It Suits A Baby And I Cannot Picture A Woman

She has been doing a test for about six weeks and it keeps failing.

She takes a name she loves, and she tries to picture it on a woman of forty. In an office. Being introduced at a wedding. On a plaque somewhere, or at the top of a letter.

And nothing comes. Not a rejection. Nothing at all. A blank, and then the name drifts back to being a small round word that suits somebody eight weeks old, and the whole exercise collapses.

And she has concluded from this that the name is wrong.

I have done a lot of thinking on this porch and I want to say plainly that the conclusion is wrong, and it is wrong for a reason that has nothing to do with the name.

The test cannot be passed. Not by that name and not by any name.

She is trying to picture a specific adult who does not exist. Not a type. A person: a face, a way of standing, a particular voice saying that word at a wedding. And there is nothing to picture, because that woman has not been born, and no amount of trying will produce her.

So the blank she keeps getting is not information about the word. It is what happens when a mind is asked for a thing it does not have.

And she has been reading that blank as a verdict, six weeks running.

Because I have asked him of the Lord

There is a naming in the first book of Samuel, and the reason given for it is the whole answer to this test.

Wherefore it came to pass, when the time was come about after Hannah had conceived, that she bare a son, and called his name Samuel, saying, Because I have asked him of the LORD. (1 Samuel 1:20, King James Version)

You are looking at a naming with no forecast in it whatsoever, and 1 Samuel 1:20 has never once required a mother to see the grown person first. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that lift a six week failure off somebody, and the written word gives the reason as something that had already happened.

Read the reason she gives. Because I have asked him of the Lord.

That is not about him at all. It is about what she did, and what God did, before he was born. It looks backward, at a prayer, and not forward at a man.

And that boy grew up to be one of the most significant people in that whole book, and his mother named him out of a thing that had already happened rather than out of anything she could see coming.

You have been asked for a forecast, and Scripture gives a naming built entirely out of the past. 1 Samuel 1 puts the reason behind rather than ahead, and the Spirit of God is what turns an impossible task into an unnecessary one.

The test that cannot be run

Now the practical part, and it is worth being exact about why the test fails.

A name does not sound like a category of person. It sounds like whoever you know with it.

Everybody has a name that means one specific person to them, and it carries their face and their voice and about nine years of knowing them. That is where the whole feeling of a name comes from. It comes from people, backward, and never from the word forward.

Which means the test she is running requires her to have known this woman already, and that is the one thing that cannot be arranged.

You are running a test that requires a memory you do not have, and no verse anywhere asked a parent to see forty years ahead. 1 Samuel 1:20 names a boy out of a prayer already answered, and the Holy Spirit is the one who releases somebody from a task nobody can do.

And here is the thing that will actually happen, and I have watched it in more families than I could count.

In about four years, that word will sound exactly like her daughter and nothing else. It will have her face on it. It will carry the way she says her own name at three, and how she stands in a doorway, and a hundred ordinary mornings.

And at forty, in that office, it will sound like a woman of forty, because she will be one, and the word will have been hers for four decades.

You are trying to do in six weeks what four years will do on its own, and Scripture never once made a name fit before it was given. The Spirit of God is at work in the four years rather than in the imagining, and 1 Samuel 1 gives a name and then lets a life happen.

The version of the test that works

But there is a real question inside the wrong test, and it deserves a real answer rather than being dismissed.

The real question is not can I picture her. It is: can this word be said seriously by an adult voice.

That one is answerable, and it takes about four seconds, and it is done with a mouth rather than with an imagination.

Say the name out loud as it would be said at forty. In a full sentence. Not in a small warm voice over a cot. In the voice used to say a grown woman's name across a room.

You are able to run the test that can actually be run, and 1 Samuel 1:20 has never once required a picture before a word could be given. The written word names out of what is already done, and the Holy Spirit is present in a kitchen where somebody says a name in a grown voice for the first time.

And what happens is one of two things, and both are useful.

Either it holds. It sounds like a person, said in that voice, and a six week problem ends in one sentence.

Or something in the mouth resists it, genuinely, and that is real information, obtained in four seconds, which six weeks of imagining could never have produced.

You are permitted to get an answer from your own voice, and Scripture puts the naming in a mother's mouth rather than in her foresight. 1 Samuel 1 records what she said, out loud, and the Holy Spirit is with anybody who tries it in a grown voice today.