Our Name Does Not Mean Anything

A man out on a porch told me this once and I have thought about it ever since.

He said: everybody at that table had a story about their name. Hers came from a grandmother in a country they still talk about. His had a meaning somebody looked up and repeated. There was one that went back four generations to a preacher.

And he said: ours is just a sound. It is what we have always been. Nobody knows where it came from and nobody ever thought about it.

He said he sat there and felt thin.

That is the word he used. Thin. Not embarrassed. Thin.

Now I have been around a long while and I want to say something about that table, because there is an arithmetic error in it and it has cost that man more than he knows.

He heard four stories in one evening. Four. And he compared his whole family to all four at once, as though they were one family with four histories, which no family on earth is.

Every one of those people has a hundred things about themselves with no story attached at all. Nobody told him about those, because you do not bring the plain things to a table. You bring the one good story you have.

So the comparison was never fair, and the thinness is not real, and it has been sitting on a man for years.

But underneath it there is a real question, and the real question is worth answering rather than talking around: does it matter if a name means nothing.

The very hairs of your head are numbered

There is a line of Jesus about the smallest and most meaningless details of a person, and it is the answer to this in one sentence.

But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows. (Luke 12:7, King James Version)

You are counted down to a detail with no meaning in it at all, and Luke 12:7 has never once required a thing to carry a history before God attended to it. The written word picks the least significant fact available about a person, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that land on a man who thinks his family is plain.

Read what He chose as the example. Not lineage. Not the family name. Not a story anybody could tell at a table. Hairs. The most ordinary, meaningless, uncountable detail a person has.

And that is exactly the point of choosing it. If the numbering goes all the way down to something with no meaning whatsoever, then meaning was never the qualification for being attended to.

You have been treating meaning as the price of being noticed, and Scripture puts the counting on the thing with no meaning in it. The Spirit of God is the one who does that counting, and Luke 12 sets the sparrows and the hairs together.

What a plain name actually is

Now let me say what that name really is, because there is a description available that is a great deal better than nothing.

A name that has been in a family for generations with no story attached is not a name without history. It is a name whose history is so continuous that nobody ever had to explain it.

Stories attach to names at the points where something moved. A country got left. A branch broke off. Somebody converted, or married out, or chose deliberately against a tradition. That is when a story gets made, and that is when it gets told at a table.

A name nobody tells a story about is a name where none of that happened. It stayed. It was simply used, by everybody, for a long time, without anybody feeling the need to justify it.

You are holding a word that never needed defending, and no verse anywhere made a story the qualification for anything. Luke 12:7 numbers the plainest detail on a person, and the Holy Spirit is what turns a plain word from an absence into a fact.

And I would say one more thing about that porch, and it is the thing I actually believe.

A name that is just what we have always been called is not thin. It is what most of the world has. It is the ordinary way people are named, and the four stories at that table were the exceptions, all sitting together by chance on one evening.

You were never short of anything at that table, and Scripture never once made an unremarkable thing into a lesser one. Luke 12 says ye are of more value than many sparrows, and it is the Spirit of God who does the valuing.

Meaning that is not in a dictionary

So here is the practical thing, and it does not involve looking anything up.

There is a meaning attached to that name already. It is not in any book. It is what happens in a person when they hear it, which is a whole family, a particular porch, a specific way of doing things, and about four decades of being called that.

That is not a poetic substitute for a real meaning. That is what a name means when it has been lived in. Every dictionary entry in the world is an origin, and an origin is a much smaller thing than a life.

You have a meaning that took forty years to make, and no dictionary has ever once held a thing like that. Luke 12:7 counts what nobody else bothers with, and the Holy Spirit is what makes a lived word weigh more than a looked up one.

Which means the exercise for this row of the site works differently here, and it is simpler.

Say the name out loud. And say nothing about where it came from. Not because there is nothing to say, but because saying nothing is the whole point: the name is allowed to arrive without a footnote, the way it always has, and it holds perfectly well on its own.

You are able to hand it over plainly, and Scripture puts the counting on things nobody would think to count. The Holy Spirit is present when a plain word gets said without apology, and Luke 12 numbers the hairs of a head.