My Delight Is in Her

The word she uses about herself is left.

Not abandoned; that would be dramatic and she is not a dramatic woman. Left. As in, people leave. As in, I am the one who gets left, and she says it lightly, at the end of a story, with a shrug in her voice, and everybody who has ever heard her say it has laughed because of the way she says it.

She has been saying it for about nineteen years, since the first one. And then the second one. And then, in a different way, the friend who moved and simply stopped, and her mother, who did not choose it, but who still went.

She is not bitter. That is the strange thing about her. She is one of the warmest people in that hall and she is generally the reason anybody is laughing.

But there is a name she carries and she gave it to herself, and she has said it out loud so many times that it has stopped being a description and become an identification, and the trouble with an identification is that it starts making decisions. It decides how long she stays at things. It decides what she does not let herself want. It decided, last year, that she would not go for something she was more than qualified for.

And when a good word comes over her from anywhere, from a friend, from a service, from a page, the name gets there first and files it under: nice, and not about me.

God renames a place that had a name

Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah: for the LORD delighteth in thee (Isaiah 62:4).

There is a lot in that verse, and I want you to see the shape of it before the detail.

There was an old name. It was not made up by an enemy; it was the name the place had come to be called, and it was, in a plain descriptive sense, accurate. Things had happened. It looked forsaken.

And God does not argue with the history. He does not say: you were never forsaken. He renames.

Hephzibah is not a mystical word. It is a sentence used as a name, and it means my delight is in her.

You are being renamed by somebody with the authority to do it. The word records God changing what a place is called and giving the reason in the same breath, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a renaming actual in a woman rather than decorative, because Scripture says we are His workmanship and workmanship is something being worked on.

Your own mouth has been the loudest voice

Now let me say the difficult part, and I say it as somebody who loves the way you tell a story.

The name is in your mouth. Not somebody else's. Yours, said lightly, at the end of stories, for nineteen years, and the lightness is exactly what has let it in, because nobody argues with a joke.

That is not a moral failure. It is what a person does with a wound they have decided not to be dramatic about: they make it small and portable and they carry it in a sentence.

But a sentence said a thousand times is not a joke any more. It is a name. And a name gives instructions.

You are not what you have been calling yourself, however accurately you described the history. Scripture says death and life are in the power of the tongue (Proverbs 18:21), and it does not exempt the tongue from being used on its owner, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person a different word to say about themselves, which is a work He does gently and over time.

Delight is not a reward for being easy to love

Here is the part I want in your hands when you leave.

The reason God gives for the new name is not that the place improved. Nothing in Isaiah 62 says the land got better first and then earned the sentence. The reason is stated flatly: for the LORD delighteth in thee.

That is the ground. Not performance, not recovery, not having stopped being the sort of person things happen to. His delight, which is a thing in Him.

You are delighted in, and the delight is not a response to your having become easier to delight in. The word puts the reason in God and not in the place, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that believable to a woman whose own voice has been running the other way for nineteen years.

And I will be straight with you, because you would spot anything else. Nothing here promises that nobody leaves again. People are people, and I will not stand in front of a woman with your history and pretend otherwise. What is settled is what God calls you and why, and a woman with a new name in her mouth makes different decisions with it even in a year when the history repeats.