The Name on the Awning

The name is painted on the awning in letters a foot high and Ibrahim's grandfather paid a man to do it in nineteen sixty one.

It has been repainted twice. The second time, about fifteen years ago, they matched the original blue exactly, because it would have been wrong to change it, and everybody in the family agreed without anybody having to say so.

For fifty years that name meant one specific thing on that street. It meant a certain way of weighing. It meant that if something was not right you could bring it back and there would be no conversation about it. It meant a man who had lent money to two other families on that street without ever mentioning it to anybody.

The name now means something else, and it happened inside about six weeks.

Nobody has painted over anything. The awning is exactly as it was. But when somebody says the name in that street now, there is a second thing attached to it, and everybody hears both, and the second thing arrived recently and is louder than fifty years.

Here is the specific thing that has broken Ibrahim, and it is not what people assume.

It is not that his own standing is gone. He has more or less made his peace with that and he has stopped arguing about it.

It is that the name is not only his. It belonged to his grandfather, who is dead, and it belongs to his brother, who did nothing, and to a nephew who is eleven and who will carry it into a school where the other children's parents know exactly what it means now.

He has taken something that was handed to him in trust and returned it in a different condition, and there is no arrangement anywhere for putting that right.

And this is where I stop writing about Ibrahim, because your name is not only yours either.

I am not going to ask what happened, and I am not going to tell you the street is wrong to have heard it.

Named by a mouth in a different place

I want to give you a line that is about exactly this and which most people read too quickly, because the interesting part is not the new name, it is who does the naming.

And thou shalt be called by a new name, which the mouth of the LORD shall name.Isaiah 62:2

Which the mouth of the LORD shall name.

That clause is doing all the work. It is not saying that your reputation gets rebuilt in the street. It is saying that the naming is performed somewhere the street has no access to, by a mouth that the street does not operate.

And the passage is addressed to a place, not only to a person, which matters here. Isaiah is speaking to a city with a ruined name, a whole community that carries one word between them, and the promise is not that the old word gets its old meaning back.

So take that under your own awning. You are named by the mouth of the Lord, and Isaiah 62:2 says that naming is His and not the street's, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a man who has stopped arguing about his own standing.

Now the honest half, and it is the reason you can trust the rest.

Nothing in that verse says the family name recovers on that street. It might. It might not. Reputations sometimes come back over a long time and sometimes they do not, and any message that hands you a guarantee about it is selling you something it does not own.

What the written word does say is that there is a naming being done that no street can perform and no street can withdraw, and the Spirit of God is the one carrying it, and it reaches the eleven year old nephew too, because he is not named by the awning either.