I Have Changed My Mind Four Times

The list lives on your phone and it gets edited at two in the morning.

That is when it happens. Awake anyway, the screen too bright, one name moves up and one moves down, and something heard that afternoon gets added at the bottom. Nothing ever gets deleted, because deleting feels like a decision, and nobody makes decisions at two in the morning.

Four times it has looked settled. Four times something moved.

By now a low steady dread sits on the whole business, and when people ask, which they do constantly, the answer comes out as we have some ideas, in a tone that closes the subject.

I want to name what the dread actually is, because I do not think it is indecision.

This is not a struggle to choose between good options. This is the fear that there is a right one, that it might not be found, and that a person will then live an entire life under a word that was not the one they should have had.

That is a much bigger fear than picking between two nice sounds, and nobody has said it out loud, so it has been sitting unexamined since May.

So let me deal with it directly rather than reassure around the edges.

There is no name waiting somewhere that is the correct one.

I want to be careful, because the opposite error is just as bad, and it is what people usually offer: it does not really matter, nobody can get it wrong, they grow into anything. That is not true either, and everybody knows it is not, which is exactly why that reassurance has never once helped.

It matters. It is a real decision and it will be lived with. And there is still no single right answer waiting to be missed, and both of those things stand at the same time.

The women of the town named him

There is a naming at the end of the book of Ruth, and the odd detail in it is the one that helps.

And the women her neighbours gave it a name, saying, There is a son born to Naomi; and they called his name Obed: he is the father of Jesse, the father of David. (Ruth 4:17, King James Version)

The women her neighbors gave it a name.

Read that again, because it is genuinely strange. The neighbors named him. Not the mother, who is standing right there. Not the father. The women of the town, gathered after a birth, said what he would be called.

You are able to give a name the ordinary way, and it has never once required a search for a perfect one in order to be enough. That is the plain shape of Ruth 4:17, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my saying so who lifts a four month dread off the person reading this.

And then the verse does something that ought to change the weight of this whole month. It runs the line forward: he is the father of Jesse, the father of David.

That is the line that ends in a king, and eventually in Christ.

So the most consequential naming in that entire genealogy was done casually, by neighbors, in the way people do at a birth, with no ceremony and no agonizing recorded anywhere. Nobody in that scene is described as weighing it. Nobody is worried about getting it right. And nothing was damaged. The line ran on exactly as it was going to run.

You were never handed the job of finding a word that God had hidden, and no verse anywhere puts that job on a parent. The written record has neighbors do the naming and then runs the genealogy straight to David without a word of correction, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that land as relief rather than as trivia.

What the name is actually doing

Here is the practical thing, and it may be the most useful sentence on this whole site.

The name does not have to fit the person. The person makes the name fit.

The problem has been running the wrong way round. The attempt has been to select, in advance, for a person who does not exist yet, a word that will suit them. That is genuinely impossible, and the impossibility is why the list has moved four times. It is not indecision. It is failure at something that cannot be done.

You are not able to predict a person who is not here yet, and a name has never once had to fit before it was given. Ruth 4:17 records a naming with no prediction attached to it at all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an impossible task out of somebody's hands.

Think about any name known well. It does not sound like a category of person. It sounds like the specific person, and whatever qualities it seems to carry were got from them. The name became theirs. It did not describe them in advance. It filled up with them over about five years, and now it cannot be heard any other way.

Which means whatever gets chosen will become the name of this child, and within a couple of years no other word will be imaginable over that face, and this is true of nearly every name on the list.

You have the freedom to choose from a list where several would work, and Scripture never once treats that freedom as a trap. The passage names a child and moves on, and it is the Spirit of God who turns that from an argument into a weight coming off a chest.

That is not a reason to choose carelessly. It is a reason to stop trying to predict.

Say it out loud to somebody

So here is the assignment, and it is not a decision.

Say your favorite name out loud, in a full sentence, to one other person.

Not the list. One name, the one at the top today, whichever it is.

You are being asked for one sentence and not for a decision, and nothing on this site has ever once asked a frightened person to commit. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes a small thing possible for somebody stuck at a large one, and Ruth 4:17 shows a name spoken by women who were simply standing in a room.

And in a full sentence, which is the part that does the work. Not the name on its own, which is how it lives on a phone and in a head at two in the morning. A sentence with it inside it: I think we might call her Miriam. This is Daniel. Miriam, come here.

Because a name on a list is an object being evaluated. A name in a sentence is a name, doing the thing names do, and the two feel completely different.

You are able to try it in a sentence without deciding anything, and a name on a list has never once sounded the way a name in a sentence sounds. Ruth 4:17 has a name said out loud by people standing in a room, and the Holy Spirit is present in a kitchen where somebody says one for the first time.

To one person. Somebody safe. Not the mother in law and not the relative with opinions, because their reaction becomes data, and this is not a survey.

And notice: nothing is being decided. Nothing is being announced. Tomorrow it can all move again and this exercise commits to nothing at all. That is deliberate, because somebody frightened of choosing needs a way to try the thing on without it closing.

You are free to say it today and change it tomorrow, and no word said out loud in a kitchen has ever once been a contract. The written word shows a name given plainly and a life running on from it, and the Spirit of God is with anybody saying one for the first time.