Names, words and Identities.

Names, words and Identities.
What makes us who we are? In his famous Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare wrote the lines:
“Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.”
So, what does that mean? This tells us that what truly matters is what something is, not what it is called. But as humans we label EVERYTHING that has any meaning at all. If something is not labeled or does not come with its own set of vocabulary then it is usually not considered very important. My human communication studies professor gave us this example: Think of a chair. Any chair at all. Now think of the word “chair” – the word itself has nothing to do with the actual object. The only meaning that the word has is the meaning that we have given it. We could start calling these things that we sit in windows and it wouldn’t really matter. The relevance of a name only goes as far as our associations.

I have always been interested in names and the importance of them, mostly based on my own personal experience. My first name is Brittany. That is what my parents and family and many friends have called me since birth. Somewhere along the line, I decided that I was tired of going by “Brittany K.” because I always had several Brittanys in my classes. As an elementary schooler I realized that I did not want to be identified as an individual by the letter “K” all of my life and so I decided to go by Lynn. It was strange at first, I actually had to practice introducing myself to people as “Lynn.” I practiced writing my name over and over again, “Lynn Kidman” and it took awhile for me to get used to answering to Lynn. Then, in middle school I somehow was given the nickname “Bacon” – I’m not going into that story. And unfortunately for me the name stuck, very very well. I got to the point where if I even saw the word Bacon I first thought of myself and not the breakfast meat. Then my freshman year of high school I decided I wanted to try Brittany again. Most of my peers called me Bacon, many people didn’t know what my real name was and only knew me as such. This is when I met William and he learned my name as Brittany. I quickly decided that in a high school as big as mine, Brittany still was not going to work. Now that I am in college, I have tried very hard to get people to stop calling me Bacon and I primarily go by Lynn. William has a hard time calling me Lynn because at home many people call me Brittany including my family. The change is always so weird for me. While I am at school I go for such long periods of hearing “Brittany” that I totally disassociate myself from that name. Even writing it now seems weird. Needless to say, I have somehow made a mess of my name but it has given me the opportunity to explore the importance of them. I have discussed what to do with my name once I get married with a lot of people. I most defiantly want to be called “Lynn Flake.” I’ve been told to drop “Brittany” altogether but since that is what my parents and family and many others still call me, that just seems like a snub to them, because they wouldn’t even be calling me by my name anymore. So option one is Brittany Lynn Flake. But I have been told by many people that I will want to keep my last name. I know traditionally that becomes your new middle name and so option two is Lynn Kidman Flake. But that leaves the problem of dropping Brittany. And I don’t know that I want to totally drop Kidman because after 21 years, I am kind of attached to it. This leaves me with option three, Brittany Lynn Kidman Flake. Super long, I know. And William is not fond of it, but it is kind of what I am leaning towards. The fact that I have so many choices and have to flip back and forth between names and am called so many different things kind of leads me to believe that names really are not that important. I think that maybe Shakespeare was onto something.

Another example of irrelevant names, titles and labels. I have several pet turtles. Two are yellow belly sliders, named Emmitt and Anna Belle. I have had them for somewhere between 6-7 years. I was only planning on getting one turtle before we went shopping for them and I already had the name Emmitt picked out. But when mama and I saw them we knew we had to get both of them. She insisted that since she was paying for them that she would get to name one of them. It took her several days and drove me crazy. In my mind I had decided that they were both boys (they were too small to really be able to tell what gender they really were) and finally my mother picked Anna Belle. I didn’t like it but it was clear that it didn’t matter, you know how mothers can be. Once they got older, we found out they were both the same sex. It doesn’t really matter that one has a very feminine name and the other a masculine name, and to me, their sexes don’t really matter that much either. My third turtle, is just a baby. I had originally decided that he was a tortoise because he has many characteristics of a tortoise and not a turtle. Well, in my research, the only tortoises that live in that part of SC I could find are gopher tortoises. So I decided that must be what he was. However, it always bothered me that he looked NOTHING like any of the gopher tortoises I could find in pictures. I have had this little baby for just over a year now and because I did not want to have the same sex vs. name issues as I did with my other two turtles, we called the tortoise “the baby” for the first year. An entire year this little creature was nameless. It had a title that was meant to be temporary and even its exact species was a mere guess. About 6 months ago I decided that it was going to be a boy (whether it’s sex was male or not) and for two months I couldn’t decided between the names Sammy or Elvis. Finally one night William and I sat down and decided on Sammy. Recently I was doing some more research on my little man to find out more about what species he really is and I have since identified him as a European box turtle and that my he is most likely a she. Talk about an identity crisis! But for an entire year my baby didn’t have a name. For over a year I didn’t even give it the right species label and for the last few months I have given it the wrong sex. But how much of that really mattered? None. It will take some time to get used to not saying “my baby tortoise” but in my mind, he is a baby boy. I have associated it with a boy and because I don’t ever plan on mating this little box turtle, I will most likely continue to associate it with being masculine and it really won’t matter. Now look back for a second, Notice that as soon as I told you that it was not a tortoise and most likely a girl, I stopped calling Sammy a “him.” Instead I said “my baby” and “it” because since I was talking about mislabeling I didn’t want to mislabel. It is just interesting to me that if we can’t say “her” or “him,” “he” or “she” we turn to “it” and “it” is nameless and carries almost no meaning at all. Though my darling little Sammy means so much to me. All of the things that I had called it and all of the things I will call him, don’t really matter. The only reason why species mattered was so I could research how to properly care for him. But wait, that was actually an important reason why that label mattered. Interesting. Either way, no matter what I called Sammy, no matter what species or sex I believed my sweet baby was, that didn’t change who [she] really is. Me calling it one thing didn’t really matter because I was wrong.

There are many words that can be positive or negative totally depending on the person who is using them. The value is not in the word itself but only in the meaning it has for people. Right now I have a friend who is going through a lot. He is not a Christian, anymore. And I find myself as a Christian talking to him about religion quite a lot. He has developed and adopted many beliefs that are quite different from mine and a life style that others would quickly discredit. Every now and then he will respond to a question I ask him with a very critical response about Christianity or “the church” and in all honesty, much of what he points out is correct. They are the things that us Christians have not gotten used to hearing, we have kind of gotten a bad rap in the world. We have been labeled as hypocrites, we are guilty of having broken churches. The world expects us all to be perfect because often we aren’t humble enough and we are quick to point out others sins and preach to them but too slow to admit our own shortcomings and so they feel that we are judging them and in defense of themselves, they judge us, very critically. He keeps telling me that there is corruption in Christianity and that we focus on the wrong things. That we are pushy and closed minded. He has noted church politics and greed and churches who preach the wrong things. The word “Christian” has such a positive association for some of us and for others, the same word is so very negative. Now for me, I see it as positive because my perspective is one that comes from truth. I know that I can’t fathom the power of God. I know that He is mighty and how wonderful it is to be His child. These are all things that I associate with the world. My friend, sees it the way many others do, those who don’t know it from the inside. There was once time, I don’t remember where I was, but there was a speaker. He said that he was on a trip (to some other country) and had been talking with a man who wanted to know why he had come and why he was helping them. The speaker said that I told the man that he was there helping because he loved God. Then the speaker noted that he didn’t say “I’m here and doing this because I’m a Christian” because saying the word Christian sets off all sorts of negative alarms to people. He told us “But if you just tell people that you love God, they think you’re pretty cool” and that they don’t get all upset. Loving God is not seen as a negative thing, but being a Christian is. Right away, I went home and changed my religious views on fb to “I love Jesus” instead of “Christian.” See, what I keep trying to tell my fried is that being a Christian is not about all of that other stuff. Those are things that we have added and done to the word and the lifestyle and the negative stuff is because we are just people. We’re human like everyone else. We screw up and we are weak and wrong just like everyone else. We’ve got issues too. You can’t always rely on people, lets face it. But what Christianity should be, its most basic form, at the very core, is having a relationship with Christ. To the world we have let this word become so many other things. To the point that they don’t even understand what it is. People think that they can “used to be a Christian” or “give it up” or even “try it” because we have taken this word and added so much to it. The dictionary definition of Christianity is “a monotheistic system of beliefs and practices based on the Old Testament and the teachings of Jesus as embodied in the New Testament and emphasizing the role of Jesus as savior.” Are you seeing this? The very most basic and absolutely most important part of Christianity is found nowhere in that.I can't speak for anyone else, but personally my identity in Jesus is based solely on my relationship with Him. We are called to have a relationship with Him. That is the whole reason He even created us.People don’t want to be Christians because they don’t like everything that comes with that label. It confuses them and to be honest sometimes it confuses me. They don’t want it because they see all of this other stuff and think THAT is what it means to be a Christian, THAT is what Christianity is. But its not about titles, labels, denominations. It is about loving Him and trusting Him and recognizing God as the almighty power and the one and only. It is about His unconditional, ever patient and never failing or ending love and devotion for us and what He has done for us, just to have a relationship with us. And now we are stuck with this label and this definition.

Names are only worth the value that we give them. They matter to us because we make them matter to us but we can just as easily not make them matter. It doesn’t matter what I go by or what I am called, just that people can differentiate me from others when they want to. What is important is who I am and what I am and what I say and do – that is what really separates me from others, not my name. My baby turtles, let’s face it, they are not at all effected by what I call them. I can call them a tortoise or a frog, all awhile they are still all turtles. Again, what is important is that when I want to differentiate them from others I have the “correct” label but only because we have attached that information, those traits, behaviors and characteristics of that species to that label. The word Christianity means so many different things to so many different people. For some it is extremely positive and others look upon it very negatively but it is the same exact word. They have attached different meanings to it and overall as the body of Christ we have not emphasized the right meaning of it. We have such power over words, we create them and we create what they mean, how important they are and their overall value. They can me nothing or they can mean something. We have to be so very careful about what we say and how we say it. How are actions define words and what meanings we personally give them. Names can be just names like Brittany, Lynn or Bacon. Or names can be powerful like Jesus. Words can be good or bad only based on what we say they are. The meanings of words have changed so much since we first began using them. In order to understand what words to use or not use, what are important or not important, we must understand why they work the way they do. Words themselves are not important or unimportant and they are not good or bad, only the meaning and value we give them. This is also so important when it comes to knowing who you are and your own identity and also that of those around you.