I Have Called Thee by Thy Name

He counted them on a Sunday, for no good reason, and got to six before he stopped.

Payroll number. Customer reference for the energy. A different one for the water. Patient number at the surgery, which is on a card in his wallet. National insurance. The parking permit for the road he lives on, which is a code beginning with two letters he can never remember.

Six systems, six numbers, and in the last month he has said at least four of them out loud to somebody who then read them back to him.

He is not angry about it. It is how a city of that size has to run and he knows it. You cannot have six hundred thousand people and a filing system based on saying who you are.

What got him, on the Sunday, was trying to remember the last time somebody who did not already know him personally had used his name. Not read it off a screen. Used it.

He could not find one. Weeks, possibly months. And what settled after that was not self-pity, it was something flatter: a suspicion that a man in a city like this is functionally a set of records with a body attached, and that the name is the least used thing he owns.

That is your Sunday. That is your six numbers. And I want to speak to that, because there is a verse where God does the one thing none of those systems does.

He uses the name

Isaiah is speaking to a people who have been catalogued, deported and processed by an empire that was extremely good at records.

But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.Isaiah 43:1

I have called thee by thy name.

Read the sequence, because it is deliberate. Created, formed, redeemed, called by name, and then thou art mine. Four actions and a conclusion, and the fourth action is the one He chooses to say out loud in the middle of an empire that dealt in numbers.

And the tense: I have called. It is done. It is not offered as something available if he applies for it.

You are already addressed by name. Not filed. The written word puts the calling in the perfect tense and follows it with possession, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man who counted to six on a Sunday.

Now let me say something in defense of the systems, because a Sunday like that can turn them into something sinister.

They are not indifferent to you; they are simply not the kind of thing that can regard anybody. A billing system has no capacity for contempt. The woman who read your reference back to you was being careful, and being careful is a form of respect, and none of it was a comment on you.

You have not been slighted by a city. The written word does not make human recognition the measure of a man. The Holy Spirit is not in competition with a customer database.

And now the flat suspicion itself, which is the thing to answer.

A set of records with a body attached. That is a definition, and you have quietly accepted it because the evidence of an ordinary month appears to support it. Isaiah is written to people with far better evidence for that conclusion than you have, and the verse contradicts it in the plainest available language.

You are somebody's and not something's. Thou art mine, and the possession comes immediately after the name. The Holy Spirit has been calling you by it for years, including through the month in which no human being did.