He Knows My Name

My grandmother was a writer. Because of this, Grammy – that’s what we called her – had a quirky way of changing her name at will. Always in search of the perfect “nom de plume”, many of her stories and poems were attributed to whatever pen name she happened to prefer at the moment. For a time, she wanted everyone, including her children and grandchildren, to call her ‘Joyce’. I learned later that ‘Joyce’ was the name of a tiny daughter that she had lost in infancy sometime around 1920. Maybe it was meant to keep the memory of her little one alive, or perhaps she just liked the name and decided to use it for a while. Her fascination with fictitious names, however, would end up causing some head-scratching for her descendants (namely, me) long after her death. A few years ago, while sorting through family archival documents, I came across my mother’s birth certificate. Now, most people would consider a document such as a birth certificate to be important and official enough to take it seriously; yet, there on the line for the mother’s maiden name, my grandmother had entered a name that may have been intriguing to her at the time, but was definitely not her own! Since discovering that document, I have often wondered what was going on in her head the day she filled in the blanks on that form.

One of my favorite childhood stories about my daughter, Jessica, is when she was about two or three, I was attempting to memorize the nine verses of Psalm 8. Every morning I would sit at the kitchen table and repeat these verses out loud, committing one verse to memory each day. If you’re unfamiliar with this Psalm, the words in verse 1 are repeated in verse 9: “O, Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Thy name in all the earth.” Over the course of 9 or 10 days, you can imagine how many times I repeated those words. Not long after this I was in the kitchen cleaning up after breakfast. Jessica was on the floor playing with her toys when I overheard her talking to herself: “O Lord, our Lord, Jessica is my name.” She was too young to understand the word ‘majestic’, but her childish little brain had zeroed in on the one syllable in that word that sounded like her name, and now she was telling the Lord what her name was, as if she needed to introduce herself. I had no idea she had been listening to me all those mornings! Interestingly, verse 2 of Psalm 8 is where the old adage “Out of the mouths of babes” comes from.

When my husband, Frank, was born, he was given a rather long name that included not one, but two middle names. When he became a U.S. citizen, he was given the opportunity to legally change his name without involving an attorney and having to pay costly legal fees. Since he was in the military at the time, every time he filled out a form, he had to enter his rather long name in full, so he jumped on this opportunity and legally dropped the last three letters of his first name, dropped his last name altogether, and used one of his middle names as his new last name. So, our family surname really isn’t a family name at all.

The name on my birth certificate, driver’s license, and passport is ‘Eva’, but about 50 years ago, a co-worker decided to start calling me ‘Evie’ (pronounced like the letters ‘E’ and ‘V’) and it just sort of stuck. Some in my family still call me ‘Eva’, but others have yielded to the nickname. My mother, on first hearing my new nickname, took it a step further and started calling me ‘Evie-ivy-over’ from an old jump rope-skipping song, and that then became my current email identity. The fact that I respond without hesitation to so many different versions of my name is confusing to some people, especially when they are new acquaintances.

The Dictionary defines a person’s name as a word or words by which he or she is known, addressed, or referred to. A nickname is usually a casual version of your real name or a reflection of your personality or character, while a non-legal fictitious name, or alias, is a name that is presented as a real name, when in actuality, it is not. In the Bible, over and over again we meet people who were known by more than one name. In Genesis, Abram became Abraham and Jacob became Israel. In Exodus, we meet Moses’ father-in-law, known as both Jethro and also as Reuel. In the Book of Esther, we meet a king named Ahasuerus, who was also known as Xerxes. The beautiful and courageous Esther’s Hebrew name was Hadassah. The faithful prophet Daniel had his name changed to Belteshazzar by that nasty king Nebuchadnezzar, and Daniel’s three friends, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, became known as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. In the Gospels, Simon became Peter, and Matthew was also known as Levi. In the book of Acts, Saul became Paul, and we learn that a kindly and generous woman named Dorcas was also known as Tabitha. I encourage you to pick up that Bible that may be gathering dust on the shelf and read their thrilling stories.

And yet, the Bible is not really their stories; it’s His story. Almighty God, who is omnipotent, omniscient, and ever present; the One that we can be privileged to call our Heavenly Father, is never confused by a fictitious name or a nickname, or even a legally changed name. He never loses track of who I am or where I am. And I never have to remind Him of my name. He knows my lineage all the way back as far as it can go. He doesn’t need a computer or the Internet. He needs neither my fingerprints nor my DNA. “Even the very hairs of [my] head are all numbered.” (Luke 12:7), and He is “intimately acquainted with all my ways” (Psalm 139:3b) even before I was ever born. Now that’s something to think about; a promise you can stand on; a pillow you can rest your head on.

“How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How vast is the sum of them!” – Psalm 139:17