WHAT’S YOUR NAME TODAY?
What essential parts of you have fallen away?
____________________
We decided on Nene. Why wouldn’t we choose the one name that recalled a childhood of barn kittens and butterflies—the girl in me bearing witness to the grandchild to come.
That was then. Today, Archie’s six-year-old body carries his own tiny burdens tucked into a backpack, starting first grade. It’s been five Thanksgivings with a boy who I once prayed would have just one more year to cuddle his Nene as we watched the Christmas-tree lighting under blankets and snowflakes.
But what’s my name today?
This woman who has become accustomed to thinking in terms of borrowed time.
How then, do we navigate a world of temporary things?
You. Me. Without thinking, do we default to our weaknesses, hesitating to lean in?
The tragedy, it seems, is that rather than consuming the world of possibilities we are consumed by thoughts of limitations in ourselves.
I notice the hesitation in my voice even when the words are ones of commitment—
Yes, I can help you.
Yes, I would love to.
Yes, I will be there.
—little acts of insurrection against the expected weaker version of me.
There is deliberation in refusing to become what I have fought so hard against.
What is now automatic is not the unbridled joy of the “what next,”
but a certain expectancy that I will not meet the moment with the best of myself.
Lest you begin to feel the “I’m sorry” that bubbles up in your humanity first,
let me put your heart at ease:
The focus here is not on some tragedy
But the recognition that tragedy does not get to occupy first place.
Once removed from its insisted position,
It no longer dominates.
And every day seems different.
The headline can never encapsulate the tender truths.
Like a grave digger, it buries the real story.
What’s my name today—
Am I still like the innocent child who believes, unworried and unworldly?
I imagine you. Going through your day.
Do you discount your presence in it?
Do you wander from one obligation to another
without remembering someone else is hungry for the beauty of your smile?
Who will we be in this moment.
What us will we bring—
The timid one that allows the headline of our lives to devour the essence of who we are?
I am aware. Painfully and exquisitely so, that the Nene I have always been is being called to come forward.
She has been buried, for a season. Beneath a world’s expectation of a brokenness that bears little if no resemblance to who she is.
But I get to choose. We get to choose.
And in the choosing, we become defiant, even ferocious, for the cause of saving ourselves.
What moment taught you to fear instead of free-fall into belief in something bigger?
What’s your name today?
Have you stopped to consider the best parts of you that fell away as you forged forward?
This is our sacred moment to gather all of it back together.
Step backward if you must.
To rediscover the singular You created,
the thing you were created for.
Nothing gets to take that away.
Put THAT first place.
The world doesn’t get to define you.
Your circumstance doesn’t get to rename you.
What’s your name today?
NOTES
SOUL MAP
Nene → Archie → borrowed time → weakness → hesitation → tragedy → headline → buried → Nene→ ferocious → gather → Created → name.
Now trace your own.
Not the chronology of what happened to you.
The trail of what happened inside you.
REFLECTION
Where did you begin?
What entered the story?
What did it cause you to believe?
What part of you went quiet?
What did circumstance begin calling you?
And what name—what essential part of yourself—might be asking to come forward again?
Write your Soul Map.
_____ → _____ → _____ → _____ → _____ → _____ → _____
YOU ARE HERE.
Image: This isn’t a glimpse of nostalgia but evidence of a life adored and fought for from the very start. Janene [Nenē] First grade.
The tragedy, it seems, is that rather than consuming the world of possibilities we are consumed by thoughts of limitations in ourselves—Janene Kraft