Saying His Name the Way He Says It

The gate stopped dragging in about four minutes and the man would not take anything for it.

That was six years ago and it was the third thing. Before that it was the outside tap, and before that he had come round with a ladder without being asked, because he had seen the gutter from his own upstairs window.

He is at number eleven. He is somewhere in his sixties. He has a small dog and a large radio and he is out in his front most evenings when the weather is anything at all.

And Beto has been saying his name wrong for six years.

Not badly wrong. Nearly right. The vowel in the middle is not the one the man himself uses, and Beto knows this, because he has heard the man's wife call him from the door and it comes out differently, softer and shorter, and every single time Beto hears it he thinks ah, that is how it goes, and then the next time he sees him he says it his own way again out of habit and momentum and the fact that it is now, frankly, six years too late to ask.

It has become a small permanent embarrassment that he carries down that side of the road.

And it means something else has quietly happened, which he has only recently let himself look at. Because you cannot ask a man to repeat his own name if you have never had a real conversation with him, and you cannot easily have a real conversation with somebody once you have spent six years at the level of a wave.

So the whole friendship has stalled at the exact height of a gate.

Beto's mother would have handled this in about ninety seconds. He knows precisely what she would have done, because he watched her do it a thousand times in a town where everybody knew everybody. She would have gone round with something in her hands, and she would have said his name wrong, and he would have corrected her, and she would have laughed at herself, out loud, generously, and made him say it twice, and then he would have been in her house within the month.

Beto has two degrees and a good job and better English than his mother ever had, and he has not managed in six years what she did before lunch.

And when he thinks about why, it is not language and it is not busyness.

It is that his mother was not afraid of being small in front of somebody, and he is.

And I would guess there is a name on your street that you have been getting nearly right for years, and that the not asking has cost more than the asking ever would have.

The whole invitation in the story is three words long

Take this off before we go on, because you have carried it down that road for six years and it was never yours.

You are not obliged to arrive at anybody's gate with something impressive. You never were. Scripture's most famous invitation is three words long and contains no argument at all, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your composure, who does anything inside another person. Set it down here. It is heavy and it has kept a good man at a wave.

Now hear how small the words are when somebody in the Gospel actually does this.

Philip has found something and goes to tell his friend, and his friend is skeptical straight away and says something dismissive about where Jesus is from. And Philip does not argue. He does not have a case ready. He says three words.

Come and see.John 1:46

That is the whole invitation and it is the whole method.

No case. No leverage. No cleverness at all, from a man who had every excuse to be defensive, because he had just been told the thing he was excited about was a joke.

Come and see. Which is to say: I am not going to win this, I am going to walk over there with you.

And you are able for words that size. Right now, on your own pavement, exactly as you are. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who does everything after the three words, and He has never once needed a man to be impressive first.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch on both sides.

Nobody is telling you to go to number eleven tonight and say come and see about anything at all. That is not the ask on this page. If somebody ever handed you your street as a list of souls to be processed, that was wrong, and you can put it down with the rest.

And your degrees and your good job are not the problem and there is nothing false about you. You are not a worse man than your mother. Scripture never once ranked a man by his schooling, and His Spirit is not standing there comparing you to her.

The point is only that the smallest words work, and you have been waiting for larger ones. That is what the written invitation is made of, and His Spirit is what carries it.

Here is the tender part, and I will put it the way your mother would have. Being corrected is not being diminished.

You have been protecting yourself from ninety seconds of looking foolish at a gate, and the price of that protection has been six years of a friendship that never got past a hinge. Your mother knew something you have forgotten, which is that letting somebody teach you their own name is a gift you hand them, not a loss you take.

You are able to be small there. Now, this week, in your own accent. Scripture puts a three word invitation in a man's mouth with no argument behind it, and His Spirit is the one who carries whatever is said at a gate, and neither of them has ever measured a man by how right he gets a vowel.

And the honest half, warmly. He fixed your gate for nothing and you have never once asked him how to say his name. He has almost certainly noticed. And he has kept coming round anyway, which tells you what kind of man he is.