ALL WITHIN YOUR NAME

I have a secret to tell. Something that only a few of those closest to me know. When writing as I do, sometimes transparency is a risk, a vulnerability that I’d like to keep shuttered up and safe from all eyes except for those I can feel safe with. Nevertheless, since I started this venture I feel the necessity to explore a right call to the believer’s life.

Twenty-eight years ago, I traveled to Brazil on my first missions’ trip. My group and I traveled up the Tapajós, a river running alongside the Amazon to a small village where we would help lay the foundations for a new church building for the small hamlet.

My faith was barely over a year old then, I vividly remember the time when it occurred, a Saturday at 8:30 am on our return flight home. My seat was away from the rest of my team and I sat next to a small elderly woman who only spoke Portuguese. She was fast asleep as was most of the passengers save for one or two quietly reading. I was thinking back on my trip as I was staring out my window at the vast and seemingly endless horizon of water when a strong and vivid voice caught my attention.

The voice was next to me but wasn’t, it was in front of me but wasn’t. It surrounded me but there was no one there. It was a strong, gentle but sure voice. I immediately realized the voice was within my mind. But it was so much more then that because it was if I could hear it with my physical ears. In all my years since, save one other I have never experienced such an audible and powerfully clear revelation. It was clear and shining, so real and commanding that it would be as if someone leaned over and struck up a conversation. But it was so much more.

A question came, “What is your last name?” Without hesitation and answering as if it wasn’t something out of the norm I replied in thought,“Bridges”. And He replied, “I have given you this name because you will be a bridge from men to me.” And at that the voice spoke no more.

Over two decades have passed and I am still in wonder and awestruck and overwhelmed by this declaration. I have hidden this deep within my heart and cherished it and let it remind me of who I am and what I am to be about. There is not a day that I draw breath that I don’t think on those words and not a day that I am not humbled by them.

I understand how it may seem like delusions of grandeur. Or that maybe a long and tiring trip had wearied my mind so that I was hallucinating things that never were said. And that would be within reason to assume, because it is an extraordinary claim, it does read as ludicrous to someone outside the situation. It was an experience during my early days of faith that grew into a beacon to action and even during my years in hiding, living in regret and gnawing on my own bitterness, it became like a searing brand in my side that was burned into my being, a reminder I could never escape from.

But in these older years, as a man seasoned by his own pain, having walked through years living in the desert of my own foolish making, I cherish it, for it has shown me the hand of His furious love and His gentle care despite the fickle waywardness of our hearts and how wounding of others we can be.

There is a Latin phrase which was originated by the Roman playwright, Plautus which reads, ‘Nomen est Omen’ meaning, ‘the name is a sign’, or ‘the name is your destiny’.

Sometimes the names we have chosen for ourselves or those we are given or born into reflect our life’s course. And sometimes these lead to good things or they inspire us down destructive roads of folly.

A theory called nominative determinism suggests the same that people are drawn to professions that fit their names. It goes as far back as antiquity. In the Jewish culture the significance of names was meant to represent personality. They were considered defining actions of one’s life. We can look at Abram, which meant exalted father. His name was changed to reflect a new identity, the ‘father of many nations’ or Jacob whose name meant ‘heel’ which pointed to his scheming ways and escape from his troubles. But the Lord renamed him Israel, He changed the course of his life, “For you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” Genesis 32:29 In this ancient culture when a person or even a place was named it was done so as an act of capturing character. This though isn’t only a Jewish custom but it can be a practice found throughout the whole of humanity, an idea that embodies cultural principles or experiences, mindsets and history.

We in modern times have also taken on our own names of definition. We have the free will to choose for ourselves the names we live by, protestant, catholic, atheist, republican or democrat. We have taken on these names as identifiers for others like ourselves and tend to exclude those that do not think like us. Oftentimes we take these self-given names and have made them our full identity. We are prone to huddle into clans and tribes that hold these identities as the only right way. We speak about others rights to their own beliefs but sometimes we passive aggressively believe our say should stand prevalent and tall over theirs and we speak nominally and ill of the them.

It is within our choice to choose our own ‘name’. We have free will to choose right or wrong, we have the free will to choose good or evil.

The powerful have the choice to either crush down the weak in a show of superiority, an act of abject strength and intention, to run roughshod declaring noble purity or they have the choice to show measured rule and mercy. Man can choose domination and being right over mercy and righteousness. Man can choose to do all these things in the spirit of manifest destiny or we can choose the way of the God man who preached the Sermon on the Mount.

We can do all these things with self-given names expounding moral superiority and pious fervor but that does not make it His way. Remember, kingdom ethics are opposite of those of the kingdom of men. We then make of these idols for ourselves.

Those words spoken to me years ago I have taken deeply to my heart. In my fresh faith I slowly shifted into one who called for the cudgel of power to be held and hard rule employed because we needed to get back to being strong and virtuous. I aligned myself with party and married that to my faith but it slowly led to quiet and resentful attitudes to others who were image bearers of the Good One. But through my affliction of heart, those years ground in the grist mill, the years in the valley of my own pain was the fiery oven that He used to burn that dross out of me.

And I have seen the fruit of my bridge building. It is nothing of my own doing. I’ve no power of my own to save or change a heart. If I was to take on the name that partisanship, that man would have me hold I would be a weak and ineffective builder. The name I take and hold dearly is ultimately not given by man, because it is then conditional by man’s terms and I will not bear that.

I have taken on that name He has given me. I have taken on that mantle that at times presses and wounds and is unpopular. I am nowhere near where I would like to be but I continually see His hand shifting me, breaking me, sometimes painfully and molding my heart anew. And oftentimes I miss the mark woefully by my own stubbornness or unbelief. It is a rough and at times a very lonely path but I choose the road of mercy, meekness and peacemaking. I choose to be the salt that flavors and keeps instead of salt pressed into others wounds. I choose the difficult work of measuring my words and thought that I would not murder with my own callousness through my lips and heart. I choose all those things because they make me a bridge, a better though flawed reflection of Him.

This is true power that the prideful kingdom of men with all their laws and regulations can never touch or dream of. Someday soon, on that great day I will stand before Him and I will not claim that I fought men for power and that I wasn’t about proving who was right and that I didn’t hole up in my own warm enclaves but that I read and believed His words and clumsily went out and set my hand to the plow and lived them out in a roughshod world angry and at unrest.

We have all been given the choice of our own bridge building, we have the choice to do it well with mercy measured and His compassion refined. And yes, there is a day of vengeance that the prophets of old claimed but today is not that day. It is a time for salvation and mercy. There is a world angry and frightened where hands have become fists and words run rancid and poisoned and retaliation make hearts grow mean and hardened. You living here now, you reading these words have been called for such a time as this. A voice as in the wilderness calls out to you. It lays now at your doorstep. It is the time you and I have been given to bridge the gaps.

Not to others like ourselves, not to safe seclusion but to others wholly different from us in life, creed and beliefs. Be about this good day and be that healing salve that someone so desperately needs. Be the sweet balm to someone within your circle of influence, be it wide or small. Be it in great action or quiet deed. For such a time as this my friends you have been called.