What’s in a name?

After a week in Haiti, I have a few reflections on my own, but let’s start with a point of reference. For starters, according to Shakespeare, the answer is “not too much” (that is, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”). On a very surface level, I would certainly agree. A name — my name, your name — is merely a string of letters with very little information about it. It means only what we designate it to mean, really. However, after spending a week in Haiti, I am compelled to answer the question a bit differently. What’s in a name?

Everything.

You and I can ignore the injustice and inequality in the world if all we see around us are generalized people groups like “the poor” and “the needy”. In fact, as I ventured into this week, those are precisely the people I went to see. There is, however, a problem with that, and you may say, “Josh, where’s the problem with helping the poor?” The issue is that the problem wasn’t external — it was one within my own heart. You see, once I stopped seeing “the poor,” I started seeing people. I saw Annette, Bedson, Nevinski, Rivaldo, Luna, and so many others. I became fascinated with getting to know them (even though my French Creole is still a little rusty). As Laurie Vanderpool so concisely put it to us this week, “Once you know their name, it’s over.” She was right, and here’s a few conclusions that it has led me to:

1) Until we intimately involve ourselves in the lives of the oppressed — until we become poor so that they may become rich, until we put ourselves between the oppressed and the oppressor — we will remain unconvicted, uninspired, and ineffective as ministers of the gospel to faceless masses. When we learn their names and identify with struggles, only then will God light a fire within us to be catalysts for change in the world and in the Kingdom.

2) Your name is not a meaningless string of characters, but a story. It is a story to your friends, to your parents or your children, to your teachers or your students, to all with whom you come into contact. This “story” is not a work of fiction, but a series of events orchestrated, set forth before the foundations of the earth by God, that moves each of us forward in development, ushering us (hopefully) into a season deeper intimacy with God, community with the body of Christ, and a missional lifestyle. As Scripture would have it, “A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches” (Proverbs 22:1) and is “better than precious ointment (Ecclesiastes 7:1). What story are we telling those who read the tale of our lives?

3) If you ever had any doubts about our God being a personal God, know that he knows your name. “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1). Who are we that the Lord of all the earth would care to know each of us by name? I don’t know, but I trust in the promises laid out to us in His word. We are not forgotten.

More reflections to come later, I’m sure. Blessings, friends!