You Can't Eat a Chicken You Name!

For my wife's birthday, Phyllis and I were taken to lunch by church friends, Gary & Sue Appleby, former missionaries to Germany. Their adult daughter, Amy was with us and shared that per the norm they had raised chickens while in Germany. The idea was, of course, to eventually make a meal out of them. But when it came time they just couldn't bring themselves to kill those helpless little birds. Why? Because Mike (their son) & Amy had given names to them! And because they had named them, it just didn't seem right to turn them from pet to provision! There is something about naming that is very personal, even if it is just chickens!

God works through people, people with names. "No child is just a child. Each is creature in whom God intends to do something glorious and great. No one is only a product of the genes contributed by the parents. Who we are and will be is compounded with who God is and what he does. God's love and providence and salvation are comprised in the reality of our existence along with our metabolism and blood type and fingerprints." Jeremiah's name, Eugene Peterson writes in Run With the Horses, may mean "the LORD exalts," or "the LORD hurls." Either way, his name involves "the LORD." Whatever his names actually meant to his parents, he became a prophet of God, doing his oft unpopular bidding. He operated against the norm, went opposite the tide of human opinion. We in America, do not tend place as much emphasis on the meanings of names as upon who they represent (a parent's surname, a favorite uncle or aunt). What we DON'T want to happen is for our names to dictate our direction in life, to be only what others expect of us instead of what God expects. And that will likely go contrary to society's norm.

Don't Abdicate Your Role

"The French talk of deformation professionelle--a liability, a tendency to defect that is inherent in the role that one has assumed, as say a physician or a lawyer." Jeremiah was a prophet and "the deformation to which prophets and priests and wise men are subject is to market God as a commodity, to use God to legitimize selfishness. . . . A personal name, not an assigned role, is our passbook into reality. . . . Anything other than our name--title, job description, number, role--is less than a name. . . . We live by the stereotypes in which other people cast us that are out of touch with the uniqueness in which God has created us, and so live diminished into boredom, the brightness leaking away."

Here's The Point

"The only thing more significant to Jeremiah than his own being was God's being. He fought in the name of the Lord and explored the reality of God and in the process grew and developed, ripened and matured. He was always reaching out, always finding more truth, getting in touch with more of God, becoming more himself, more human." Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine (Isaiah 43:1).