What's In a Name? Your Name?

Buddy Bear. Apple. Princess Tiaamii. Monroe and Moroccan. The spate of unusual celebrity baby names can’t have entirely passed you by, even if you’re not an avid gossip mag reader. The much-anticipated new female addition to the Beckham brood has been named Harper Seven. Run-of-the-mill these names are not.
What’s in a name? A great deal. Just be thankful you weren’t christened Autumn Sullivan Corbett Fitzsimmons Jeffries Hart Burns Johnson Willard Dempsey Tunney Schmeling Sharkey Carnera Baer Braddock Louis Charles Walcott Marciano Patterson Johansson Liston Clay Frazier Foreman Brown, like the a young Wolverhampton girl who can thank her adventurous parents for giving her one of the longest names in the world.
Once given, our names become part of us; they go before us. There is a power in what we are named. Just look to the Bible to see how important names were - they told a story, whether it was whom you were the son to, where you were from, or what you’d been through. Names were changed to symbolise character growth or a change in circumstance: Abram and Sarai became Abraham and Sarah in the Old Testament to mark God’s promise of countless descendents; Saul became Paul in the New Testament after his miraculous conversion.
Brand names too are powerful words. Google, rated one the biggest brands in the world, brings to mind a certain word: search. It is synonymous with finding what you need, with ease, with information ‘on a plate’, with reliability.
The National Trust: beauty, nature, history. Nintendo: fun, family, gaming.
However, the value of a brand name is a delicate, transitory thing. Circumstances can change a brand’s identity in an instant. Take the media storm around BP’s oil slick last year in the Gulf of Mexico. Sometimes no amount of apologetic, desperate PR can salvage a reputation. BP has become synonymous with disaster.
Have you ever stopped to think what you are synonymous with? What is conjured to mind when your friends, family or colleagues hear your name uttered? Can you be counted on? Are you a friend to all? Do you add value to a situation if your name is associated with it?
As Christians we carry not only our own personals names - the whim of our parents, a cultural trend or a carefully planned family tradition - but also the name of Christ. Therefore we not only need to protect our own individual names and reputations, but honour the name of God with our actions. We claim to be followers of Christ, so how we behave, who we are, must glorify His name.
What does YOUR name mean to you?
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