and your name shall be... wonderful?

Names were special when I was growing up. At church, adults were addressed as Brother Calhoun or Sister Calhoun until the friendship was firmly established. Then you became Sister Shirley or Brother Tommy. Children were not allowed to address adults by their first name alone. If they had a special relationship to you, you might call them Mr. Howard or Miss Jeanette but only with permission. Public boundaries for relationship were clear for children and adults alike. As a child I discounted these etiquette rules. I saw them as artificial and unnecessary. I have changed my mind.
Perhaps it is the sales calls I get on the phone where I am addressed as "Peggy" by someone who does not know me, will never know me and doesn’t want to know me even if I buy something... or it could be the doctor who calls me by my first name while I still don’t know theirs... or it could be I am just tired of feeling like I have no protection from a world of people who presume they know me and feel free to use my first name as a sign of a non-existent relationship. My, I sound grumpy, and old. Children, all children, are exempt from this rule for me, however. They can call me anything they want to and I will love it. No prefixes are needed and my first name will do just fine. Kids are all about relationship and have no special axes to grind beyond loving.
Our individual names have meaning. Some of that meaning may come because of a definition attached to the name word. Margaret means "a pearl". In my family that name is given to the oldest daughter. So my Aunt Peg (Margaret), me (Peggy), and my oldest daughter (Megan) all share a version of the same name. In some families names are handed down from generation to generation. Year after year, John David or Mary Elizabeth or Mary Samuel or Stuart Alvin is passed on to the next generation of children providing a context and a connection to the past from which they have sprung. Sometimes the past is too heavy a connection to bear. It feels oppressive or artificial, not really a reflection of the person who carries the name.
None of our names, I suspect, feel like the real "us" until we have lived with them for awhile. For those who never feel settled in their names, legal name change is an option. For some women who marry and take the name of their partner, we have another name shift to accommodate. We leave the name of our birth and add a new name to our list, creating a new name history. The visible sign of names’ importance is the custom of creating hyphenated last names that incorporate both last names. At some invisible point in our lives, we grow to fit our names or we let our names begin to fit us.
I remember trying out different names as a child. I wondered what I would look like as a "Mary Jane" or a "Taffy" or a "Margaret". What would I become if I were named Katherine or Mary Samuel (one of my cousins) ? Would I live up to that name differently than the name "Peggy"? I’ll never know who or what I might have become if I had been named Mary Catherine or Maria Irene.
It has been an adventure figuring out who "Peggy Joyce Calhoun Cole Hester" was and who she could be. Peggy is not a very dignified name and I am not a very dignified person. On any given day you might see me in overalls with hay in my hair, or kneeling down in front of the communion table in my Sunday best taping up the bright green table cloth with no thought for my posterior view presented to the congregation, or sliding down the home made slip and slide at the Fourth of July party at the farm, or falling gracefully off Junie B. Jones as the saddle slipped to one side. I am a person with a clear sense of my place in this world partly because of all the family stories my Grandma told me, but no illusions about my importance in the grand scheme of things. So the name Peggy suits me just fine, thank you. It is down to earth, non-threatening, easy to say, playful and it suits me.
The Bible pays attention to names. All those lists of "begats" and stories of name changes... Simon to Peter and Jacob to Israel... names are of great importance in the Bible. New names come with a change in purpose or a new self definition. Sometimes they come in struggle with unknown angels and sometimes they are given to us by others. But in Isaiah 62 a phrase in verse two gives me another source for a new name. "...and you shall be called by a new name which the mouth of the Lord will give..." I wonder what new name God will call me? Maybe I have already been given that name and didn’t hear God call me by my new name. What a soul loss that would be, to have been given a new name by God and missed it because I wasn’t listening. I am going to start watching for the clues to my new name, listening for the sound of God’s voice in my daily rounds calling me by name, calling me to a new name adventure, a new holy place with a name to match my calling. I do hope it isn’t something too dignified or righteous or heaven forbid, something I have to live up to.