A New Name

I like the Psalms because they are honest. They’re joy and pain and longing and grief and anger and worship—all mixed up and raw, just like our hearts.

In college, I took a poetry class—I had been writing angsty poetry in a cool-looking journal since high school, so I thought I knew what I was doing. Turns out, I was pretty terrible. The problem was that my goal in writing was to “share” something kind of obscure and then spin it into something nice and happy. Because I thought that’s what Christians were supposed to be. Nice and happy. After getting paper after paper back with more red pen on it than my actual writing, I went in to see this professor—a non-Christian at a very liberal school, by the way—to ask why he didn’t like my writing. He knew my faith, so he told me to pull a Bible off his shelf and open it to Psalms. He said, “This is the only part of the Bible I read. Because it’s honest. Write like that.”

It was a watershed moment for my writing and also for my soul. Pretending really doesn’t get you anywhere. We have to start honest and let God do some work.

In Psalm 16, David starts with a tone of urgency. He writes, “Protect me, God, for I take refuge in You.” He is not asking protection; he demands it as only a child of God can. It’s in the heartbreak moments, the raw moments, that I pray like David—I pray the guttural, desperate prayer of a wanderer in the wilderness.

The title of Psalm 16 in some Bibles is “Confidence in the Lord.” Because overall, the Psalm paints God as supreme—the most wise, the most powerful, the most valuable. But, you can tell these descriptions of God didn’t come from a list of “nice things to say about God in order to sound spiritual.”

One translation of the Bible titles this Psalm “You Will Not Abandon My Soul.” Personally, I like that better because this Psalm takes the tone of someone who has struggled through something and knows first-hand who God is.

I’ve experienced things that have broken and filled my mama heart, and stretched it in ways I didn’t know it could really stretch. I know tubes and hospitals and fear and that feeling of being thrown somewhere you don’t want to be. God has said yes, and He has said no—and I’ve wondered whether he is good. And I know that even in the middle of pain for your babies—one of the most keenly felt kinds of pain, I think—He is Father. He is good. And, He is renewer of all things.

I know a lot of you have honest questions running through your heads. It might be hard for you to call God wise and valuable right now. So, let’s take the idea of inheritance and start at the beginning.

In Genesis 32, Jacob stands on the threshold of the Promised Land—it was the inheritance promised by God to Abraham, Jacob’s grandfather.

It’s a strange story—Jacob came to the Promised Land with an entire entourage of people. He was surrounded by family, but he meets God and spends the night wrestling with Him.

The strangest part about this story is the way the wrestling begins. Jacob wasn’t laying hold of God to get something from him; God was the aggressor and, after wrestling all night, strikes his hip.

It feels like that sometimes—like God is hurting us. To be clear, God does not relish our pain. And the break moment isn’t always the death itself. It’s the moment that grief opens up like a floodgate and threatens to overwhelm us.

But, until God breaks us, we think we are in control. That God sits in the sky, a benevolent grandfather who just wants our attention and is grateful when we deign to give it to him. No. Our God is a lion; He is the power of the mountains and the vastness of the oceans. He is the glory of the sun.

So, broken Jacob clings and asks for a blessing; God asks his name. Jacob means wrestler, displacer, schemer. Before he could move forward, Jacob had to acknowledge who he was. God blesses us when we cling to Him in our brokenness. Again, God does not enjoy our pain. But, He loves when we cling to Him, when we lean into Him and acknowledge our weakness because that’s when He shows His strength, power, and glory. That’s when He infuses us with boldness.

Jacob asks for a blessing and he gets a new name. He already has the inheritance, but it’s here where he becomes Israel, which means “God fights.”

And with a new identity, Jacob names the place. It isn’t until later that Jacob realizes he’s seen God. Like Jacob, we aren’t great at realizing what’s happening or what God is doing in the moment that He does it.

Jacob names the place Peniel to remember it. We don’t get over our grief. We don’t go back to being the same person we were before. Ever. But, we mark the place where God broke us and gave us a new name—where He changed us into a new person.

I hope that you wrestle. That God grabs you not-so-subtly and works something into you. We’re going to talk about inheritance in this series because, even when He allows the broken things in our lives, the fact that we have an inheritance means that God is for us.

And He is the one that heals. The question we have to ask ourselves, and the question we are going to wrestle with is this: Do you truly believe that what God has for you is good?

Shannon Owen lives in Houston, Texas with her husband, Lee, and their two girls, Avery (6) and Kate (2). In 2012, between her two girls, she miscarried a baby at 8 weeks due to an ectopic pregnancy; read more from Shannon about her Hope Baby here. She taught high school English, but traded in her grammar textbooks for board books after Avery was born. However, words and stories are still very much a part of her life. 

During a lengthy NICU stay after her daughter Kate was born, Shannon dusted off her pen and started a blog to keep friends and family updated on Kate’s progress, but kept writing because it was catharsis. Kate was born with a congenital, non-progressive muscle and joint disorder as well as bilateral vocal cord paralysis, which causes a blockage in her airway. Shannon also writes for Abide, an audio prayer app, and has had some of her reading plans featured on YouVersion. You can find her at shannonowenblogs.com. Shannon and her family are very involved in their church, Houston’s First Baptist. Shannon and Lee help teach high school juniors and seniors, and Shannon leads and teaches in the women’s ministry.

Are you a writer who would like to join the blog team? Learn more and apply here.