The Family That Gets Its Name

He watches for it and he has watched for it since he was fourteen.

The small pause. The half beat after he says his surname when somebody is placing it, and then the recovery, which is usually kind and is occasionally not.

Ah. Are you one of the ones from up by the bridge.

He is fifty-one. The things his surname is about happened before he could vote, and two of them were his uncle and one was his father and one was a cousin who is dead now, and he has spent thirty years being a different sort of man in the same town.

And it has worked, mostly. He is trusted at work. His daughters were never treated badly at school. If you asked anybody under forty they would tell you he is one of the good ones, which is a sentence that contains its own history.

But he still watches for the pause. He is aware of doing it, and he does not enjoy it, and he cannot stop, because thirty years of clean living have not removed a syllable from the name on his post.

And here is what he has never said out loud, not to his wife and not to anybody: he has never once been able to hear his own surname without hearing what it is about.

A family that gets its name from somewhere else

For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named (Ephesians 3:14 and 15).

Look at the direction the naming runs in that sentence.

The family does not give the Father a name. The Father gives the family its name. Every family, in heaven and on earth, derives what it is called from Him, and that is a claim about origin rather than about sentiment.

Which means there is a naming that runs down from God, and it is not a metaphor for feeling included. It is the same kind of thing your surname is: an inherited designation that says where somebody is from.

Except this one comes from a Father whose name has nothing in it to live down.

You are named from a Father whose name carries nothing you have to live down. That is what the word says about where a family's name comes from, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an inherited name feel like a real inheritance, because Scripture says we have received the Spirit of adoption whereby we cry, Abba, Father.

Thirty years of living something down

Now let me say the thing about the thirty years, because it deserves saying and nobody in that town has ever said it to you.

They were not wasted and they were not vanity. You raised daughters who were not treated badly. You were trusted at work by people who had every reason to be careful. A man who lives well in a place that has already made up its mind about his name is doing something genuinely difficult and mostly unrewarded.

But you have been doing it as a defense, and a defense is exhausting in a way that a life is not, and it never finishes, because there is no point at which a town formally revises its opinion and sends you a letter.

You are not required to earn your way out of a name. The word says if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things are passed away (2 Corinthians 5:17), and that is a statement about status rather than about reputation management, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a new standing feel like rest to a man who has been running a defense since he was fourteen.

Two names, and which one outranks

Here is the practical part.

You have two names now, and this article is not going to pretend the first one has gone. It has not. It is on your post and it is in that pause and it will be there next week.

But the second one is not a nickname or a feeling. It is a family designation given by a Father, and in the order of things it outranks the one from up by the bridge, because it comes from higher up and because it was given rather than inherited by accident.

So the pause still happens, and you are still the man in the room, and you now know two things about yourself where before you knew one.

You have a name from God that outranks the one your town knows. Scripture says behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called the children of God (1 John 3:1), and the Holy Spirit is the one who bears witness to that inside a man, so that the pause in a conversation stops being the loudest fact in the room.

And I will keep it honest, because you have had enough of people being encouraging at you. Nothing here changes what that town thinks or removes a syllable from your post. What is settled is that there is a naming that runs down from a Father, and a man who knows he is inside it walks into a room carrying two names rather than one.