The Trade And Nothing Else

Duncan woke at ten past five because his body had been waking at ten past five for thirty-one years and had not been told.

He lay there a while listening to the boiler tick. Then he got up, because lying there was worse, and he went down in his socks and put the kettle on and stood in the middle of his own kitchen with nothing to do in it.

The bag was by the door where he always left it. Canvas, the handles gone black and shiny, a strip of gray tape round the base from the year it split in the van. Trowels, a spirit level, the good float he had bought himself when Ellen was born. He had carried that bag out of that door at half past six every working morning since he was nineteen years old.

There was nowhere to carry it.

He made the tea and sat down at the table and looked at the bag for a long time, and he could feel a question working its way up out of his chest that he did not want to hear, and it came anyway. It was not what will I do. He was fifty and healthy and there was work in the world somewhere. The question was quieter and worse than that.

It was: what am I, then.

Because when a man says what he is, he says the trade. Plasterer. Thirty-one years. It is what he says at a wedding when somebody asks. It is what his brother-in-law introduces him as. It is what he tells himself in the van at a red light on a bad week to explain why the week is worth having. Take the trade away and there is a man in socks in a kitchen at half past five with no reason to be up.

There was a book on the table from the night before, one Ellen had left, and he opened it flat with the side of his hand the way he flattened a bag of plaster, and he read one line about a man in another century who had said that God's words were found and he ate them.

Ate them. Like food, at a table, in the morning.

Duncan read it again, and then a third time, and something in his chest went quiet, and he did not know why, and he sat there with his tea going cold with his hands flat on the wood.

Maybe that is you this morning. Maybe there is no bag by your door but there is something else you have been introduced as for years, and the thing has gone or is going, and underneath it a question is coming up that you would rather not have heard. Sit still. There is an answer to it, and it is older than your trade, and it has your name on it.

The morning a whole camp had to learn a new name

There was an old man in a tent country with a hundred people around him: herdsmen, servants, cooks, children who had grown up calling him one thing since they could talk. Ninety-nine years old. Everybody in that camp knew exactly who he was, and every one of them had been wrong about the size of it.

God came and spoke a covenant over him, and inside that covenant He did something that must have sounded absurd at breakfast.

Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee.Genesis 17:5

Picture the practical side of it, because that is where the weight is. By that evening a cook had to catch herself mid-sentence. A boy had to be corrected twice. Somebody leading a camel in from the far pasture came back saying the old name and got a look. Within a week a hundred people were saying a word they had never said before, over a man with no children by his wife and no nation anywhere in sight.

You are named by an oath and not by an occupation, and that was settled over you before this week went the way it went. I am not offering an encouraging thought. Genesis 17:5 has God renaming a man in the middle of a covenant, before a single piece of evidence arrived, and the Holy Spirit is the One carrying that same act across the centuries and setting it on you at your own kitchen table.

What a name was actually for

We hear a name as a label on a person. Back then a name was closer to a standing: what a person is called is what the room holds them to be. Change the name and the room's whole understanding of the man has changed with it.

That is exactly why an exchange of names belongs inside a covenant and nowhere else. When two parties bound themselves, each came out of it carrying something of the other's identity, so that from that day you could not say who one was without saying the other. It was never a self-improvement exercise. It was a legal and public fact about who somebody now belonged to.

And that is what the man in Jeremiah is reaching for when he says the strangest thing about eating.

Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart: for I am called by thy name, O LORD God of hosts.Jeremiah 15:16

Look at the order in that sentence. He eats the words, and the reason he gives is that he is called by God's name. The name came first. The eating is what a person does once they know whose they are.

You have a name on you that no employer issued and no employer can withdraw, and it is not a nicer way of describing your feelings about yourself. Jeremiah 15:16 says plainly, I am called by thy name, and the Spirit is the One who makes that sentence true in a man's mouth on the first morning of no work.

The name is yours before you can feel it

Here is the part that matters most for a person sitting in a kitchen with cold tea. On the day the old man was renamed, he had no nations. He had one son by a servant and a wife past childbearing and a camp full of people practicing a new word over a fact that had not happened yet.

So for a year he was called father of many, out loud, daily, by people with no evidence, and the name was completely his the whole time. It was not waiting on his feelings about it. A name given in covenant belongs to a person on the day it is given, and nobody has ever had to earn their way up to a gift.

You have not failed to feel it and you were never asked to. Scripture never once makes a covenant name conditional on the wearer's confidence in it, and His Spirit is not standing over you waiting for a better mood before He will call you what God already calls you.