Lent: Name

Eighteen years and change ago, I called my younger brother to let him know that he had a new niece.

"What did you name her?" he asked. (We'd made a point of not telling anyone the names we were considering after discovering with Oldest Daughter that some people felt they had a license to be rude about prospective names.)

"Spock," I said. Somehow I kept my voice even but earnest, the tone you might expect from a second-time father.

"Spock?" He was incredulous. He was outraged. He was exemplifying precisely we had kept lipper number two's name quiet for nine months. "You named your daughter Spock?"

"I think it's a lovely name," I said simply. "Don't you?"

Names are funny things. Often they're ordinary words from another language, that someone one day decided to slap onto some unsuspecting kid and suddenly the word gained a whole new significance no one had expected. "Alondra" is Spanish and "Zipporah" is Hebrew. They both mean bird, but those girls are nothing like one another.

We pick the names we do for our children because of the sort of people we want them to become: logical and reasoned, loyal and strong, devoted and caring, or whatever other quality we associate with their names.

Our names gain value and meaning as we get older and build a reputation. People who have never met you but who have heard your name usually have some sort of idea what to expect when they hear your name, and it may not be the meaning your parents had when they picked that name out for you.

In the end we're choosing our own names, in secret even from ourselves. It's a lifelong act of discovery that reveals itself in how we treat others when we have more than we need, and how we treat them when we don't have enough.

Friend.
Helper.
Good Counsel.|
Wanderer.
Indifferent.
Cruel.
Murderer.

They say on the final day, all will be revealed. The books will be opened, and the Judge of all the earth will call us all forth, one at a time, by name.

I wonder if any of us really knows the name we will have chosen to answer to. Be wise, and be sure that it is one you will not be ashamed to hear.