Jonny Heart: What is in a name?

Saturday, June 16, 2007

What is in a name?

What is in a name? So many people are known solely by their name. What they do in life does not affect people’s opinion of them; they remain a public star with out judgment or consideration. The rich see their name more as a title or rank of status. Life used to be predestined for you just by the person’s last name. What people represented and lived for didn’t matter, so I ask the same question as the lovely Juliet, what is in a name?

All my life I could never walk down the halls of my church without someone coming up to me knowing exactly who I was but me not knowing them. You see, my parents have attended this church for 28 years now so they know a lot of people and I get titled, “oh you’re a _______ (my last name),” instead of my first, or they may say “You’re Dave’s boy.” It has gotten to the point that it bothers me but I miss it when it doesn’t happen. Growing up at a church for twenty years, you find that more people know you then you would like, especially if you have no idea who they are.

However today gave me a little prize. Yesterday was the Hoedown for the closing program of VBS at my church. A big party where the kids could bring their parents and enjoy an evening of games and food. The theme required the use of bails of straw, and lots of them. My father offered the use of his truck for transporting the straw back to the place we borrowed them from. Can you imagine 35 bails of straw in the back of an 8-foot bed? With the high pile of bundles I didn’t want to drive them home on the public streets only to drive right back the next morning. (we borrowed them from a garden center and it was a block away from the church.) So I left the truck at the church over night so I didn’t have to drive all over town with this Straw. The next morning my dad went to the church to get the truck. He asked if there were any more bundles and the woman just looked at him puzzled. In ignorance of knowing whom my father was, she replied; “well, that truck is Jonny Heart’s dad’s truck, and I don’t know if he wants you driving it.” With a big smile on his face and a hint of a chuckle he replied, “Oh, I don’t think he will mind since I’m his father.” Never in my life at that church has someone not known my parents but knew me. It was a fun little highlight of the day for me.

This incident brought to light a truth that has crept up on me. I am becoming an adult and more importantly an individual separate from my folks. My name at church is slowly becoming my own, what I make it. My actions now speak for myself instead of my last name. Yet never will I be able to truley become seprate from my parents at that church I have some where else. While going to school at Johnson Bible College I have a chance to become my own person. No one knows of my parents or what they have done in life, instead I am who I want to be. Its kind of a weird feeling, At this pivotal part in my life I decide what direction to go and for the first time mommy and daddy won’t be there to catch me if I fall. Am I scared? A little but responcibility comes with being an adult. Life is just beginning for me and I can make it what I want, my name is mine to make through the choices and actions I choose. So, what is in a name? Nothing, but what I do now is everything. Think about it.

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Quotes from my Senior Patron

-Clive Staples Lewis-

"The Love of knowledge is a kind of madness."

The Problem of Pain

"We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which he will not be satisfied until it has a certain character."

Mere Christianity - (Pg. 31)

"This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies."

The Problem of Pain - C.S. Lewis (Pg. 31)

"What would really satisfy us would be a God who said anything we happened to like doing, what does it matter so long as they are contented? We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, liked to see young people enjoying themselves, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, a good time was had by all."

"If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the fit of faith, for the power to go on believing not in the teeth of reason but in the teeth of lust and terror and jealousy and boredom and indifference that which reason, authority, or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 139-140)

"It is not reason that takes away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other... Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your ganging moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know by experience..."

A Grief Observed - (P.g. 9-10)

"I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 7)

"It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 32)

"In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 56-57)

"Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something mush harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person-and he would not need it."