I Wanted My Own Name On Something

You had the letters picked out.

That is the part you have never told anybody. Not just a name. Letters. A color. You knew what the sign was going to look like from the road at dusk and you knew what it was going to say.

That was nine years ago and it did not happen. Things happened instead, and the things were reasonable, and you have never once described the decision as a mistake.

You are here. There is a name over this door and it is not the one you drew. You are good at this. On most days you are properly glad.

And every so often, and never at a predictable time, you get a particular feeling for about four minutes and you have no name for it.

It happened last Thursday driving past a place with a small hand-painted sign. Somebody's own name on a board. Not even done especially well.

Four minutes. And then it went.

Here is what you do with those four minutes, and it is the reason this is worth writing.

You call it ingratitude. You have a life, you have work, you have people, and here you are aching over some lettering you never made. So you tell yourself off, briskly, and you get on with the day.

That is the wrong name for it, and using the wrong name is why it keeps coming back.

It is not ingratitude. It is grief. And grief that gets called ingratitude cannot go anywhere, so it stays and comes around again every few months, unfinished.

What is thy name

A man wrestles all night with somebody he cannot see clearly, and near dawn he is asked a question.

And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob. (Genesis 32:27, King James Version)

God asks a man his name.

Stop on that for a second, because it is not an information question. He is not being told anything He does not know. It is being drawn out of the man's own mouth on purpose.

You have been asked your own name by God rather than told to stop thinking about it, and Genesis 32:27 makes the answer come out of the man himself. The Holy Spirit is the one who asks a question like that, and He never asks it in order to embarrass anybody.

Jacob has to say it out loud. And the name he has to say means what it means, and everybody in the story knows what it means, and he says it anyway.

Then he is given a new one.

You are dealing with a God who treats a name as a serious thing rather than a vanity, and Scripture has Him asking for it directly. The Spirit of God is the one who put that scene in the book, and it is written in Genesis 32 that the whole night turns on a name being spoken.

So the wanting is not the problem. Not remotely. God asks after names. God changes names. God writes names down and reads them out.

You were made by somebody who cares about names enough to ask for one in the dark, and the written word never once treats that as a weakness in a person. The Holy Spirit is not standing over you waiting for you to be finished with it.

Grief has a job and ingratitude does not

Let me separate the two, because they have been tangled together for nine years.

Ingratitude is a comparison. Ingratitude looks at what it has and finds it insufficient, and it is a posture toward the present.

Grief is different. Grief is not about the present at all. Grief is about something real that did not happen, and it exists precisely because the thing mattered.

The four minutes on Thursday were not about this building. They were about a board with your own letters on it that does not exist anywhere in the world.

You have been grieving rather than complaining, and Scripture treats a lost thing as a thing worth naming rather than a thing to be scolded out of somebody. The Spirit of God is the one who knows which of the two is happening in a woman driving past a hand-painted sign.

And here is why the difference is practical rather than semantic.

Ingratitude, if that is what it were, would need repentance. You would need to change your posture toward your own life.

Grief needs none of that. Grief needs to be named, said out loud once, and allowed to be a real loss. Grief that is permitted to be a loss finishes. Grief that is called something else runs forever.

You have been asked to do something much smaller than repent, and it is written that God asks a man to say his own name out loud in the dark. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes a four minute ache into a thing that has actually been said rather than a thing that circles.

Say what it was going to say

So here is the thing to do, and it will feel absurd, and it takes about twenty seconds.

Say out loud what the sign was going to say. The whole thing. The letters. If you remember the color, say the color.

Then say your own name after it. Just your name, on its own, in an ordinary voice.

You are saying a true thing out loud rather than indulging anything, and Genesis 32:27 has God drawing exactly that out of a man's mouth. The Spirit of God is the one who receives the sentence, and He asked the question in the first place.

It has to be out loud because it has been a picture in your head for nine years and pictures do not finish. A picture said out loud becomes an event, and an event can be over.

And you will notice something the first time. It will sound smaller out loud than it does in your head. That is not a disappointment. That is the actual size of it, and the actual size is bearable.

You have been carrying a thing that shrinks the moment it is spoken, and the written word makes a spoken name the turning point of an entire night. The Holy Spirit is the one who was there for the wrestling, and Genesis 32 is where He asks for the name.

Then you go and open under the same letters in the morning, and you are honestly glad, which you have been most of the time anyway.