What That Word Used to Mean

Verna is old enough to remember what her family name meant on that road in nineteen fifty eight, and she is old enough to know that almost nobody else does.

It meant a particular thing. It meant that if your car went in the ditch you could knock on that door at any hour. It meant a woman who sat up with other people's dying. It meant a man who never had much and never once had less than he owed.

There were four people on that road in nineteen fifty eight who knew all of that firsthand and all four of them are dead.

What it means now is one thing that happened, and everybody within nine miles knows it, and it did not happen in nineteen fifty eight.

Here is what she has learned about a name over eighty one years, and it is not bitter, and I am not going to make it bitter.

A name does not carry its history. People carry its history, and people die.

The good years are held by the people who lived through them, and when those people go, the good years go with them, and what stays in the language is whatever was most recent and most talked about. That is not a moral failure of a road. It is what memory is.

So the name on that road now means the last big thing. It will mean the next big thing later. And for a stretch in between, which may be the rest of her life, it means this one.

She does not argue with anybody about it. She has decided not to spend her last years correcting nine miles of people, and she thinks that decision was right, and she is also honest enough to know it cost her something to make it.

And this is where I stop writing about Verna, because your name means something now that it did not mean once.

I am not going to ask what it means, and I am not going to tell you the road will change its mind.

What God does with the name

I want to give you a verse that tells you what God is doing while a road decides what your name means, and it is not what most people expect.

The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.Zephaniah 3:17

Four things He is doing and only one of them is what people go looking for.

Mighty in the midst of thee. That is the one everybody wants: the strong thing, the intervening thing, the fixing.

But then: rejoice over thee with joy. Rest in his love. And that last one, which is the strangest sentence in the prophets: joy over thee with singing.

Singing. Over a person. About them.

And note what a song is, because this is the whole point for a woman with a name on a road. A song is a thing that is repeated. It does not get retold shorter, and it does not get amended by whoever is talking this year. It has a tune, and the tune stays.

So take that on your own porch, at eighty one. You are being sung over, and Zephaniah 3:17 says God does that with joy and with rest, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person actually hear it rather than merely read it in a book.

And now the honest half, because you have never been able to stand anything else.

Zephaniah 3:17 does not say the road learns what your name used to mean. Those four people are dead and their memories died with them, and nothing on this page brings that back. If your name means the last big thing for the rest of your life, that is a real loss, and it is allowed to be one.

What the written word does say is that there is a voice which never revised anything, which knows all of it, the nineteen fifty eight and the other, and is singing rather than summarizing, and the Spirit of God has been carrying that tune the whole time.