Naming Names

Naming Names

My sister and I go by our middle names. Both of us were named after our grandmothers, but we were called Lynn and Leigh, never Alice and Nona. This, of course, caused all kinds of confusion on the first day of school, and it is still a pain when filling out forms. I will answer to Nona if need be, but every time I do I feel like an imposter. Technically, I bear her name, but it has always seemed more hers than mine.

Names specify. When the angel announced to Mary that she would bear the Messiah, he didn’t say, “Name him whatever you like.” He said instead, “You will name him Jesus” (Luke 1:31). It was a name that meant something: “He will be very great and will be called the Son of the Most High” (Luke 1:32).

A friend asked me once, “If the Lord had a name for you that embodied the new person he is making of you through his love, what would that name be?” I told him I thought he might lovingly call me “My unforgettable tattoo,” because he says my identity is engraved on the palms of his hands.

Whatever his chosen name for me, it is one that both fits me and forms me.

In the flyleaf of one of the many books in his personal library, C. S. Lewis wrote, “All that you are . . . every fold and crease of your individuality was devised from all eternity to fit God as a glove fits a hand. All that intimate particularity which you can hardly grasp . . . is no mystery to Him. He made those ins and outs that He might fill them.”^a

“_________ is mine.” Write your name, your true name, in the blank. He is ever naming names, and he loves the sound of yours.

I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.

Isaiah 49:15-16, NIV

^a Quoted in Corbin Scott Carnell, Bright Shadow of Reality: C. S. Lewis and the Feeling Intellect (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), 163.