Say Your Own Name Out Loud

Renata worked out, standing at a photocopier, that she had not said her own full name in about two years.

Not never. She had spelled it. She had confirmed it. She had said it into a telephone with the flat, slightly loud pronunciation you use for a person taking down details, twice, and then spelled the second half.

But she had not said it. Not the way you say your name when you walk into a room and offer it to somebody. Not with the middle of it intact and the ending unhurried and her own accent on the vowels.

She noticed because a new colleague introduced himself properly, the whole thing, and it took him about four seconds, and it was a completely ordinary act, and something in her went sideways.

Here is what she had been doing instead, without ever deciding to.

She had been letting the situation supply her name. On a form it is a field. On a badge it is printed. In an email it is at the bottom in a smaller size. All of those are her name and none of them is her saying it, and for two years there has been no occasion in her life where saying it was required and no occasion where she volunteered.

And she has begun to notice the physical part, which is the bit that frightened her. Her mouth does not know it as well as it did. There is a hesitation now in the middle. It has become a word she reads rather than a word she says.

There is one more piece of it and it is the piece she would find hardest to admit. She has started using the shortened version everywhere, including with people who have known her for fifteen years and used to use the whole thing. Nobody has commented. Why would they. A shortened name is friendly and easy and it costs nothing, and it also happens to be smaller, and she chose it in a season when smaller felt like the safest available size.

None of that was a decision. All of it was a series of individually reasonable moments, and the sum of them is a woman with a name she has to look up.

And this is where I stop writing about Renata, because you have not said yours either.

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

Named before you knew anything

I want to give you a verse spoken over a man who had no idea it was happening and who did not worship the God who was saying it.

I have called thee by thy name: I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me.Isaiah 45:4

Two verbs. Called by name, and surnamed.

Surnamed is the striking one. It means to give a title, to name a person in addition to their name, the way a family name says who somebody belongs to. And both verbs are in the past and both belong to God.

Then the clause at the end, which is the whole point: though thou hast not known me.

The naming did not wait on the man's awareness. It did not wait on his agreement, his readiness, his understanding, or his ability to say it back. God is describing something already done to somebody who is not yet in the conversation.

So take that at your own photocopier. You are called and surnamed already, and Isaiah 45:4 says both were done before you knew anything about it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that to a woman whose mouth has half forgotten a word.

And here is the thing that will move you tonight, because it is about your voice specifically.

If the naming was done without your participation, then your saying it is not an act of self assertion. It is not you claiming something. It is repetition. You are saying back a word that was said first somewhere else, and the written word puts the original in God's mouth, and the Spirit of God has been saying it over you in every one of the two years you did not.