His Mother Has Assumed For Months

It has been said out loud at least four times now, at that table, in front of people.

Not as a question. As a fact, folded into a sentence about something else: when the baby comes, and he has his grandfather's name, we should do the thing with the photographs.

Nobody corrected her. There was no moment where a correction would have fitted without being a scene, and so the not correcting has now happened four times, and four times of not correcting has become, in that kitchen, a yes.

And neither of them wants that name.

I want to start where this actually starts, which is not with the name and not with the mother in law.

It starts with a woman who lost her father, and who has found, in a grandchild she is going to love enormously, a way for his name to keep being said out loud in a room after he stopped being in the room.

That is what is underneath it. It is not control. It is not entitlement. It is grief that has found a door and is walking through it, and the door happens to be somebody else's decision, and she has probably not thought about that for one second, because grief is not careful.

So before anything else on this page: she is not the antagonist here, and there is no version of this that works if she is made into one.

But the assumption has hardened. And unhardening it is the thing that has to happen, and it has to happen without wounding a woman who is doing something honest in a clumsy way.

There is none of thy kindred that is called by this name

There is a scene in Luke around the naming of John the Baptist that is exactly this scene, in exactly this kitchen, two thousand years earlier.

And they said unto her, There is none of thy kindred that is called by this name. (Luke 1:61, King James Version)

You are inside a scene Scripture already recorded, and Luke 1:61 has never once made the relatives the enemy in it. The written word simply reports what the neighbors said, without a word of criticism over them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a couple who have been dreading a Sunday.

Read what the relatives are doing there. They are not being cruel. They are pointing out, reasonably, that this is not how it is done in this family. They think they are being helpful. They are, in their own frame, correcting an error.

And then a mother says the name plainly, and they do not believe her, and they go over her head to the father, who writes it down, and the whole street talks about it afterward.

You are not the first family to have this exact afternoon, and Scripture keeps the relatives in the story as people rather than as opponents. Luke 1 reports their objection without condemning them, and the Spirit of God is what lets a couple hold both things at once.

What she is actually asking for

Now the practical part, and it turns on one distinction.

She wants her father's name said in a room. That is the real ask, underneath the surface one.

The surface ask is: use it as his first name. The real ask is: do not let him disappear.

Those are not the same, and the second one has several answers, and only one of them requires giving up a decision.

You are able to answer the real ask without surrendering the choice, and no verse anywhere made honoring into obeying. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives somebody the words in that room, and Luke 1:61 has a family assume they know how it goes and a mother say otherwise.

A middle name is one answer, though it is not the only one and it is not automatically the right one. So is a second name in a set. So is the thing many families do, which is to name a room, or a photograph, or a day: your great grandfather's chair, which the baby will sit in.

The point is not the mechanism. The point is that a woman who is frightened of a man being forgotten needs to be told, in words, that he will not be forgotten, and that sentence is available whatever gets written on a form.

You have been treating this as a single yes or no, and Scripture never once presented honoring a family as an all or nothing thing. Luke 1 keeps the whole family in the room and the name still gets chosen, and the Spirit of God is in the keeping as much as in the choosing.

Write both down, side by side

So here is the assignment on this row, and it is deliberately small.

Write down the name they want and the name you want, side by side, once.

On one sheet. In the same handwriting. Nothing else on the paper.

It sounds like nothing and it does something specific. It takes the two names out of the atmosphere, where one of them is a weight and the other is a wish, and puts them next to each other as two words on a page.

You are able to look at both at once without deciding anything, and Luke 1:61 has never once required a family to be settled before a name could be spoken. The written word records the disagreement plainly and keeps everybody in the house, and the Holy Spirit is present at a table where two names get written down.

And here is what usually happens when they are side by side, and it is not what people expect.

Sometimes the two names sit together perfectly well, and the answer to a four month problem is visible in about nine seconds, and it involves both of them.

Sometimes the one that has been carried as a weight looks, on paper, like an ordinary name that somebody loves, and the weight comes off it.

And sometimes it stays exactly as hard as it was, and at least it is now a thing on a table rather than a thing in the air, and two people can look at it together instead of each carrying it separately.

You are permitted to look at it without a conclusion attached, and Scripture puts a whole family in one room and settles nothing until the father writes. The Spirit of God is in the unresolved part too, and Luke 1 lets the scene stay unresolved for several verses.