every person was created by God and we have no business to label them with what we think they are. How would you feel if someone labeled you?

Did you know that to label is to Libel? Libel is the act of publishing a statement about someone that is not true. Libel is usually contrasted with Slander, which refers to a spoken statement that is not true. Both are used in legal contexts and folks go to jail.

In 2 Corinthians 5:16-20, using the Message Bible, the Apostle Paul reminds us that: Because of this decision we don’t evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong, as you know. We certainly don’t look at him that way anymore. Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life emerges! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We’re Christ’s representatives. God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God’s work of making things right between them. We’re speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he’s already a friend with you.”

Max Lucado says this: “Let’s view people differently; let’s view them as we do ourselves. Blemished, perhaps. Unfinished, for certain. Yet, once rescued and restored, we may shed light, like the two stained-glass windows I have in my office. My brother found them on a junkyard heap. Some church had discarded them. Dee, a handy carpenter, reclaimed them and then he repainted the chipped wood and repaired the worn frame. He sealed some of the cracks in the colored glass. The windows aren’t perfect, but—if suspended where the sun can pass through, they cascade multicolored light into the room and it is beautiful!”

In our lifetimes, you and I are going to come across some discarded people, tossed out. Maybe you’ve been discarded some time as well. But guess what? We get to choose. Neglect or rescue? Label them or love them? We know what Jesus’ chose—just look at what he did with us. So, can’t we do the same for others? O Lord, open our eyes and hearts so we can see those who need you and that may be for us as well. AMEN.