The Name on the Badge Is Not Your Name

Ten past six in the evening, and the car park has emptied out except for four vehicles and the security lights coming on one row at a time.

He is sitting in the truck with the engine off. He has been sitting there eleven minutes. The lanyard is already over his head and dropped on the passenger seat, face down, the way he always drops it, and the photograph on it is nine years old and he looks like a different man in it.

The reason he is not driving is that the meeting on Thursday is a restructure meeting. He has been to enough of them from the other side of the table to know the shape of one from the invitation alone.

And what is going through him is not really about money. The mortgage is nearly done and his wife works and they would manage, and he has run those numbers twice already tonight and they are fine.

What is going through him is a sentence, and the sentence is: then what am I.

Because he has been the title for nineteen years. At his niece's wedding, when the man beside him asked what he did, he gave the title and watched the man's face rearrange slightly, and something in him that he is not proud of enjoyed that. When he telephones about the car insurance he gives the title. When he cannot sleep he thinks about the site, and about who is covering what, and he thinks about it the way other men think about their children.

Somewhere across nineteen years the thing on the badge stopped being what he does at the works between seven and six. It became the answer to who he is. Nobody did it to him. It happened one ordinary week at a time.

And now here is where I stop describing him, because I think you have your own badge, and it might be a title or a role or the thing you are known for at church, and you already know what it is because it came to mind about four lines ago.

Let me ask it the way it actually sits in the chest. If it went on Thursday, who is left sitting in the truck.

He has been using your first name the whole time

I am not going to argue with you about this. I could. I could line up the reasoning and prove to you that you are more than your work, and you would agree with every step of it and drive home exactly as hollow as you were, because this was never a thing you believed. It is a thing you feel at ten past six in a car park, and reasoning does not reach down there.

So instead of arguing, I am going to tell you what happens. Then I will set something written beside it, because His Spirit has been saying it in that car park for the last eleven minutes without any help from me.

You take a title and at first you wear it. Then you get good at it, and people start to call for you by it, and being called for feels a great deal like being wanted. Then the title starts doing some of your remembering for you. It tells you why you were worth the day. It tells you where to sit at a table. It tells you what to say when a stranger asks who you are, and it is such a relief to have an answer ready that you stop noticing you have handed the question over.

None of that is vanity. I want to be plain about that. It is what happens to any man who does a thing faithfully for nineteen years, and it happens fastest to the ones who did the job well.

But a title is a description of your usefulness. It can only ever tell you what you are for. It cannot tell you who you are, and it was never built to carry that weight, and it buckles the first time someone puts a restructure meeting in your calendar.

Now listen to what God actually says, and notice what He does not use. This is not my read on you. It is written down, and it has stayed in the present tense for three thousand years because His Spirit keeps it there.

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

No title. No function. No performance review. He does not say I have called thee by thy office, or by thy usefulness, or by the thing you are known for. He does not read off a badge, and neither does His Spirit, who has been addressing you by that name in the truck with the engine off.

I have called thee by thy name.

And He says it to Jacob, of all people, which is not an accident. Jacob had spent his whole life being what he could do. He got what he had by being quicker than his brother and cleverer than his uncle, and he built an entire identity out of being the one who could work an angle, and then he met God in the dark by a river and the first thing he was asked was his own name.

He had to say it out loud. That was the whole wrestling match.