There are a lot of babies being born in my church right now. Two ladies are currently pregnant, one of them with my eleventh grandchild, and there are three sets of twins on the prayer list. It's the next baby boomer generation and we didn't even have a war.
This got me thinking about names and I remembered this story from years ago when my daughter Abbey worked in a church daycare. She was having a conversation with a 3-year-old girl named Destiny.
Destiny: Miss Abbey, do you have a mama?
Abbey: Yep.
D: What's her name?
A: Karen.
D: What's your brother's name?
A: Mike and Elijah.
D: What's your sister's name?
A: Leah and Deborah.
D: What's your daddy's name?
A: Alfred.
D: (eyes wide) NUH-UHH!!!
Ben himself says, "If you had a name like Alfred, you'd go by Ben too."
Names are important; they tell people who we are. Lasting memories are created by names. For as long as I live I will remember the little red-haired girl named Gloria in my first-grade class who drank tomato soup for lunch and then threw it up all over her desk. When Ben and I were having children, he always wanted to name one of our girls Gloria, but that was a hard no from me, for obvious reasons.
Names are important to God too—so important that he occasionally changed one. Abram became Abraham, Sarai became Sarah, Jacob became Israel. Naomi wanted to change her own name after she suffered terrible loss; she asked her friends to call her Mara, meaning "bitter."
All this thinking about names made me look up what God has to say about them. Here are a few things I found.
Our parents give us names when we are born, and those are the names other people know us by. But God knows us before that, and the Bible says,
The LORD hath called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name. (Is 49:1)
God has his own name for us! Don't you wonder what yours is? In Revelation 1:17, he says,
To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.
I'll get a sweet name, just between me and God. I can't wait. He says,
Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine. (Is 43:1)
He calls me by my name. I am not just a number to him, not just another in a long line of needy beings he created and now has to deal with on a daily basis.
Don't you call your children by name every day? You don't just call out, "Hey, you! Kid!" You want them to know they are special to you, so you look them in the eye and use their name. God does the same. Jesus our shepherd "calleth his own sheep by name" (John 10:3).
When I go out to the farm and have a bucket of grain, as I'm walking toward the feed trough I shake the bucket so the cows hear it, and I yell, "C'mon, cows!" We currently have 25 animals. A few of them have names, but I gave up on naming every calf years ago. Now we mostly call them by their tag numbers. "Hi, 40! You're a sweet girl!"—like that. There's no way we could call the whole herd by name; it would be impossible for me to remember them all. Ben says he had a hard enough time remembering the names of five children. But Jesus calls each of us by name—he has millions of sheep and remembers every one of us by name.
When Moses was giving God all his excuses why he couldn't lead the children of Israel out of Egypt, God told him, "I know thee by name" (Ex 33:12). In other words, I know everything about you, your strengths and your weaknesses, "and thou hast also found grace in my sight."
It's amazing to me that God could know me that deeply and still want me, and yet there it is. I've found grace in his sight.
So what do we do with this? I don't know about you, but it makes me want to be a better image-bearer of Christ. Have you ever seen the meme that says, "I want to be the person my dog thinks I am"? Even though God knows me better than my dog does, I have that same desire.
Proverbs 22:1 says
A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favour rather than silver and gold.
In this life we get to choose our name. I have a friend who, when her teens were leaving the house, would call out, "Make a good name for yourself!" and isn't that a great reminder that every day when we get out of bed, we have the opportunity to make for ourselves a good name or a bad one?
Which will you choose today?