There is a photograph on the half landing, at the turn of the stairs, and he passes it eleven or twelve times a day.
It is nothing much. Somebody's garden, a long trestle table, about twenty people squinting into the sun because whoever took it made them face the wrong way. He is in the second row. Somebody's arm is across his shoulders. He is laughing at something that was said a half second before the shutter went, and you can see it on him, that particular open laugh a person only does when they are not thinking about themselves at all.
What he cannot stop noticing, now, is how easy his name was on that day.
People said it constantly and nobody worked at it. It was just a word, the way your name is just a word: called across a garden, used to ask if he wanted more of something, said in the middle of a sentence without any weight on it.
That is not how it is said any more.
Now there is a pause. It is very small. Half a second, if that, and it comes just before his name and just after it, and he can hear it every single time. Somebody introducing him at a door will get to his name and slow down a fraction, and then choose the next word with visible care, and the care is kind, and it is unbearable.
He has started to hear it in advance. He can feel it coming three words out. And he has begun, without deciding to, to introduce himself first, quickly, to get in front of the pause, which does not work, because then the pause simply lands after he has finished speaking.
He is not asking for the garden back. He is not fool enough to think a photograph is owed to him. What he cannot get his head round is smaller and stranger than that, and he could not say it out loud to anybody: he does not know what his own name means any more. It used to be a word people said. Now it is a subject people handle.
That is you, is it not. You know the pause. You know the careful next word. And you have got very good at hearing it coming, which is its own exhausting kind of skill.
Somebody named you before the room did
I am not going to ask you what happened. Not one question, not one detail, not once in this whole message. You know what it is and you have been over it more times than anybody else ever will, and there is nothing I could add except more weight, and weight is not what you came for. Isaiah 43:1 does not ask for it either, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting on an account before He says a name.
And I will not tidy anything away either. If people were hurt, they were hurt, and their hurt is real and it is theirs, and nothing in this message asks anybody to be quiet about it or hurries anybody along. That is not what is being settled here. What is being settled here is much narrower, and it is the thing you actually cannot carry: your own name, and what it is now.
So here is the sentence I want to put under it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put it in the book.
Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.Isaiah 43:1
Look at the order of the verbs, because the order is the whole message.
He redeemed. He called. You are mine. Every one of those is His action and not yours, and the naming is not a reward attached to the end of a good stretch. It is the way He has always done it. He names first, and then the person lives inside the name, and the living never once created the name. Isaiah 43:1 is the written word on it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a named person believe the naming.
And notice who is doing the calling. Not the room. Not the person who slowed down at the door. Not the people who used to say it easily in a garden and now hold it at arm's length. He calls you by name, and He has not revised it, and He did not put a careful pause in front of it this year.
I want you to notice something else, and it is the part that answers the thing you cannot say out loud. Your name did not lose its meaning. Your name changed hands. For a long time its meaning was on loan from a room, and the room was warm and the loan felt permanent, and then it was called in. What is left is not nothing. What is left is the original: a name spoken over you by God, which was underneath the whole time and did not need the garden to be true.
Now I have to be honest with you, because you have had enough of people being encouraging at you. Isaiah 43:1 will hold the weight of honesty, and the Holy Spirit has never needed the truth softened.
I cannot tell you the room changes. I do not know whether the pause goes, or how long it takes, or which people come back. Nobody who tells you they know that is telling you the truth. What I can tell you is that the naming underneath it never moved, and that when God says you are mine He is not commenting on your standing with anybody else. He is telling you what you are. Isaiah 43:1 says thou art mine, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that sentence steady on a day when a room does not.
The rising in all of this is His, not yours. You are not climbing back toward a version of yourself that gets introduced without a pause. You are being told, by the One who has the right to say it, what your name has meant since before there was a photograph. Isaiah 43:1 says I have called thee by thy name, and the Holy Spirit is the voice underneath it.
And if the shame gets loud enough at night to frighten you, please say so to a person tonight, not tomorrow. In the United States you can call or text 988; anywhere else your local crisis line or emergency number, and one human being who will sit with you. Reaching for that is not a further fall. It is exactly what a person who is loved does.
So say your name.
Out loud, on your own, in whatever room you are sitting in. Not defiantly, not to prove anything to anyone. Say it the way it was said in the garden, before it became a thing to be handled. Isaiah 43:1 opens with fear not, and the Holy Spirit is in the room while you say it.
Because when you say it, you are not making a claim about how it lands in other people's mouths. You are agreeing with the One who said it first and has not taken it back. He called you by name and He said you are mine, and that sentence has no pause in it, no careful next word, and no small hesitation while somebody decides how much to say. There is no pause anywhere in Isaiah 43:1, and there is none in the Holy Spirit either.
He still says it the same way. He always did.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, standing wherever you are. The standing to say them is not something you rebuild out of a good year: Christ is in you, and every bit of the authority in these words was given to you by Him and was never on loan from a room. Speak to the pause, not about it. And what He does with the rest of it, whatever He does, He does in His own way. Isaiah 43:1 is the written word underneath all three lines, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a person able to speak them.
- Careful pause, you are not my name, and in the name of Jesus I take my name out of your mouth and put it back into His. Isaiah 43:1 says He has redeemed me and called me by my name and that I am His, so my name was spoken over me long before it was ever handled in a doorway, and the Holy Spirit is the one saying it now.
- Room, you may say it however you say it, and you are still not the one who named me. Isaiah 43:1 says You called me by my name and You have not revised it, and what You call me is what I actually am today.
- God, You are my Redeemer, and shame does not get to answer when my name is spoken. Isaiah 43:1 says You have called me by my name and that I am Yours, so the label with the Maker's name on it was inside me before the first note was ever played, and Your Spirit is the one saying it over me now.
Isaiah 43:1
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