new name

Today was yet another wonderfully crazy day, this one filled with family Christmas parties. The highlight? The time my cousin squirted bbq sauce all over everyone comes in a close second but I think the real winner is when my grandparents decided to give the grandkids Christmas cash in stacks of one's this year... It made for lots of great jokes and pictures. But all of that is completely irrelevant and unrelated to reverb 10 anyway...

the question: Let’s meet again, for the first time. If you could introduce yourself to strangers by another name for just one day, what would it be and why?

my answer: 
What a weird prompt. I'm not entirely sure what this has to do with reflecting on 2010 but I will say this: after all these years of living, I still don't feel like my name really fits me. It's a fine name I suppose but somehow it just feels weird to me. And it's so complicated... How, you ask? It doesn't really bother me too much anymore but as a child it bothered me to no end that everyone says my name wrong. My name is Laura (pronounced like La-ra), not Lora. There isn't an O anywhere in my name. People will argue with me all day that the 'lau' makes the O sound to which my best witty comeback is this: please spell for me the word laundry. Nobody puts an O sound in that word, do they? Argument fail. Okay, I said I was over this but it miiiight still bother me from time to time... I stopped correcting people many years ago but I love meeting other Laura's and asking them which way they spell it. I love the joy shared among my name twins when someone recognizes that yes, there is a difference, and it is nice to have your name said correctly.

That being said, if I could introduce myself by any other name I still have no idea what it would be. I'm open to suggestions if anybody would like to give me one. Maybe Emma? I really do like the name Emma... Sometimes I introduce myself by my twin roommate's name just to further confuse people on how much we supposedly look alike. We've had an awful lot of fun with that in the past...

I'm cutting this blog post short tonight but I'll leave you with this: this whole talk of names reminds me of camp over the summer when we would teach little children the passage of scripture about a guy named Mephiboseth. Every week our kids would rename him to something more easily pronounced ranging from Mebob to Mephy to M&M or even Mishka. What a blessing it was to teach kids about this crippled guy with a crazy name and how he gets adopted by King David and given a new life. I loved tying that directly into the picture of how when we become believers we too are being adopted by God into his family. We'd also study stories like that of Saul who's name literally changed (to Paul) after he encountered the Lord. We would then talk about how encountering God results in life change. It's cool to me that tonight's prompt asks about fully starting over and being someone different for a day and that is exactly the opportunity we are given when we become believers in Christ. He wipes us clean, forgets our old self, and begins to shape us into the people he wants us to be. Second Corinthians 5:17 reminds us that "If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation. The old has gone and the new is come." What a blessing that is! Please go check out 2 Samuel 19 to learn more about the incredible and so often overlooked story of good old Mebob and remember the opportunity to be given a new name (and a new life) is available to each and every one of us.


(ten points for debriefing that prompt CentriKid style...)