Mislabeled Boxes

I was going on a weekend trip and I needed a little travel bag I thought I’d packed in a storage closet. I opened the door and saw a stack of boxes. Each was clearly marked: WINTER CLOTHES, QUILTS, SNORKELING GEAR, OLD CLOTHES, and RAGS.

But I didn’t see my bag. I was sure I had packed it in that closet, but it certainly didn’t belong in any of those boxes. I poked around, but found no travel bag.

I really needed the bag, so I began searching in other places around the house. Then I thought back to the boxes in the storage closet. Were they all labeled correctly? Could it be that one of the boxes had once been used for something else, and the label hadn’t been changed?

I went back to the closet and started looking inside the boxes. When I opened the box marked QUILTS, I found the travel bag along with several other travel items—but no quilts!
I wasted close to an hour trying to find that little bag. It would have been easier if the boxes hadn’t been labeled at all. Before returning the box to the closet, I crossed out the incorrect label—and made sure the box was labeled correctly.

As I packed the boxes back in the closet, I thought about my label as a Christian. If I call myself a Christian, and don’t live up to my label, I’m doing God a worse service than if I made no profession at all.

I want to live up to my label. How about you?

Your friend,