He Calls His Own By Name

Denise heard her own name in a conversation that had nothing to do with her and it took her about four seconds to understand what was happening.

Two people at the next table. Not talking about her. Talking about somebody else entirely, some situation at work, and one of them said her name in the middle of a sentence as a shorthand for a kind of outcome.

They were not being cruel. They were being efficient. Her name had become a usable object: a fast way of indicating a category, which meant they did not have to explain themselves, which is what makes shorthand so hard to give up.

She did not say anything. She finished her coffee. She has thought about it most days since.

Here is what she cannot work out, and it is a real question rather than a rhetorical one.

She does not know what a person is supposed to do with that.

You cannot object. You cannot go over. You cannot say to a stranger, that word you just used to save yourself two sentences is my name and I am sitting here.

And you cannot forget it either, because it changes what a name is. Up to that point her name had been a thing said to her. Now it is also a thing said about a situation, by people she will never meet, in rooms she is not in, and she has no idea how widely.

And the strangest part of it is that she has started to hear it differently when it is used properly. When a friend says it warmly, some part of her checks for the other meaning first.

There is a second cost and it took her longer to see. She has begun introducing herself faster. Not louder, and not with more confidence: faster, the way you get a thing over with. The name comes out in one piece with no space around it, and then she moves straight to a question about the other person, because a question is a door and a door means nobody is standing in the room looking at her name.

It works beautifully. People find her easy to talk to. And she has not, in about a year, let her own name sit in the air for even one second after saying it.

And this is where I stop writing about Denise, because your name has been used to save somebody two sentences.

I am not going to ask what it stands for now, and I am not going to promise you that stops.

Called, and led out

I want to give you a line about a shepherd and a gate, and I want you to notice two verbs and the order they come in.

and he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out.John 10:3

Calleth by name. Then leadeth out.

The naming comes first and the moving comes second, and the order is not decoration. Nobody is led anywhere until they have been named, and a sheep in that fold is not addressed as a category, or as a type, or as an example of anything. By name.

And the setting is a fold full of other people's sheep. That is what the passage describes: a shared enclosure with several flocks in it, and the whole point of the calling is that in a place where a great many animals look the same, one voice says one name, and one animal knows exactly who is being spoken to.

So take that at a table with two people at the next one. You are called by your own name and never as an illustration, and John 10:3 says he calleth his own by name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a person able to pick that voice out in a crowded fold.

Now the honest part, because you would notice if it were missing.

John 10:3 does not stop other people using your name as a shorthand. It says nothing about the next table, or about how far it has traveled, or about whether it fades. You may hear it again. Somebody may use it in a room you never learn about, and there is no mechanism anywhere for recovering that.

What the written word does say is that in a fold full of animals that look alike, one voice uses your actual name for you and not as a category, and the Spirit of God has never once used you to save Himself two sentences.