Called by That Name

Her email signature has changed four times in two years and the fourth one arrived on a Thursday with no warning.

Junior Coordinator. Then Coordinator. Then, after the restructure, Delivery Associate, which nobody could explain. And now something with the word Partner in it that makes her sound significantly more important than she is and which her mother has already screenshotted and sent to three relatives.

She is twenty-four. She is doing fine, objectively. She is not being mistreated and she is paid on time and there are people at that office she genuinely likes.

The problem is a small one and it happened at a wedding.

Somebody she had never met asked her what she was, and she opened her mouth and the answer that came out was the job title, which had changed the previous Thursday, and she heard herself say it and thought: that is not a thing. That is a row in a spreadsheet somebody in HR maintains.

And then, because she is honest with herself in a way that is occasionally inconvenient, she spent the rest of the evening trying to work out what she would have said instead, and could not finish the sentence.

I am. And then nothing.

A name was placed on you and it was not a job title

Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God (1 John 3:1).

Look at the verb: called. Not: allowed to think of ourselves as. Not: encouraged to feel like. Called, which is a word about what somebody is named by somebody with the standing to name them.

And look at who does the naming. The Father. Not a manager, not a company, not the person at the wedding asking a perfectly reasonable question.

And look at the word before it: bestowed. It is a gift word. Something was given, deliberately, at somebody's cost, and the result of the giving is a name.

You have been called by a name that was placed on you by God. That is the plain sense of the verse, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a placed name into a felt one, because Scripture says the Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Romans 8:16), which is exactly the sentence you could not finish at that wedding.

Why the job title got there first

Now let me say something kind, because you have been slightly embarrassed about this since the wedding and there is nothing to be embarrassed about.

The job title got there first because it is the answer to the question you were actually asked. People ask what you do. It is a good question, it is not shallow, and it is how most human beings open a conversation with a stranger.

The problem is not that you answered it. The problem is that when the question came, you discovered there was nothing underneath the answer, and that is not a character flaw at twenty-four. It is a completely ordinary discovery and most people have it much later and handle it much worse.

You are not what your work is called and you never were. The word says we are His workmanship (Ephesians 2:10), which puts you on the made side of the sentence rather than the job side, and the Holy Spirit is the one who settles that in a person before their circumstances test it.

A name that does not move with the org chart

Here is the practical difference, and it is worth having clearly.

A title is assigned by an organization, for its purposes, and it changes when the organization's purposes change. That is not cynical; that is simply what a title is for. Nobody at your work is doing anything wrong by restructuring.

A name placed on a person by God is not assigned for anybody's operational convenience. It does not get revised in a reorganization and it does not appear on a spreadsheet, and it was placed on you before you had done anything at all that could be evaluated.

You have a name that is not being maintained by anybody's HR system. Scripture says God has said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee (Hebrews 13:5), and that is a sentence about permanence spoken by somebody who does not restructure, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the seal, which is a mark applied to something to show whose it is.

And I will be honest with you, because you would notice if I were not. Knowing this does not make the next restructure comfortable and does not tell you what to do about your career. What is settled is what you are when the title is gone, and a woman who can finish that sentence goes to the next wedding with something to say.