Nobody Uses My Name

There is a strip of masking tape on the top of his locker with his name on it, written in his own hand with a marker, eleven years ago, on his first Monday. The tape has gone the color of weak tea and one corner has curled. Nobody has read it in about that long.

Shift change is the loudest fifteen minutes of the day. Two crews in one room, forty lockers, boots on concrete, somebody's radio going, the heavy door banging every twenty seconds, the smell of coffee and machine oil and cold air coming in off the yard. It is a good room. He likes these men. They would carry him out of a fire and he knows it.

And in fifteen minutes, six of them will speak to him, and not one of them will use his name.

They call him Spare. It goes back to his first year, when he was the permanent flexible cover on the schedule, the one they slotted in wherever a hole opened up, and somebody said hey, get Spare on it, and it landed the way those things do. It stung then. He remembers exactly where he was standing the first time somebody said it in front of the plant manager and the plant manager laughed and used it too.

It does not sting now. That is the thing he would tell you if he told you anything. Eleven years takes the edge off a word the way water takes the edge off a stone. Spare, you got a minute. Spare, that pallet yours? Morning, Spare. He answers to it easily. He answers to it faster than he would answer to his own name, which is a thought he had once in the parking lot and has not gone back to.

His mother is gone eight years. She was the last person who used his given name every single time. She used all of it when he was in trouble and the short one the rest of the time, and either way it was his, and it came out of somebody's mouth on purpose, aimed at him.

Since then: Spare at work. Buddy at the parts counter. Sir at the bank. Dad, sometimes, from a son who calls at Christmas and is kind and busy. And a strip of faded masking tape on a locker in a room where forty men would drop everything to help him move a couch and not one of them could tell you what to put on the card.

He is not sad about this. I want to be careful there. He is not standing in that locker room aching. He is a man who has been unnamed so gradually and so pleasantly that he has quit noticing, and that is a different thing and in some ways a heavier one, because nothing hurts and nothing is coming back on its own.

If you have gone that quiet about your own name, I am not going to hand you a speech about self worth. I am going to take you into a room where Jesus met a working man for the first time, and I want you to notice what He said before He said anything else. You are already named by somebody who uses it, and He used it before you had done a thing worth naming. That stands written at John 1:42, and the same Spirit who was in that room is in this one, at shift change, over the noise.

What He Said First

Andrew has been out all day and he comes back and grabs his brother, and he brings him in, and here is the whole of the introduction.

And he brought him to Jesus. And when Jesus beheld him, he said, Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone.John 1:42

Everybody remembers the second half. Cephas. The stone. The new name, the famous one, the one that ends up on churches.

Almost nobody notices the first half, and the first half is the one I would put my hand on your shoulder for.

Before Jesus gave him anything, He said the man's own name back to him. Thou art Simon the son of Jona. Not a nickname. Not a role. Not what he was useful for. His name, and his father's name with it, which in that world was the whole of a man's belonging said in four words. Jesus beheld him, which is a looking word, a settling of the eyes, and then He said out loud who this man already was.

Simon had done nothing. He had not preached, followed, confessed, failed, wept, or been restored on a beach. He had walked in the door behind his brother because his brother made him. And the first sound out of the mouth of Christ was his name, spoken correctly, in full, on purpose, aimed at him.

You have your own name said out loud by Christ before you have done anything He could be thanking you for. John 1:42 has it in writing, and the Spirit has not stopped repeating it in rooms where nobody else does.

The Name Is Given, Not Earned

Then comes the new one, and I want you to see how it works, because this is where a man usually gets it backward.

Thou shalt be called Cephas. A stone. And you know what Simon does over the next three years. He talks when he should be quiet. He swings a sword in a garden in the dark. He stands by a fire in a courtyard and says three times he has never met the man, and then he hears a rooster and goes out and cries like a child.

That is the stone. That is the man named Rock, doing all of that, after being named it.

So the name was never a performance review. It was not a description of his current reliability, because his current reliability was about to be publicly and humiliatingly terrible. It was a claim. Jesus said what He was making of him, and He said it first, at the door, on day one, to a fisherman who had not yet given Him a single reason.

That is how every name God gives works, and it is why nobody can take it off you. A name you earned is a name you can lose, and you know how fast, because you have watched a nickname you never agreed to outlast eleven years of everything else. A name He gave you first, out of Himself, with nothing about you prompting it, is not up for review.

You are not called Spare. You were never called Spare by the only one whose naming holds. This is yours today, and no room full of men and no eleven years of habit had the authority to overwrite it. His word said it at John 1:42 before anybody nicknamed anybody, and His Spirit is why it is reaching you at a locker door.