I Introduce Myself With Their Name

It was a wedding in August and you were at a table with strangers.

The woman on your left asked what you do, in that friendly, throwaway way people ask at weddings, expecting eleven words back.

And you heard yourself say the name.

Not what you do. The name. As if the name were an answer to the question, which it is not, and everybody at the table nodded as though it were, because a name is easier to nod at than a description.

Then the conversation moved on and you sat there with a strange flat feeling for about twenty minutes.

Because you have a trade. You had one before any of this. There are things your hands know that took you years, and there is a way you handle a difficult person that you built yourself out of about four hundred difficult people.

And when somebody asked you what you do, you handed them a word off a building.

You have been doing it for three years. You worked that out on the drive home. Three years of answering an ordinary human question with a piece of somebody else's property.

Here is what worries you about it, and it is not vanity.

You are starting to think it is true. Not just convenient. True. As though the honest answer to who you are now is a word you rent.

That is not the case, and there is a moment in Exodus that settles it.

I AM THAT I AM

A man is standing in front of a burning bush being sent to do something enormous, and he asks a practical question. Who do I say sent me.

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you. (Exodus 3:14, King James Version)

God answers with a verb.

That is the whole thing and it is worth stopping on. Asked for a name, God gives a state of being. Not a title, not a category, not an institution. I AM.

You are made in the image of a God who answered a name question with a verb, and Exodus 3:14 puts being before every label there is. The Holy Spirit is the one who settles a man's identity underneath what he does for a living, and He has been doing that in you for longer than three years.

Now bring that back to the table in August.

The question was what do you do. It is a verb question. And the answer you gave was a noun, and specifically a noun that belongs to somebody else.

You have been handing people the smallest true thing about you rather than the largest, and the written word starts identity with being rather than with a label. The Spirit of God is the one who tells a man which part of him is actually the answer, and it is written in Exodus 3 that the answer was never a title.

Nobody at that table was asking to be sold anything. They were asking what a man does with his hands and his hours.

The name was not a lie. It was just the wrong size.

You were never required to shrink yourself into somebody else's word to answer a friendly question, and Scripture gives a man a self that stands before any arrangement is signed. The Holy Spirit is the one holding that self steady while a system quietly offers a man an easier answer every day for three years.

Why the name is easier

Let me be honest about why you reach for it, because it is not laziness.

The name is safe. It closes the question. Nobody follows up, because there is nothing to follow up on, and follow-up questions are where a man has to say what he is actually worth.

If you say the verb instead, somebody might ask how long that has been going on. Somebody might ask if you like it. Somebody might ask whether it is going well, and that is the question you cannot answer at a wedding.

So the name is a door you close politely, and you have been closing it for three years.

You have been protecting something real with that word, and the written word does not scold a man for guarding a tender place. The Spirit of God is the one who knows exactly which question you were avoiding, and Exodus 3:14 shows a man asking God a practical question and getting a straight answer rather than a rebuke.

Look at Moses again. He is not a confident man in that scene. He argues four separate times. He tells God he is not the right person, that his speech is poor, that nobody will listen.

God never once tells him to sound better. God tells him who is sending him and lets him go with a stammer.

You are permitted to answer badly and still be sent, and it is written that God gave a hesitant man His own name to carry rather than a better script. The Holy Spirit is the one who goes with a man into a room where he is not sure how to describe himself.

Say the verb first

So here is the small thing, and it is genuinely small.

The next time somebody asks, say the verb first and the name second.

Not instead. First. I fix things that other people gave up on, and I do it at the place with the name on it. I look after twenty-two people and a building, and it runs under a name you would know.

Same information. Different order. And the order is the entire point.

You are putting the true thing in front and the arrangement behind it, and Scripture puts being ahead of every label in Exodus 3. The Holy Spirit is the one who steadies a man's voice in the half second where he decides which one to say first.

It will feel exposed the first time. That is because it is exposure. You will have said something about yourself that can be asked about.

Let the follow-up come. If somebody asks whether it is going well, you are allowed to say it is hard and leave it there. That is a complete and honorable sentence and nobody at a wedding will press it.

You have a name of your own to give people, and the written word never once made a man's worth depend on the letters over the place he works. The Spirit of God is the one making that true in a man's mouth rather than true in his head, and Exodus 3:14 is where it stands.

Then you go back to the same building on Monday and nothing about the arrangement has changed at all.