Four Generations And I Want To Stop

There are four of them.

The great grandfather, who worked somewhere everybody still mentions. The grandfather, who is in a photograph in a hallway. Her father in law, who is very much alive and who has never once asked for anything. And her husband, who carries it as a middle name and who says he genuinely does not mind either way, in a voice that is slightly too casual.

And if this baby is a boy, there is a fifth slot, and everybody knows it, and nobody has said it.

She does not want to use it.

Not because there is anything wrong with the name. She likes it perfectly well. She wants to give her son a name that is his, and not a slot in a sequence, and she has wanted that since long before this pregnancy and has never said it out loud to anybody in that family.

And here is the trap, which she has understood clearly and cannot see a way out of.

Stopping a four generation tradition cannot be read as neutral. Whatever is said, it will be heard as: your family's thing, the thing you kept going for a century, ends with me.

So she has not raised it, and the not raising has been going on since March, and it is starting to sit between her and her husband as well.

I want to be honest about the size of this rather than shrink it. It is a real difficulty and the trap is a real trap. What I do not accept is that it has only one exit.

As for me and my house

There is a sentence at the end of Joshua that families quote on kitchen walls, and it is worth reading for what it actually establishes.

And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve... but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD. (Joshua 24:15, King James Version)

You are the house that gets to choose here, and Joshua 24:15 has never once made a household's decision somebody else's to make. The written word puts the choosing squarely inside one house, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a couple the standing to use it.

Look at what Joshua does in that verse. He does not tell the other households what to do. He does not criticize them. He says: choose you this day, and then names what his own house will do, and leaves everybody else's house alone.

That is a whole model for this conversation, and it does two things at once. It takes the decision fully into one household, and it refuses to make the decision a judgment on anybody else's.

You have been assuming a choice must be a verdict, and Scripture makes one without passing judgment on a single other family. The Spirit of God is what makes that a settled thing rather than a defiant one, and Joshua 24 says as for me and my house.

The two sentences

Now the practical part, and it comes down to which sentence gets said.

There is a sentence that will be heard as a rejection, and a sentence that will not, and they are much closer together than anybody expects.

You are one sentence away from the whole of this, and Joshua 24 has never once required a household to argue its way to a decision. The written word states a choice and stops there, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies the shorter version when a longer one has been rehearsed for months.

The rejection sentence is any sentence that explains why not. We do not want a sequence. We want him to have his own identity. It has been done four times already. Every one of those, however gently said, contains an argument against the tradition, and an argument against a tradition is heard as an argument against the people in it.

The other sentence contains no argument at all. It is: we have fallen in love with a different name, and we would love to use his grandfather's in the middle.

That is all. No reasoning, because reasoning is what turns a preference into a critique.

You are able to say it without an argument attached, and no verse anywhere required a household to justify its own decision to another one. Joshua 24:15 states a choice without defending it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a plain sentence land softly.

And there is something worth knowing about how that sentence is actually received, because the dread has been building a much worse scene than the one that happens.

Most families, told that a couple has fallen in love with a name, respond to the love and not to the loss. There is often a moment of adjustment, and then somebody asks what it is, and then the conversation moves on, and the four generations are mentioned once more that year and then not much.

You have been rehearsing a scene that mostly does not happen, and Scripture puts the choosing in the house without a hearing. The Spirit of God is in the moving on, and Joshua 24 names a decision and moves on.

What the father in law has not said

And I want to say one thing about the man who has never once asked, because he is the quiet center of this.

A man who has carried a name for four generations and has never asked for a fifth has almost certainly thought about it. And his silence is very often not expectation. It is quite often the opposite: a deliberate decision, made years ago, not to put a weight on his son.

That possibility has never been tested, because the subject has not been raised, and a silence has been read as a demand for eight months.

You are able to find out rather than to guess, and Joshua 24:15 has never once asked a household to run on somebody else's unspoken expectation. The written word makes the choosing explicit, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a real question finally gets asked.

And the paper comes first, before any of that, because two people in one house have not yet looked at this together.

You are the house in that verse, and Scripture hands the choosing to exactly the people who live in it. Joshua 24 says as for me and my house without any committee, and the Spirit of God is with two people at a table with one sheet of paper.