The Proverbs Project: Know your name…

A few weeks back I alerted you to my proverbs project – spring boarding from the thirty sayings that start in Proverbs 22:20.

“How is it going?” I hear you ask. “Pretty well,” I reply. “I am up to number 23, and my plan is to drip feed them out over a longish period – and this is one of those posts.” “So what is this week’s saying?” you ask and I reply, “Know your name.”

Some background…

A few months ago I was fooled into attending a time share presentation. Yes, Rosemary and I did get a free meal at the resort in payment for 3 hours of our lives that will never come back, but my, it was rather a trial. Of greater interest to me, however, was the person trying to sell the time share to us.

A less likely salesperson I could not imagine. She was clearly uncomfortable with the high pressure sales techniques she was supposed to employ, and when it came to demonstrate the financial benefit of our potential purchase, she was hopelessly out of her league. She would make one calculation after another and then make a bold claim from it. As gently as I could I would do a counter calculation on my phone and say – “actually, I think that’s the figure you mean. It really doesn’t add up, does it?” I don’t think I was their favourite customer, and at one point her supervisor came and hovered around us nervously. I think the supervisor summed me up as being in the difficult category.

To cut a longish story short, it became clear that we weren’t going to buy anything, and with that sad realisation the salesperson suddenly became a real person, and chatted more openly about her life and dreams. She’s an artist, trying to make her way. She has an eye for the unusual and for spotting beauty in unexpected places. She spoke about the locations where she paints and about some of her current projects. She came alive. She showed some photos of work she has done – really stunning.

I asked the obvious question: “So why this job when you are so clearly wired for something else?” “Is it that obvious?” she asked. “Yeah, can’t say I enjoy this, but we all have to make a living. I’m not getting many sales though…”

I thought the situation was filled with pathos. I wonder how many people are in her situation – trying to be something they are not to ensure that bills are paid, and the car battery can be replaced.

Know your name. What does that mean?

Among other things it means knowing yourself well enough to spot what you will never do well, or what will never satisfy you. Conversely, it means knowing what you do well, or what with practice and nurture you could do well. It’s those moments when time flies away and you have been so absorbed in what you are doing that you barely noticed it. In last weeks post I wrote about Ps 20:4 “May he give you the desire of your heart and make all your plans succeed.” That’s all very well, but sometimes we don’t know what the desire of our heart is. We have been so shaped by the external forces on our life that we land up doing things that are really not us. That’s ok if it’s for a short period, but if it drags on, year in and year out, it corrodes our soul and takes the joy out of life. So know your name, and don’t do what is really not you.

In getting to know your name you might need to discard some false names you have accepted along the way. Sometimes our failures haunt us and we replay them over and over. We allow them to become our name, instead of a simple stepping stone in the journey to discovering our voice. We may need to consciously speak down the disempowering voices that muddy our path and leave us feeling dispirited and despairing.

Discovering our name should not be a journey we do alone. Good friends can help – friends who see in us more than we might see on our own. A good friend will inspire you to open up to life. A good friend will help give you the confidence to have a go. A good friend will encourage you to chuckle at yourself if it doesn’t go to plan.

At a more important level, knowing your name is a deeply spiritual exercise.

It starts with accepting the forgiveness and freedom offered at the Cross of Jesus. It means leaning in to the identity we are given because of Jesus: Child of God. It means we notice those passages in the Bible where people are given a new name, because the old one would not do. It is about being willing to explore parts of our being that have been latent, but that could be nurtured into life. It’s about the courage to change, because we are confident of God’s loving embrace regardless of the outcome.

Know your name – because if you don’t, you could be spending your waking hours flogging timeshare, instead of unleashing the van Gough within.

Nice chatting…

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

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