A Name Only the Two of You Know

In that village she has been somebody's daughter for fifty-one years.

Her mother ran the shop for thirty years and was, by any measure, the most known person in the place. Everybody has a story. Everybody remembers her handwriting on the noticeboard. There is a bench.

And the daughter is now fifty-one and has lived in that village her whole life, and she is greeted every single day, warmly, by people who like her, and the greeting is almost always a version of the same thing.

You are so like her. Or: your mother would have loved that. Or, from the older ones, simply: Nancy's girl, said fondly, as though it were her name, which in that village it effectively is.

She loved her mother. There is no resentment here and this is not a story about a difficult family.

But she has never once in her life been met by somebody with no prior information. Everybody she has ever been introduced to came pre-loaded. And there is a small strange grief in that which she has never been able to explain to anybody, because if you try to explain it you sound ungrateful for a much-loved mother, and so she has stopped trying.

Somewhere under fifty-one years of being warmly, accurately, affectionately placed, there is a woman nobody has ever met.

A stone, and a name nobody else reads

To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it (Revelation 2:17).

That is one of the strangest promises in the New Testament and it is aimed exactly at what you carry.

A white stone. A new name written on it. And then the clause: which no man knows except the one who receives it.

So there is a name that God has for a person which is private between the two of them. Not secret in an eerie sense; hidden in the sense that it is not part of the public record of that person, not what the village has, not what anybody has assembled about them from the outside.

Which means the God who made you has a word for you that came from Him rather than from anybody's memory of your mother.

You have a name that arrives from outside every village that has ever placed you. That is what the word promises, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an unread name into something a woman can rest in, because Scripture says the Spirit searches the deep things of God and shows them to us.

Being placed is not being known

Let me name the difference, because you have carried it wordless for years and it is not ingratitude.

Being placed is when people can locate you accurately in a network. It is warm, it is genuine, and it makes a village a village. Nancy's girl is not an insult; it is a form of belonging and half the world would take it.

Being known is when somebody has met you with no prior file and formed an impression from you alone.

You have had a lifetime of the first and almost none of the second, and the reason nobody has ever understood when you tried to say it is that the first one looks, from outside, exactly like the thing you are missing.

You are met without a file by Someone who did not read about you first. The word says the LORD looks on the heart while people look on the outward appearance (1 Samuel 16:7), which is precisely the distinction, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes being met feel different from being placed.

Why the name is hidden

Now, this bothers people, so let me handle it.

Why would God give a name that nobody else can read? It sounds lonely at first.

It is the opposite. A name only two people know is what exists between people who are actually close, and every family has a version of it, and every close friendship. The public name is for the network. The private one is for the relationship, and it is not a lesser name; it is the one that could not have been assembled by anybody from the outside, because it comes from knowing rather than from information.

So the hiddenness of it is not a withholding. It is the proof of where it came from.

You are given a name that could not have been assembled from what anybody knows about you. Scripture says I will give him a white stone and a new name written which no man knows but the one who receives it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a comfort rather than a curiosity.

And I will keep it honest, because you would notice. Nothing here means the village stops saying you are so like her, and they will say it on Thursday, and they will mean it kindly. What is settled is that there is a name for you which was not assembled from anybody's memory, and a woman who knows that walks through her own village as herself.