Changing Names...

I was having lunch with a young woman this weekend and as I listened to her share her heart I realized that she should meet a friend of mine. I told her I had a guy I wouldn’t mind introducing her to. Immediately she asked me, "What’s his name?" I knew instinctively why she wanted to know and couldn’t help but laugh. “Why, you want to see how it goes with yours?”

She just laughed in return. Because anyone that is a girl or knows a girl, knows that from the time we’re in grade school and have notebooks of our own to decorate we splatter them with the decoration of our new last name. My first one was Denise Gunnerson. Robbie Gunnerson was my third grade crush and the first boy that ever let me wear his baseball cap. That was only after I let go of my true first husband who had me going by the name of Denise Osmond.

A name change changes your very identity. It comes with a wedding ring, a “filing jointly” status and a life of being known as belonging to someone. And even though men will never know what it is to graffiti their Five Star notebooks with a new last name, I can’t help but think not one of us hasn’t at some point needed a name change.

God did a lot of changing names. He changed Abram to Abraham, Jacob to Israel, Simon to Peter and Saul to Paul. These men were childless, schemers, wishy-washy and bullies. But when God changed them the became fathers, patriarchs, rocks and history changers.

What is most heartbreaking is when someone doesn’t believe their name can be changed. I see it so often. People who have decided their sin, their “just the way I am,” or the pain of their past is who they are. Some may fight for a while. Tug at the chains around their neck, Try to pretend they’re something they’re not. But the bloodiness of their hands has them tired. And the charade that might have fooled others has never fooled them.

But the chain has a key to the lock. The “sin that doeth so easily beset us,” has a liberator. The schemer, the abuser, the double-minded man, the adulterer, the liar, the alcoholic, the doubter, each has a redeemer, who when He sets us free He “sets us free indeed.” Not halfway. Not partway. But all the way.

Will it hurt? Yep. It will change us forever. Because it won’t just change our name it will change the way we walk too. When Jacob met the Angel of God at the ford of the Jabbok and they wrestled, scripture says that the Angel touched Jacob in his hip socket and he forever walked with a limp. Even how he walked was different. Why? Because he looked in the face of that Angel and said, “I’m not letting go until you bless me.”

Why do people spend their lives with names they were never meant to carry, pains God never desired them to endure, identities defined by their issues instead of who God can be to them? Because they weren’t willing to hold on. They weren’t willing to “go there” to “get there.” Jacob knew what the old Jacob looked like. The old Jacob had spent his life running. Stealing. And living with the consequences of it. And he was bloody alright, but when he finally got to a place, away from his family, away from all his crutches, and alone with God, God met him. And wrestled with Him and He with God. And no matter how difficult the struggle Jacob refused to let go. And in the end God changed his name. He changed his name to Israel. He was now known as the man who "persisted with God." And Jacob was never the same. Never.

I don’t know how you may have thought you were defined. I don’t know what you’ve been called in the past, how you’ve named yourself, what your parents called you, or what your friends addressed you by. But I know that each of us has the opportunity to be redefined. Don’t have to take it. Everything with God is a choice. He created choice. Why? Because He, like us, wants His name to be chosen. Just like we as women choose whose name we will take in marriage because we want to know we love them and just like men choose who they will give their name to, because they want it to belong to the one they want to spend the rest of their lives with, God is the same way. He wants to be desired, cherished and when He is, He graciously bestows His name upon us. And when He does even the way we walk will be different.

May we be so bold as to cross over to the Jabbock. May we get alone with God and may we persist with him until He blesses us. May we not let go until He blesses us. Because the one thing I do know is that He won’t ever let go of us…