Lovely In One Language, A Joke In Another

The word is beautiful. That is the trouble.

In the language his mother raised him in, it means something small and warm and entirely lovely, the kind of thing an old woman says to a child in a doorway.

And in the language the child will go to school in, it is almost, very nearly, a completely different and faintly ridiculous word. One syllable away. Close enough that some clever twelve year old will get there in the end.

So the name sits on the list and cannot be removed and cannot be chosen.

And every time it comes up, it is not really a conversation about a name. It is a conversation about which country this family is actually living in, and neither of them wants to have that conversation out loud, so they have it in code, about a word.

I want to describe what is really being asked here, because framed correctly it becomes much smaller.

He believes he has been handed a choice between his mother and his son. Between the doorway in the old language and a corridor in the new one. Between being the man who came from somewhere and the man who lives here.

That is an enormous choice, and nobody could make it over a Sunday lunch, which is exactly why the list has not moved since March.

And it is a false choice. It was never on the table. It was assembled out of one word and a worry, and it has been carrying the weight of a whole immigration.

How hear we every man in our own tongue

There is a moment in Acts where a crowd from everywhere hears one thing, and what astonishes them is not the message.

And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born? (Acts 2:8, King James Version)

You are looking at a room where God went to every language rather than picking one, and Acts 2:8 has never once asked a family to consolidate. The written word records the crowd astonished at exactly that, and the Holy Spirit is the one who did it, which is stated a few verses earlier in the same chapter.

Consider what was not done that day. There was no single language chosen for efficiency. Nobody was asked to hear it in the language of the place they had moved to. Each one heard it in the tongue wherein they were born, which is a phrase worth sitting with.

Wherein we were born. Not the useful language. The first one.

You have been treating the first language as the one that has to give way, and Scripture went to the trouble of reaching every single one of them. Acts 2 is the Spirit of God deliberately refusing to make people choose a tongue.

What the twelve year old can actually do

Now let me be practical about the clever twelve year old, because he is the entire opposition here and he deserves a proper hearing.

He exists. He will get there. That is true and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Here is what is also true and never gets counted. He will get there with any word at all. That is his whole skill. A child who is going to do that does not need a name that is one syllable from something funny in a second language. He will use a last name, a coat, a way of running, the town somebody came from, or a first name that is perfectly ordinary in every language on earth.

You are defending against something that cannot be prevented by a word, and no verse anywhere put that job on a name. Acts 2:8 has God reaching a crowd in every tongue at once, and the Spirit of God is a far better protection than a careful choice of syllables.

And here is the thing that is genuinely lost if the name goes. The doorway. The old woman. The particular warmth of a word that only exists in one language and cannot be translated without being flattened.

A child who carries that word carries a door into a whole side of a family. A child who does not carry it has one fewer door, and nobody will ever remark on the absence, which is exactly what makes it easy to give away.

You are able to hand him a door rather than a defense, and Scripture never once made a name into armor. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a language alive in a family, and Acts 2 reaches every man in the tongue wherein he was born.

The half that keeps getting put down

So here is the thing that needs saying plainly, and it is not about the name at all.

Every time this comes up, the half that gets asked to give way is the same half. It is always the old language that is being weighed for whether it is practical. It is never the new one that is asked whether it can accommodate something.

That is not a decision anybody made. It is a habit, and habits like that are how a language quietly leaves a family over two generations without anybody choosing it.

You have been putting the same half down every time, and the written word went to every tongue rather than asking any of them to step back. Acts 2:8 is a deliberate refusal of that arithmetic, and the Spirit of God is the one who made that choice in front of a whole city.

I am not saying the name has to be the one. Nothing on this site says a name has to be anything. What I am saying is that the reason for setting it aside has been examined from one side only, and the other side has never once been given a fair hearing at that table.

So give it one. Out loud, in the language it is lovely in, to somebody who speaks that language, without the English worry attached to it.

You are permitted to hear it as your mother hears it, and no verse anywhere ranked one language beneath another. Acts 2 puts them all in one room at the same volume, and the Holy Spirit is with a man who says it in the tongue it belongs to.