The Nickname That Followed Her to Work

The card comes around the break room at ten forty in the morning, face down, the way they always do, with a pen taped to it so nobody can lose the pen.

It is for the man in shipping who is turning sixty. She takes it to the counter by the coffee maker, which is gurgling and spitting the way it does, and she opens it to find somewhere to sign. And there, third from the top, in green ink, somebody has written: "Happy birthday from all of us in AP, and from Mouse!"

She stands there for a second with the card open.

She has worked here eleven years. Her name is on the badge clipped to her collar. Her name is on the email she sent nine minutes ago about the quarterly reconciliation, which was signed properly, in full, the way she signs everything. She writes her real name forty times a day.

Her cousin started in accounts payable in March. By the second week of April the whole floor had it.

It came from being seven years old and small and quiet at a house full of loud people, and it stuck the way those things do, and it followed her to junior high and it followed her to her wedding, where it was in a toast, and it has now followed her here, into the only building in her life where nobody had ever called her that. She had eleven years of just being her name. That is over, and it took about nine days.

The strange part, the part she keeps turning over, is that she answers to it. Somebody says it across the parking lot and she turns around. Somebody puts it in an email and she replies warmly, signing her real name, and they write back "thanks Mouse!!" and she does not say anything. She has never once said, out loud, "actually, I go by my name." Not in thirty one years. She is thirty eight years old and she has been answering to a word she never agreed to since before she could spell it.

She signs the card. She writes her full name, carefully, the way she always does, and she puts the pen back in the tape and passes it on.

And walking back to her desk she thinks a thing so quiet it barely counts as a thought: I do not know how I would even start.

You know the name. Yours might be affectionate, or it might not be, and you may have carried it so long that hearing it does not sting anymore, which is its own kind of information about how long it has been. So before anything else, and before one word about what to do: You have a name that was given to you inside God's own house, and nobody on this floor issued it. Isaiah 56:5 says He gives a name that cannot be cut off, and the Holy Spirit has been using that name for you since long before your cousin ever filled out an application.

A name is a handle, and somebody is holding it

Here is what a nickname actually is, stripped of the affection people wrap it in.

It is a handle. It is the part of you other people pick you up by. And handles get fitted to the convenience of whoever is doing the lifting, which is why almost nobody chooses their own. Yours was fitted by adults in a loud house to a quiet seven year old, and it fit her, and it has been fitted to you every day since, at eleven, at twenty five, at thirty eight, on a woman who reconciles a quarter for a living and has not been small or quiet in a very long time.

That is the trouble with a handle. It does not update.

Now hear what God does, and notice that He does not adjust an existing one.

To them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will not be cut off.Isaiah 56:5

Read where the name is. In My house. Within My walls. Not shouted across a parking lot, not written in green ink on a card that will be in a drawer by Christmas. Cut into the fabric of the place where He lives, in the part of a building that does not come down.

And read what kind of name it is. Everlasting, and not able to be cut off, which is God saying plainly that nobody gets to take a chisel to it later. You have a name that cannot be cut off, and no one on earth has been given the tool for it. That stands written in Revelation 2:17, where He gives a new name known between Him and the one who receives it, and the Spirit has been reading that over you at your desk while you signed somebody else's card.

He did not rename you to make up for anything

I want to be careful here, because there is a cheap version of this message and it would insult you.

The cheap version says God gives you a nice name to make up for the one people gave you. As though heaven were running a consolation counter. That is not what is happening and it would not be worth much if it were, because a name handed out to soothe you is just a nicer handle held by a kinder hand, and you would still be being carried.

What is actually happening is older and much better. The name He uses for you was not composed in response to yours. It was not a reply. He was not reacting to a loud house in 1995. He named you out of Himself, first, before there was a seven year old to be small in a corner, and it has been the name in His mouth the entire time you have been answering to the other one. You were named by God before anybody else got a word in, and nothing you did earned that name or could lose it. Scripture says it in Isaiah 62:2, that you are called by a new name which the mouth of the Lord bestows, and the Spirit does not put that sentence in the future tense when He speaks it to you.

Which means this article is not asking you to go and correct the whole floor. You may want to one day and that is yours to decide. But the correction is not the point and it is not the medicine. You could get the whole building to stop tomorrow and still be a woman who does not know what she is called. You are already called something in the place that matters most, and the calling of it does not depend on what happens in the break room. That rests on Isaiah 43:1, where God says He has called you by name, and the Spirit goes on saying it in a room where the coffee maker is the loudest thing in it.