What's in a Name?

Recently - I don't remember why - Jessi was talking about googling herself and people she knows, and telling me about the funny (or weird) results. I think I've tried it once or twice for myself. Out of curiosity, I googled myself yesterday. Just my first and last name.

I didn't find myself until the second page.

I did find a photographer, a couple restaurant employees, an ancestry.com page to a lady b. 1908 d. 2000, and a character for a Percy Jackson fanfiction. I enjoyed that last one.

Strange how googling myself and finding many people with the same name who are not me can make me feel so insignificant. I guess that's what middle names are for. Although one search result informed me there were only five people in the U.S. with my name. I find that hard to believe.

We were watching a TV show on Netflix the other night - one of those apocalyptic/world collapses kind of shows everyone seems so interested in - and one of the characters mentioned how she couldn't remember her dead husband's face.

Dad jumped in with a comment about how that has a scientific explination: We have a hard time remembering what the people we know most and love look like because there are so many images of them in our brains that they all jumble together, whereas we recognize people we've only seen a few times because there are only those couple images to link to them.

And here I was worrying that it was just my weak memory that made me incapable of recalling the features of a friend's or relative's face.

I did get to pondering something like this a while ago, while I was feeling especially poetic. It seems to me that for the people we love, it's less what they look like and more who they are that comes to mind when we think of them. Less physical features and more of their...essence, if you will (though I don't mean to sound creepy). I've often heard pastors talk about our bodies as just being the shell for who we actually are. When I think of my family, I think of what they mean to me, what I know and love about them, not the color of their eyes or how tall they are.

I don't know why I find this so comforting. Maybe it's the knowledge that, though I'm bound to forget the face, I won't forget the person.

At one point that was going to tie in a little better with the name thing. Something along the lines of "it's not the name, but the person", and how a name is just what someone is called by. (And that, in turn, was going to link to my dog.) Maybe I'll give it a try.

First off, my dog. Don't y'all love hearing about her? In those brief moments when I find the will to train her, I realize that one key component to her training is the fact that she doesn't answer to her name. In the training guides I found through google, they tell you to say your dog's name, and every time she (most dog training manuals always refer to the dog in question as "she") responds, "click and treat". Dogs don't answer to their name because it's their name, but because it's the word they know to  mean we want them. If that makes any sense.

In a lot of the fantasy books I read, especially Tolkien's, the characters have multiple names. They have their given name, and then sort-of-nicknames based on their characteristics, or terms of endearment, like the Elvish word for "laughter". Names are used to identify, but often the name used identifies with the true person, and it's not the name they were born with.

It's a concept I can't quite put into words, and I almost feel funny trying. I don't want to sound bizzare or anything. This isn't supposed to be deep and un-Biblically spiritual, just a thought.

That whole thing about our body just being a shell makes me think of Jesus. He was God incarnate, God in a body prepared for Him. Even His name wasn't unique. It had significance, of course, and then He was also called "Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us". All this junk about how Jesus looked makes me roll my eyes. (Especially when He's depicted as Caucasian. It's not racist to be firm in the fact that Jesus was a Jew.)

Do you understand what I'm trying to say? Because I'm having a really hard time trying to explain, and it's frustrating.

Names do have significance. They can define you, especially last names. People associate names with things. A child with a good, upright family will have more expectations put on them to be like the others who carried that last name. Names can connect people. But names and faces aren't all we are. They aren't the impression we'll leave on people. It'll be the attitude, the spirit of joy or of depression, the laughter or the temper, the hope or the sorrow, friendliness or pride, love or hate. They might never remember our name - they might not even know it at all - but there's a chance that, even for a couple hours, they'll remember who we were because of how we lived in front of them.