What’s In A Name?

I have been the health officer for the last two years (and an assistant before that).  In a summer and three (working on four) semesters I have become quite efficient at the art of health forms.  It’s a science.  I start at the bottom and scan for food allergies or other pertinent notations and then move up to medications.  If I see any health related pieces which I would need to attach to a personhood, I THEN look at the name. Due to my position, I come to know campers by their medications, food allergies, and tendencies to wet the bed. (Unfortunate, I know).

So it was odd, almost peculiar really, when I spotted it.  A child with no medications, no allergies, and not a single checked medical history box to speak of.  But there it was. My name.  A camper was coming with my name!  Anika.  Ironically, Anika K.  I was ecstatic!  I love my name and I love that it is a unique name, but it is also exciting to be able find some one else who shares the inability to find monogrammed pencils. (Even if she is merely a fifth grader I will know for only a week).  Yet, I stopped in my ecstatic tracks.  The fact I saw the name amidst my 125 forms seemed odd… it didn’t fit my pattern.

And then it occurred to me.  Oh so simple.  The answer for why I had managed to see her name scrawled against the top of a paper I never would have otherwise stopped to consider seemed obvious…

You come to recognize the name by which you are called.

You know your name.  You recognize your name.  When you see it, you take note.  When you hear it (or, in my case, you think you hear it…) your ears perk up to see who is talking to you or about you.  A name becomes an identifier for your own personhood and when you see it, hear it, you subconsciously and mostly unknowingly attribute it to yourself. 

And I’m coming to realize we do this with our “other names” as well. 

Not other names in that your name is William but you go by Billy.  (Or Mike for that matter!) But the names, the labels, the identifiers…the ones our family calls us, our friends call us.  The names we call ourselves…  The things the world may tell us we are. 

And these we come to recognize, for good or bad, as well.

I talked to a camper once who everyday wore something different which read “Princess” on it.  I mentioned it one day and she replied with a giggle so matter-of-factly “of course! That’s my name!  Or at least that’s what my daddy calls me!” To her, wearing “princess” was like wearing a monogrammed sweatshirt!

Most of us don’t wear our “other names” quite so boldly or proudly, however.  The older I get and the more people I talk to, I mean REALLY talk to, the more I KNOW everyone has a pocket full of nametags they put on the t-shirt, underneath of the sweater so no one will see.  But they have to wear it, because they have come to believe it to be true…

We come to recognize the names by which we are called…

And our ears perk up just the same.  For good, for bad, or for ugly.  We may recognize with a smile or cringe with a frown…but part us hears words, the words both written on the nametags we place on our resumes and hide in our journals.  We hear them and with the rest of the world listening on as if nothing strange was said, our insides are screaming…

“This is me…” 

And yet and still, most of us scoff.  “What is in a name!” we cry.  “It’s just a word!  It doesn’t define them!  It’s not all of who they are!”

Hubert Humphrey once said “In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears.  Things are not only what they are.  The are, in very important respects, what they same to be.”

And I find this to be true.  Not always because it needs to be but because it is claimed.  Often for ones self or if not, by someone else, and so it becomes true.  “I’m not ugly.  But I believe myself to be ugly.  Others believe me to be ugly.  I become ugly.  I am ugly…”  It’s a sorry progression and an unfortunate reality. 

Because you see, whether your name be “Ugly” or “Beautiful”, “Good” or “Bad”, “Leader” or “Follower”, “Self-Starter” or “Couch Potato”…or any number or level of name before, after, or in between, the answer to a question of “what is in a name?”  Can simply be stated: “A lot”.

It’s one of those things we know but often neglect to remember, to recall, to remind.  There is much found in a name and the roots are much deeper than the surface.  We come to claim labels as names and we come to recognize the names by which we’re called. 

It becomes a dangerous reality.  For I know the other “names” I recognize as quickly as “Anika” written a top of a page.  Some of them are names never spoken.  Names I’ve called myself when it is just ‘Myself’ to face.  Some are names I’m not proud of.  A couple are actually quite special in their own right…  But, though I will answer affirmatively if any of them were called, none of them are truly me.  Those names I have come to recognize are not my truest identity…

There is much in a name, not the least of which is power.  Power to build or destroy, to bless or to curse, to leave desolate or to find filled. 

I’m reminded of a sheet full of verses from my old (very old! As I only was in a youth group in 6^th and 7^th grade) reading “Who Am I?” at the top.  The list was filled with labels, with identities, with names.  Names which bore both power and purpose.  Names which claimed me and redeemed me.  “I am a slave of righteousness” (Romans 6:18).  “I am God’s possession” (2 Corinthians 1:21-22).  “I am God’s workmanship” (Ephesians 2:10).  “I have been blessed with every spiritual blessing” (Ephesians 1:3).  “I am not the great ‘I Am’, but by the grace of God I am what I am…” (Exodus 3:14, John 8:24, 28, 58 and 1 Corinthians 15:10).  And the list goes on and on…

Those are names to recognize.  For they are they names by which God calls us.  Calls us to and calls us by.  And what a life and transition the world would make, if we came to recognize that those were the names by which we are called…