Do Not Call Me By That Name

They keep telling Nilda she has not changed at all.

She has been back about seven months. She was away eleven years and I am not going to itemize what happened in those eleven years, because it is hers and because the shape is what matters: she went out with a certain number of people and she has come back with fewer, and some of that was death and some of it was not, and there is no version of the story where she comes out of it as the person who left.

And they are so pleased to see her.

That is not sarcasm. They really are. This is a family that turns out, and there were fourteen people in that house the night she got back, and somebody had made too much of everything, and one of her cousins cried.

And what they said, over and over, all evening, with real affection, was: you have not changed at all.

She said thank you every time.

She has been saying thank you for seven months.

Because here is what she cannot work out how to say: they are greeting a woman who does not exist. They have kept a version of her going for eleven years, in their heads, quite lovingly, and now she is in the room and they are talking to that one, and she is standing behind it, doing the reactions.

She knows the reactions. She knows exactly what that woman would say and how she would laugh and when.

She does them, and they are word-perfect, and every one of them costs her something she cannot name.

There was a gathering at the end of the summer.

Somebody put on a song from before. One of the ones that used to get her up, and everybody turned and looked at her, delighted, waiting for her to do the thing.

And she did it.

And then she went out to the back step and sat down.

Her aunt came out after a while with two plates and sat down beside her and did not say anything for a long time.

And then she said: "What do you want us to call you?"

Not: what is wrong. Not: are you all right, which Nilda could have answered in her sleep.

And Nilda put her head back against the door frame and could not speak for a bit.

Now let me ask you the same question.

Because if this is yours, people are calling you something, warmly and constantly, and it has not been accurate for a long time, and you have never once been asked.

The woman who changed her own name

Naomi goes out of Bethlehem with a husband and two sons and comes back with neither, and the whole town turns out.

They recognize her. That is the detail the story gives us first: the women of the town say is this Naomi?, which is not a cruel question, it is the sound of a place that remembers somebody.

And this is what she says to them.

Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went out full, but the Lord has brought me back empty.Ruth 1:20 to 21

Naomi means pleasant. Mara means bitter.

She is standing in the middle of a street in front of everybody she has ever known and telling them to stop using her name, because it is a description and the description is no longer true.

And she puts it in the strongest terms available. The Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. She does not soften it, she does not say the words were the enemy's, she does not hedge it into acceptability. She addresses it to God's own name and says it in public.

Now watch what the book does next.

Nothing.

No narrator's comment. No rebuke. Nobody in the town corrects her theology. The chapter simply ends, and the very last line mentions, almost in passing, that they arrived at the beginning of the barley harvest, and Naomi does not know that means anything and is not told.

So hear this said over you, on a back step outside a full house. You are permitted to say plainly that you are not who you were and that this is not what you would have chosen, and God has let a woman say a harder version of it in His own book without one word of correction. That is written in Ruth chapter one in full, and it is the Holy Spirit who helps in our weakness and intercedes for us, and He does that in a person standing in the street with the wrong name being called at her.

Now let me be careful, because this is a story people misuse.

I am not going to tell you that your eleven years were for something.

I know how the book of Ruth ends and so do you and I am not going to run ahead and use it, because Naomi in chapter one does not have chapter four, and you do not have yours, and telling a woman on a back step that this is all going somewhere is the same as handing her a reason I do not have.

And I am not going to tell you that she was wrong to say it.

Some people teach that chapter as Naomi's low point, a failure of perspective she later repents of. The text does not say that. It records what she said, in her own words, at the moment she said it, and it lets it stand, and that is God putting a woman's accurate sentence about her own life into Scripture without an asterisk.

Here is what I am telling you.

They are not being unkind. They are doing the only thing they know how to do.

Your family kept you alive for eleven years by remembering you, and what they have is the last version they were given, and when you walked in they reached for it with real love, and every one of them meant it.

They will not find out on their own. There is no way for them to know, because you are doing the reactions perfectly, and they are word-perfect, and the better you do them the longer this goes on.

Somebody has to say it, and it has to be you, and it is one sentence.

The word says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit, and near is a location word about God rather than a mood word about you. And the Spirit of God is the one who intercedes for the saints with groanings too deep for words, which is the only prayer available to somebody being called by a name that stopped fitting years ago.