Finding A Name

This morning I spent some time playing with my son Elijah as my daughter Gracie slept in her bouncy seat.  My son has decided that her name is T C, and I love it.  We named her Gracie because we believe that the grace of God removed a small cyst in her brain when she was still developing in the womb.  On a Monday it was there, we were freaked out, people prayed, and on Friday it was gone.  In many other ways she has become the grace of God to us and so we named her Grace, but my son has decided that her name is T C.  

It's not that he doesn't like her real name, and I don't think that he has a reason for re naming her (although who know what goes on in the mind of a child) but it is his way of reaching out for her name and speaking it in the only language he can.  Her name really is T C to him, that is who she is becoming in his life.  

What about God, What about the Holy Spirit, What about Yeshua?  Why have we named them as we have?  Some of it is the way that these names have been revealed to us by God, or at least the way we have interpreted that revelation and been able to understand it.  In one way this is God's name, it is the reality we can grasp at of this infinite God.  In another way it is not God at all, it totally fails to fully grasp who he is.  

Names are funny things, they seem to reveal who a person is and at the same time call a true identity out of that person that is always in the process of becoming.  As parents it is a great weight to name our children well.  Then their sibling and friends just rename them for silly reasons.  On a mission trip in high school this girl just started calling me Bubbles, she decided that should be my nickname.  No reason, it just was.  Luckily it didn't stick, but others have.  On that same trip I bought a whip and was trying to whip a bird at the campground where we were staying, it came back and hit me in the face and cut my cheek.  At that point my friend Colin started calling me Indy, and that name stuck a little more because it had meaning.

Often we cry out to God in the names that have little meaning to us, but they are what we have learned he is called.  Other times we cry out to him and we can not even speak his name because we are so moved by his overwhelming beauty and deep darkness.  We must cry out, and each of us must call to Him in the most meaningful ways we can, by the name that we truly know him by.  But someday we will know his true name and he will speak our true names and we will all be undone by the beauty and depths of love wrapped up in our names and in his name.  Until then we continue to find our true name in this place, and we journey toward his true name as it is worked out in our current world.

Peace.