Shelburne: What do our names say about us?
I don’t know if anybody requires them anymore, but during my younger years some of my friends grew up in faiths or cultures that required parents to give their offspring Bible names. This may explain why in every American town back then we had a jillion Johns and Jameses and Peters and Thomases.
Today biblical names for modern kids obviously is a dying custom. In even the most devout families, new parents now seem to stay up late trying to dream up names nobody on earth has ever heard or spelled before. Pity those poor kids. For the rest of their lives they will have to spell their names multiple times every day in any transaction that requires their identity. Most of them will assure you that Bob or Jane would have made life a lot easier for them.
I got started down this path when I ran across a Bible name while I was reading the news this morning. For the first time ever (I think), I saw in a “Most Wanted” notice that a female criminal the cops are looking for grew up with the Bible name Vashti. I wonder if this had anything to do with her bad behavior. (Do you remember that Vashti in the Bible was the upstart queen King Ahasueras dumped before he married Esther?)
This got me to thinking about previous times when I chuckled in amazement to see that somebody had named their child Judas, or Delilah, or Jonah, or Jezebel. Bible names? Yes. But it seems obvious that the parents who chose them did not know those Bible stories. Who would intentionally name their son or daughter after an infamous miscreant or doofus?
Names matter. Maybe more than we know. Some interesting studies have been done to see what effect the actual sounds of names may have on our personalities. After all, we hear those same tones and inflections hundreds of times even before we know one word from another, and then we hear them thousands of times for the rest of our days. Do these often repeated sounds change the way we react to the world around us? I don’t know.
But I do know that God changed the names of people like Abraham and Sarah and Jacob and Paul to fit the visions he had for them. What does your name say about God’s goals for you?
Gene Shelburne is pastor emeritus of the Anna Street Church of Christ, 2310 Anna St., Amarillo. Contact him at GeneShel@aol.com, or get his books and magazines at www.christianappeal.com. His column has run on the Faith page for more than three decades.
This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Shelburne: What do our names say about us?
