Part of the process of moving involves giving your new address to the Post Office. They, in turn, provide the estimable service of forwarding your mail. For this beneficence may the Lord make us truly thankful.

If you've ever had your mail forwarded, you've come to realize the Postal Service sorts it with a special set of priorities and guidelines. Junk mail is delivered the same day, often in triplicate. Letters from loved ones arrive at an inverse ratio to the intensity of the relationship (the closer you are, the longer it takes).

Bills come without fail two days after the due date on the invoice.

Magazines are pre-sorted. Monthly general interest magazines have a few pages ruffled or torn and are passed through. Weekly newsmagazines are read by employees, stockpiled and delivered bi-annually. Magazines with photos of beautiful women never arrive; they end up in a special room at a used books store in Cleveland. For any issue of any magazine in which you have a special interest, refer to the love letter ratio.

Tax refunds are considered undeliverable or traded for a player to be named later.

Enabling this massive redirection of interpersonal communications is a deceptively simple low-tech device: the forwarding label. A fire engine yellow adhesive strip adorned with your new address (printed by an aging dot matrix printer sporting a pre-Columbian ribbon and an attitude of complete disinterest regarding the job at hand).

It would make sense to paste this label over the old address, right? Oh, no. That would minimize confusion to an embarrassingly ungovernmental degree. Jobs would be lost, the economy would falter and the world would no longer be safe for democracy. No, these harbingers of free speech are carefully positioned to maximally obscure whatever lies beneath. Magazine covers come out reading like a new verse to The Billboard Song: "The President said fall fashions are likely to be on duty for several months in colorful prints accessorized with heat prostration, Elvis's missing son and surface-to-air body paint." Kind of like an art review by Jesse Helms.

Most importantly, these labels CANNOT BE REMOVED. We're talking serious adhesion here, state-of-the-art stuff. That which relegates super glue to teflon status. A permanent relationship - one-night stands need not apply.

Those warning labels on mattresses on pillows simply said, "Do not remove." Forwarding labels dare you to try. And I have. Steam doesn't work. Neither do letter openers. Ditto finger nails, razor blades, exacto knives, scissors, meat cleavers, crowbars, machetes, axes, M-15's, AK-47's, nitroglycerin, blasting caps and limited range thermonuclear devices (though there's apparently no truth to the rumor which suggested it was American reluctance to yield our forwarding label technology that held up the START negotiations for eight years).

Envelopes fall open if you handle them, stamps fall off if you look at them, but forwarding address labels are forever.

All of us use labels, and not just when we move. "He's a liberal," "She's a feminist," "They're conservatives." Or black, white, red, Japanese, Communist, Presbyterian, Catholic, Jew, Moslem, redneck, radical, reactionary, fascist...fill in the blank.

You get the idea. There's an inexhaustible supply of labels. And once we've slapped one on a person, we've hidden the breadth and depth of their real meaning, of who they are. We've scrambled the message they're trying to send us. We've masked their picture with a label of our own.

Even if a label is more or less accurate, by applying it we may cripple someone's chances to grow and change. Labels stick.

Once I asked a friend if she preferred to be called black, African-American, Afro-American or something else. "Linda," she replied.

The God who knows our names is the God who makes all things new. Don't cover up the good stuff with labels.