A Name Given, Never Earned

Ari has been running a repayment plan for four years and it took him until this spring to notice that no loan was ever issued.

He would not have described it as a repayment plan. He would have said he was rebuilding, or being consistent, or letting time do its work, and all of those sound like maturity and one of them may even be true.

What he was actually doing was accruing. Small deposits, made daily, against a total he had never calculated: turning up, being reliable, taking the difficult jobs, not complaining about the difficult jobs, being the first person there and one of the last to leave. None of that is wrong. All of it is good work.

The trouble is what it was for.

Every deposit was going toward the moment when he would be, once again, the kind of man whose name meant what it used to mean. There was no schedule for that moment. Nobody had told him the figure. He had simply assumed, the way you assume gravity, that the standing he had before was a thing he had earned, and that having lost it, the way back was to earn it again.

And this spring, in an ordinary conversation, somebody said something about his father, and it went through him sideways.

He thought: I did not earn any of that in the first place.

The standing he is working to buy back was handed to him at about nineteen by people who had decided to think well of him before he had done one thing to justify it. He inherited it. He was given it. And a thing that was never sold to you cannot be bought back, which means four years of very good work has been aimed at a transaction that does not exist.

And this is where I stop writing about Ari, because you have been paying something back.

I am not going to ask what it is for. That is yours and it stays yours.

The night the name was given

I want to take you to the single strangest naming in Scripture, and I want you to look at the state the man was in when it happened.

And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.Genesis 32:28

Now look at the circumstances, because they are not what anybody would design.

He is alone. He has sent his family across a river ahead of him because he is frightened of meeting his brother, which is a situation he created himself, twenty years earlier, by deceiving his father.

He has spent the night in a physical struggle he did not win in any ordinary sense. He is injured. His hip is out and it will not go back, and he will walk differently for the rest of his life.

And in that state, at dawn, limping, unresolved, on the wrong side of a family situation entirely of his own making, he is given a name.

Not awarded. Given. There is no ceremony, no witnesses, no achievement being recognized in front of anybody, and nothing in the text presents it as a payment for the night's work.

So take that where you have been making deposits. You are given a name and it was never a transaction, and Genesis 32:28 hands one to a limping man before anything is resolved, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that land in a person who has been paying installments for four years.

And there is one more thing in that chapter, and it is the detail that keeps this honest. The limp stays. He gets a name and he does not get his hip back, and the written word puts those two facts side by side without apologizing for either, and the Spirit of God has never once traded one for the other.