My Own Name Never Described Me

He looked his own up once, at about nine, in a book at his grandmother's house.

It meant something large. Something with a lot of force in it. A word that belonged on a person who walks into rooms and changes them.

And he stood there in a hallway holding a book, and understood, in the plain and total way a nine year old understands things, that this was not him.

He has never once told anybody that.

And now, thirty years later, choosing for his own child, that hallway is standing right behind him, and the question in front of him is: what is the point of meanings at all. His meant something. It did nothing. He is not that word and never has been and the word did not help.

So the whole exercise looks a bit thin from where he stands, and he has been quietly opting out of the part of this that everybody else seems to enjoy.

I want to go back to that hallway before I go anywhere near a name for a child, because that is where the real thing happened.

A boy did not learn a fact about a word that day. A boy learned something about himself, and what he learned was: there is a version of me that was hoped for, and I am not it.

That is a much heavier thing than an etymology, and it has been carried since, unexamined, for three decades.

If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature

There is a sentence in the second letter to the Corinthians that answers the hallway directly, and it does not do it by arguing about the word.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. (2 Corinthians 5:17, King James Version)

You are described by a sentence far larger than the one in that book, and 2 Corinthians 5:17 has never once left a man to be defined by a word he was given. The written word calls him a new creature outright, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that making, which Paul says plainly in the same letter.

Look at what that verse does not do. It does not say the old description was accurate and needs living up to. It says old things are passed away. It replaces the whole category, and it does so on the basis of being in Christ rather than on the basis of measuring up to anything.

Which means the standard a nine year old set for himself in a hallway was never the standard he was actually being held to, and it never had any authority at all.

You were never being measured against that word, and Scripture put the describing of a man in God's hands. The Spirit of God is what makes all things new, and He did not consult a reference book at any point.

What a meaning was ever for

Now the practical question, which is a good one and deserves a real answer rather than a dodge.

If a meaning does not describe a person, and it clearly does not, then what is it for.

Here is the answer, and it is much smaller and much warmer than what a nine year old assumed.

A meaning is a record of a hope. It is not a forecast and it never was. It is a piece of evidence that on a particular day, before a person had done a single thing, somebody thought of a good word and put it on them.

That is all. And that is a great deal.

You have been holding a hope and reading it as a verdict, and no verse anywhere made a name into a measurement. 2 Corinthians 5 puts the whole describing of a person under God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a standard back into a gift.

Read that hallway again with this in hand. A woman, thirty nine years ago, chose a word with force in it and put it on a newborn. She was not predicting. She was not setting a target. She was hoping something big over somebody four days old.

And a boy at nine turned that hope into an examination and then failed himself in it, alone, in a hallway, and told nobody.

You are able to receive it as it was given, and Scripture never once handed a person a word to be graded against. The Spirit of God is what lets a thirty year old verdict go with them, and 2 Corinthians 5:17 makes old things pass away.

So say it out loud

So the assignment on this row is a strange one for a man in this position, and it is not about his child at all.

Say your own name out loud, and say what it means afterward, plainly, in front of one person.

Not the child's. His own. The one from the hallway.

Because that word has been carried silently for thirty years and has never once been said out loud with its meaning attached in the company of another human being. It has only ever been a private failure.

You are able to take it out of a hallway, and 2 Corinthians 5 has never once left old things standing over a man. The written word says behold, all things are become new, and the Holy Spirit is present when a thirty year old sentence finally gets spoken in daylight.

And what happens when a man does that is nearly always the same. He says it, and the meaning, and the person listening says something entirely ordinary, and there is no verdict in the room at all, and the silence he has been expecting since he was nine does not arrive.

And then, having done that, choosing for a child becomes something a man can enjoy rather than something he opts out of.

You are free to enjoy this rather than stand outside it, and Scripture makes a man new rather than accurate. 2 Corinthians 5:17 hands the describing to God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been doing the making all along.