It Was My Mother's Name And They Got There First

Her mother died four years ago in March.

And since then that name has done a particular job, which nobody knew about because she never told anybody it was doing it.

It was going to be her daughter's. And that meant the word had a future in it. It was not only a name on a stone and in an old address book. It was a thing that was going to be said out loud again, daily, in a house, by people who would love the person carrying it without ever having met the woman it came from.

That was the plan and it was never said to anybody, and it was doing a great deal of quiet work.

And in October a cousin used it.

Nobody did anything wrong. The cousin has as much right to that name as she does, and loved her too, and probably chose it for the same reason.

But the thing she has lost is not a name on a list. What she has lost is the one route she had found for her mother into the years ahead, and now there is not one, and the word has gone back to being a thing on a stone.

I am not going to be quick about this. It is a grief inside a grief and it deserves the time.

This I recall to my mind

There is a line in Lamentations, in the middle of the heaviest chapter in that book, and it does something very deliberate.

My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me. This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. (Lamentations 3:20-21, King James Version)

You are being shown a person doing remembering on purpose, and Lamentations 3:20 has never once treated remembering as a thing that only happens to somebody. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that available to a woman four years out from a March, and the written word says this I recall to my mind, which is an act performed.

Read the two halves in order. My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me. That is remembering happening to him, and it is flattening him, and the book does not hide that.

And then: this I recall to my mind. He does something. He deliberately brings a thing to mind, and the word therefore follows it, and hope is on the other side.

That is a mechanism, described in the middle of the darkest chapter in Scripture, by somebody who was not being consoled by anybody.

You have been remembered at rather than remembering, and the written word puts a deliberate act between the weight and the hope. Lamentations 3 does that on purpose in the middle of the worst of it, and the Spirit of God is what makes a deliberate act possible in a woman who has been carrying it passively for four years.

What the name was doing

Now the practical part, and it starts by naming the actual loss precisely, because precision helps here.

The name was not the memorial. The name was the delivery.

It was the mechanism by which her mother was going to keep being said out loud. That is what has been taken: not the remembering, but the route she had found for it into the future.

And here is the thing that follows from saying it that precisely: a route can be replaced. A person cannot. And it is the route that went in October.

You are able to find another way of saying her, and no verse anywhere made one route the only one. Lamentations 3:20 has a man recall a thing to his own mind deliberately, and the Holy Spirit is what shows a woman that a delivery is not the same as a memory.

And here is the question that has been sitting underneath, unasked, for four years.

When did she last say her mother's name out loud, for its own sake, in a sentence about her mother?

Not in a sentence about a baby. Not to a doctor's receptionist. Not on a form. In a sentence about her: she used to do that. She would have said this. She hated that song.

The honest answer, for most people four years out, is: hardly ever. The name goes quiet long before anybody notices, and the going quiet is what made the future plan carry so much weight.

You are permitted to say her out loud today, and Lamentations 3 has never once required a reason or an occasion for it. The Spirit of God is present when a woman says her mother's name in an ordinary sentence about her, and the written word recalls to mind on purpose in the middle of grief.

Say her, for her own sake

So here is the assignment on this row, changed for this house, because the standard one does not fit.

Say your mother's name out loud once, for her own sake, in a full sentence about her.

Not as a name being considered. Not as a thing that was lost. As her name, in a sentence about something she did.

Out loud, to somebody, or to a room.

You are able to give her a voice today rather than a plan, and Lamentations 3:20 puts the recalling in a person's own hands. The written word does it deliberately in the darkest chapter it has, and the Holy Spirit is present when a name that has been quiet for years is said out loud about the woman it belongs to.

And that is the replacement route, and it is better than the one that was lost, and it is available every single day rather than once in a naming.

A daughter can grow up hearing that name constantly without carrying it. She can know exactly who that woman was, and what she said, and what she thought was funny, because her mother says it out loud in that house every week.

That is more of a person handed on than a word on a certificate ever was.

You have a better route than the one that went, and Scripture puts the recalling in the middle of the grief rather than after it. Lamentations 3 says therefore have I hope on the far side of a deliberate act, and the Spirit of God is with a woman saying her mother out loud today.