Naming in a New Year! (Jan 1-7)
This week in snapshots:
It’s the New Year (hope yours has been as happy as mine ;), and so last week as I was watching a bunch of Youtube in the expectation of watching much less of it in 2023, I found a video about naming the year.
I know, in Christendom there’s this trend of asking God for a word for the year, and I love seeing other people’s words for their year. But… that practice wouldn’t really work for me because of my prejudice against the kinds of words people choose. *le shrug
But that’s not what he talked about at all.
Instead, he shared about a journaling practice where he reflects on the experiences of the past year (2022) and naming 2022 accordingly. Because this sounded intriguing, I decided that I shouldn’t name 2022 out of the blue and instead went through and gave each year of my life names. Though, they sound more like titles of books or snapshot captions. A sampling:
2003: Baptism by Fire
2004: But! I am the fastest runner in my grade
…
2008: The last year I was a padawan learner
2009: The last year I would be the fastest runner in my grade
…
2017: I graduated from academia!
2018: The year I won the battle for my mind
I would have forgotten the word I chose in January of 2022. I certainly don’t remember any of the “resolutions” I set, and so I’m sure I must have achieved them by default. But for whatever reason, I remember the names of each of those years quite easily… and I wrote them once.
So naming and titles, huh. And I thought that was that and that was cool, but then I heard simply,
“I’d like you to call Me by my name, not by my title.”
Kudos to my friend reading John Mark Comer’s God Has a Name for opening that conversation.
“God” is the ultimate title, and “Lord” the next ultimate title. “2020” is the title for such names as The Year of the Pandemic, The Start of the End, or for me, Regrettable Choices Made. “2022” is a title anyone can relate to, but has names like Invasion, Inflation, and for me, External Deconstruction.
But don’t you know? Every time you read the title “LORD” in all caps in your Bible, that’s someone somewhere considering the name “YHWH” too holy to write with human hands, and penciling in a proper title that shows adequate fear of the LO—sorry, shows adequate fear of YHWH?
The same YHWH who decided that this was ridiculous and gave himself another name with actual human hands, Yeshua?
I know YHWH has many names, and I brought a lot of them to him but this year, YHWH is the name I’m to call him by.
How have you reflected on “2022" and what are you resolving for “2023”? And if you hear a whisper echoing the same simple distinction between the Ultimate Title and “I have a name,“ what name is YHWH inviting you to call him by this year?
Here’s to 51 more weeks of “2023,”
—Beth
