I Have Called You by Your Name

He stopped correcting people in his second year and it is now his eleventh.

The first year he corrected everybody. Politely, and with a small smile, and usually only once, and about a third of them got it and the rest went back to the other version within a fortnight.

By the second year he had worked out the arithmetic of it. Correcting somebody costs about four seconds and a very small amount of social friction, and it has to be done every time, with every new person, for the rest of his working life. And so he did what a sensible man does with a cost that repeats forever, which is that he stopped paying it.

So now there is a version of his name that exists only at work. Everybody uses it. It is on the rota, and in emails, and in the mouth of a man who has known him for nine years and thinks of himself as a friend.

And the strange thing, which he did not expect and could not have predicted at twenty-six, is what it has quietly done.

It is not offense. He is not angry with any of them and if you accused them he would defend them.

It is that a man who is called by an approximation for forty-five hours a week starts to feel like an approximation. Not disrespected. Just slightly not there. As though the person they are being friendly to is a near neighbor of himself.

God says the name first, and He says it correctly

But now thus saith the LORD that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine (Isaiah 43:1).

Read what is in that verse in order, because the order is doing something.

He created you. He formed you. Fear not. I have redeemed you. I have called you by your name. You are mine.

Called thee by thy name. Not by a role, not by a category, not by an approximation that is close enough for a rota. By the name, which in that whole book is a way of saying: the actual particular person and not a member of a group.

And then the last clause, which is short and which lands like a hand on a shoulder: thou art mine.

You are called by your own name by the God who made it. That is what the word says He does, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an ancient sentence land on a man who has spent eleven years answering to something else, because Scripture says He knows those who are His and knows them individually.

What eleven years of an approximation does

Let me name it properly, because you have never said it out loud and it deserves better than being carried silently.

You are not offended. I believe you. The men you work with are decent and they are not trying to erase anybody, and a person's mouth does what it has been trained to do with sounds it did not grow up with, and none of that is malice.

But a name is not a label. In your family, and in the book this site is about, a name carries a person. It is how somebody is picked out of a crowd, how a mother calls across a courtyard, how God addresses a man in the dark. So being called by an approximation for eleven years does not offend a person; it slowly detaches them, and the detaching is so gradual that nobody, including the man it is happening to, notices when it starts.

You are not an approximation and you have never once been addressed as one by God. The word says the LORD called me from the womb, from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name (Isaiah 49:1), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a felt belonging rather than a nice verse, because He is the one who cries Abba from inside a person, which is the most personal address in the book.

Thou art mine

The last clause is where the whole verse is going, and it is the answer to the specific thing you are carrying.

Thou art mine.

That is a statement of ownership in the warm sense, the sense in which a person belongs to a family rather than to an employer. And it is attached, in the same sentence, to the calling of the name, because in Scripture those two things go together: God names, and the naming establishes the belonging.

Which means the correct pronunciation of your name is currently being used, daily, by the one whose opinion on the matter is final.

You are known by name by Someone who says it properly. Scripture puts I have called thee by thy name and thou art mine in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that arrive as belonging in a man who has felt slightly not-there for eleven years.

And here is the honest limit. This does not tell you whether to start correcting people again. You may, and there would be nothing wrong with it, and you may not, and there would be nothing wrong with that either; that is a decision about your own life and it is yours. What is settled is that the version of your name that is used in heaven is the real one, and a man who knows that walks into a canteen as himself.