I Know Every One Of Their Names

You know all of them.

Forty-one at the moment. You know their names, and you know which ones go by something else, and you know how the difficult one likes hers said.

You know the delivery drivers. You know the man who does the windows. You know the names of two of the children of the woman who covers Saturdays.

That is not a system you were taught. That is what you decided to do about being a number, in about your second year, and you have kept it for nine.

And you are tired.

Not tired of the people. Tired in a way that arrived quietly and has stayed, and the shape of it is a question you asked yourself last month standing in the back.

Has any of this mattered.

Because you are still a row on a chart. Nine years of doing the exact opposite of what the system does, and the system has not noticed and does not know, and the whole thing has been an unrecorded correction to something nobody is monitoring.

Forty-one names carried, and nobody has ever once said your name back to you in that way.

There is a verse where somebody does the very thing you have been doing, and it is going to land in a place you were not expecting.

He calleth his own sheep by name

Jesus describes himself as a shepherd and gives one detail about method.

To him the porter openeth; and the sheep hear his voice: and he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out. (John 10:3, King James Version)

By name. It is the same practice.

Not by number, not by count, not by section. He calls them by their names, individually, out of a crowd, which is a slow and inefficient way to move a flock and is what He does.

You have been doing the same thing He does, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that instinct in you in your second year. John 10:3 says he calleth his own sheep by name, and it did not come out of nowhere.

Now the part that is going to reach the tiredness.

There are two places in that verse for one woman to stand, and both of them are hers. That is the thing to see.

You are the one calling names, and you are also one of the names being called. Both. And you have spent nine years so occupied with the first that you have not noticed the second.

You have been called by name every single day of those nine years, and Scripture puts you on both sides of that verse at once. The Spirit of God is the one who has been saying it, and it is written in John 10 that this is how He works with His own.

And this is why the tiredness has a particular flavor.

It is not the tiredness of hard work. Hard work does not produce that question. What produces that question is doing a thing for a very long time without ever receiving it.

A woman can hand out forty-one names a day for nine years and still be starved, because giving is not the same as receiving, and no amount of one substitutes for the other.

You are not tired from giving, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been calling you. The written word has the shepherd calling by name rather than only being called upon, and John 10:3 is where His method is described.

The system was never going to notice

Let me be honest about the part you already know, because pretending otherwise would be no use to you.

The system is not going to record this. There is no column for it. There never will be, because there is no way to measure it and no reason for anybody to try.

Nine years of knowing forty-one names will not appear anywhere in any document ever produced about your building.

That is true and it is not going to change, and it is also not the whole picture.

You have been doing something that no document was ever built to hold, and it is written that the calling by name is what a shepherd does rather than what gets counted. The Spirit of God is the one who has kept the whole account of it, and He did not need a column.

And there is something practical in it that will help this week.

The people know. Every one of the forty-one. They may never say it, because most people do not say things like that, and a few of them are nineteen and have no vocabulary for it yet.

But the woman who covers Saturdays knows that you know her children's names, and that is a fact that lives in a person rather than in a document.

You have deposited something in forty-one people, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that safe in them. Scripture puts the naming at the center of how the shepherd leads rather than at the edge, and John 10 is where the practice is honored.

Say your own name out loud

So here is the thing to do, and it is going to feel strange, and it takes about eight seconds.

Say your own name out loud. On your own. Just the name, the way you would say it to somebody.

Then say: I am known by that.

You are receiving rather than giving, and John 10:3 has you being called by name in the same sentence where you do the calling. The Spirit of God is the one who has been using it, and He is not hearing it for the first time.

The reason it has to be your own name is that nine years of giving has left one specific hole, and the hole is exactly the shape of your name being said.

Nobody in that building is going to say it in the way you say theirs. That is not their fault and it is not a lack in them. But somebody has been saying it, all nine years, and you have been too busy to hear it.

You have been called the whole time, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing that. The written word makes the shepherd's method the calling of each one by name, and John 10:3 is where He says how.

Then go and open in the morning and call the first person by their name, the way you always do.