It Has To Work In Two Countries

There is a name he loves, and his mother cannot say it.

Not will not. Cannot. The sound in the middle of it does not exist in her mouth, and when she tries, something else comes out, and everybody in the room is kind about it, and that kindness is somehow the worst part of the whole thing.

And there is a name she loves, and half of the family here would spend a lifetime asking how it is spelled.

So the search has narrowed to a small strip of ground between two languages, and everything in that strip is a compromise, and none of it is loved by anybody.

I want to name the thing that is actually happening, because it is not a shortage of names.

The choosing has been handed over to whichever room is imagined at the time. Sitting at one table, the name from the other country sounds like an imposition. Sitting at the other table, the local one sounds like an erasure. And the list keeps changing because the room keeps changing, and a person cannot choose while the judges keep swapping chairs.

That is exhausting in a specific way, and it has been going on for months, and it has very little to do with names.

There is also a fear underneath it that nobody has said out loud, so let me say it.

The fear is that a name from over there will make the child a stranger here, and a name from here will make the child a stranger there, and the whole thing will be a small permanent notice that this family belongs nowhere in particular.

That is a real fear and it deserves better than reassurance.

Out of every nation and kindred and tongue

There is a scene in Revelation that settles this, and it settles it by showing what the room actually looks like at the end.

After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb. (Revelation 7:9, King James Version)

Notice what is not there.

There is no translation happening. Nobody is being smoothed out. The nations are still nations at the throne, the tongues are still tongues, and none of it has been flattened into one convenient sound that everybody can pronounce.

You are not being asked to sand a family down into something easier, and Scripture ends with the tongues still standing exactly as they are. The Holy Spirit is the one who lets that land on a man who has been trying to disappear the difference, and Revelation 7:9 keeps every nation distinct in the last room there will ever be.

That verse is the future, and the future is not a compromise. It is a courtyard with everybody in it, still themselves, all facing the same way.

You have been treating two languages as a problem to be solved, and the written word treats them as a multitude standing together. The Holy Spirit does not translate that crowd into one sound before it is acceptable, and neither does anybody need to translate this child.

The room that has been deciding this

So let me be practical about what is going on in the choosing.

Every name has been auditioned in a room. That is the mechanism. Say it in the head, imagine a face, watch the face react, score the name accordingly.

And the rooms have been the wrong rooms.

The room in the head is a room of adults, at a table, on a specific afternoon, in a particular mood. It is one Sunday lunch, replayed, with one relative whose face is easy to imagine. That is a very small room to give a whole life to.

You are able to take this out of one afternoon's imagined faces, and no name on earth has ever once had to satisfy a room before it could be given. Revelation 7:9 puts a multitude no man could number in front of a throne, and it is the Spirit of God who widens a picture that has been narrowed to one table.

Here is the room the child will actually live in. It has both grandmothers in it. It has school. It has a street. It has a wedding forty years out and a hospital corridor and a hundred ordinary mornings. Most of the people in it have not been born yet.

And here is the thing about that real room. It contains people from both sides, all the way through. Not one of them is a judge. All of them are relatives, in one sense or another.

You were never choosing between two countries, and Revelation 7:9 puts every kindred in the same room without asking one of them to leave. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a divided picture into a gathered one.

Two mouths, one child

Now the useful part, which is smaller than the fear.

A name that gets said differently in two places is not a broken name. It is a name with two homes. That is a description of a family, not a description of a failure.

There is a version of this child's name that a grandmother in one country will say, with the sound she can make. And there is a version that a teacher here will say. Both of them are the child's name. Both of them are people reaching for the same person and getting there.

The distance between the two is where this family actually lives, and it has been read as damage when it is simply the shape of the house.

You are able to hold both pronunciations without either being the wrong one, and Scripture never once ranks a tongue. Revelation 7:9 has all of them at the throne together, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the word compromise out of a man's mouth and leaves him with the word home.

There is no version of this where the name has to arrive in one country only. Every child in a family like this one carries a word that is handled differently in different rooms, and they do not experience that as a wound. They experience it as knowing where they come from.

You have not been building a problem for a child, and the written word ends with the difference intact and honored. The Holy Spirit does not require a family to choose one country before it can be blessed.