The Name on the Mailbox

Dorsey heard his own surname used in a sentence that was not about him and that is when he understood what had happened.

He was in a hardware store two counties over, which is a distance he now drives for certain things. Two men he did not know were talking about something else entirely, some situation at a workplace, and one of them said a phrase that had his family name in it, used as a comparison.

They were not talking about him. They did not know him. One of them was maybe twenty five and would have been a boy when it happened.

His name had become a unit of measurement.

That is the thing about a small place. A name does not merely get a bad association; it gets absorbed into the language, and once it is in the language it does not need him any more. It goes on working in sentences about other people, in shops he is not in, spoken by people who could not pick him out of a line.

And here is what he cannot get past.

He can see how it would end. Names do fade out of a language, over decades, as the people who remember why get old. But his mailbox has that name on it. His son has that name. The name did not come from him, it came down to him, and it will go on down after him, and it is going out into a county where it now means a thing.

He has caught himself, twice, thinking about whether his son should use his mother's name.

He did not say it out loud. He would never say it out loud. But he thought it, and thinking it told him something about how far this has gone in him.

And this is where I stop writing about Dorsey, because your name has been used in a sentence somewhere.

I am not going to ask what for, and I am not going to promise you the language changes back.

Four things, and a county issued none of them

I want to give you a verse that is a list, and I want you to notice that every item on the list is a title.

But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people.1 Peter 2:9

Four of them. Chosen. Royal. Holy. Peculiar, which in that older English means a possession, a people belonging particularly to somebody, claimed and kept.

And here is who 1 Peter 2 is written to. Not a comfortable congregation. It is written to scattered people whose reputation in their own towns was actively bad, who were being spoken about in exactly the way you are being spoken about, and the Holy Spirit had it put down for them in four words: but ye are.

That word but is standing against the sentence outside. It concedes that there is a version out there and it does not argue with the version. It sets four titles beside it that were issued from somewhere else.

So take that in a hardware store two counties over. You are a chosen generation and a peculiar people, and 1 Peter 2:9 hands you four titles no county has any part in issuing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes those land in a man who has just heard his own name used as a unit of measurement.

Now the honest half, and it is why you can trust the rest of this page.

Nothing in that verse says the language in your county changes. It might, in thirty years, when the people who remember are old. It might not. Nobody who tells you otherwise is in a position to know, and I am not going to trade you a certainty for a maybe.

What the written word does say is that four titles were issued to you from outside the county, in a claim you did not make, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps them current whether or not a single person in that hardware store ever learns anything.