The Apology I Add To My Own Name

Sixteen adults in a school room at ten past seven, on chairs designed for people considerably smaller than any of them, and the radiator is doing something that everybody has decided to ignore.

Beginners' Spanish. First week. The tutor is lovely and slightly over prepared, and she is going round the room, and everybody has to say their name and one thing.

It comes down the line. A woman says her name and that she has a sister in Malaga. A man says his name and that his wife made him come. A young lad says his name and nothing else, and gets away with it, and everybody laughs.

Ray says his name. And then, before he has decided to, he says: "Not working at the minute, so, plenty of time on my hands."

Nobody asked. The tutor smiles and moves on and it is gone from the room in two seconds. Nobody in that class will ever think about it again.

Ray thinks about it for the rest of the evening.

Not because anybody looked at him. They did not. Because he heard himself do it, and he knows he has been doing it for about two years, and it has spread. It is not only classrooms. It is at the door of the church hall, and at his brother's, and, and this is the one that has been sitting on him since about April, it is in the way he starts praying. He arrives with the explanation already attached. Before he says anything else, he lays out the situation, as though God needs to know which sort of man He is dealing with tonight.

Somewhere in the last couple of years the figure stopped being a fact about a month and started being a fact about him.

If you have been doing that, you will have recognized it about four lines ago. You know your own version. And you know the moment it started answering to your own name.

Two facts, and only one of them is a name

Let me be exact about what is being said here, because there is a version of this that is worth nothing and it gets handed out constantly.

Nobody is telling you the number is unreal. It is entirely real. It is the most concrete thing in your week and it decides what happens on Thursday, and nothing in this article makes it smaller, and nothing here is going to promise you that it is about to move. This site does not know and will not pretend to.

What is being disputed is not the fact. It is the authority the fact has been given.

Because a number can tell you what is in an account. It cannot tell you what you are. Those are two different kinds of statement and one of them has been quietly doing the other one's job for two years.

Hear this while the radiator is still clanking. You are named by God and the naming was done before your circumstances were consulted. Scripture has Him say it plainly, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes those words land in a man rather than pass over him.

Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.Isaiah 43:1

Notice the tense of it. Not I will call you. I have called you by name. It is behind Him. It is settled, and it was settled while the people He said it to were in the worst circumstances of their national life, in exile, with nothing about their situation improved and no date given for when it would be.

That is the whole reason the verse is worth anything to you. If God had said it to a comfortable people, in a good year, it would be a decoration. He said it into a mess and He did not fix the mess in the same sentence.

So take this where the reading has found you. You have been called by name and you are His, right now, in this exact month, and none of it waited for the figures to look better. The written word says so and the Spirit of God is the one who bears witness to it in you on the days you cannot feel a thing.

Now the harder half, because a man like Ray has usually done a bit of arithmetic on God as well.

Underneath the apology there is often a question that has never been said out loud: whether the lack is a verdict. Whether it means something about him, spiritually. Whether he is short of something, and that is why he is short of everything else.

I will say it as plainly as I know how. That is not what Scripture teaches and it is not how God works, and it does harm every time it is implied. The book of Job exists in the middle of the Bible largely to demolish it. There is no scale on which what you have is weighed and read off as what you believe. You are not in a hard place because you failed to qualify for an easier one, and the Holy Spirit who bears witness with your spirit does not consult an account before He does it.

I spend my life among old manuscripts, and there is a habit from that world worth borrowing. When something comes in, the first thing that gets recorded is not its condition. It is its identity: what this is, whose hand, which house it belongs to. The condition report comes after, and it can be dreadful, pages missing, water damage, the whole of it, and not one word of that report changes the identity line at the top. The two are on the same sheet and they are not the same fact, and no keeper has ever confused them.

There is a condition report on every one of us. It is not your name.