WHAT’S IN A NAME?

On Naming, Knowing, and the Distance Between Them

by

Nathan Christopher Sawatzky

The Riddle.

OTTFFSSENT

Sit with that before reading anything else. It looks like static, letters with no obvious order, and that is exactly the point. A note before going further: this is a clue, not the answer. The answer sits at the very end of what follows, and it will make far more sense there than it would here.

Keep it in the back of your mind. Everything after this point is, in its own way, still circling the same question that string of letters is already quietly answering.

the answer to the riddle makes it impossible to forget. But we need to do some math first. Things don’t always add up right.

Any given Sunday.

To start the week,

Someone stood alone on a small stage. He waxed eloquent praise on shared effort, in a field built for a hundred thousand people, broadcast to hundreds of millions more, and declared the moment greatness. They were not wrong, and they were not right either. Greatness was named by the very person standing inside the achievement, sunglasses held, voice catching, as he gestured toward the sky. The one direction in that stadium nothing human had built. This wasn’t a performance. This was recognition. Something was genuinely felt. But a name given by whoever benefits from it has never once been enough, on any stage, to prove what it claims.

A second moment happened later the same day, on a different stage, but the same field. Someone else tried to stand inside the team's championship photograph, wanting to be recognized as having been there, folded into a moment he had no actual part in. It did not work. In fact, it did the opposite. Publications quietly cropped him out. Nobody disputed he had, in fact, been standing there. Reference held completely. What got refused, collectively, was the predicate, that his presence deserved to mean what he wanted to. What he wanted didn’t matter any more. He didn’t deserve the shared memory of recognition, and he was removed from the position.

Both were desperate quests for validation. In fact, one could say that of all the people who witnessed it too.

None of this is unusual. People reach for validation this way every day, in far smaller rooms, with no cameras and no crowd. What makes this instance usable is not that the behavior is rare, but that millions watched the same moment at once, about as corroborated as a single human event has ever been, witnessed live rather than recalled from bias or memory.

And here is what keeps the moment from being only an example of hollow naming. Nearly everything said was also true, specifically true about love. "A language spoken without words that turns strangers into friends" is not an accurate description of a sport. It is an accurate description of love, borrowed for the occasion. The same night, a halftime show built around that theme put up a large white circle with the word love across its center, the V painted like a dove, drawn from the same moment the Spirit descended at Jesus's baptism[1], his actual name never once appearing on the sign. A symbol that recognizable can carry the reference on its own, or so the sign assumed. That version asked nothing of anyone, no belief, no ownership, no risk, palatable enough to sell soap on the billboards right behind it. A dove folded into a letter is love with the reference quietly removed, safe because no one specific is left behind it to agree with or refuse.

On a long enough timeline, everything's survival rate reaches zero[2]. Stadiums empty. Trophies tarnish. Every nation that has called itself great has, eventually, stopped being able to say so. But that is not the whole truth, because a thing goes on existing exactly the way someone defines it, at least in their own account, for a while in everyone else's too. A person can stand alone on a podium and declare themselves great, and the declaration persists, at minimum, as a claim. A claim that only survives because its author keeps insisting on it is not the same as a claim that was true the moment it was spoken. Standing alone on a podium has never conferred the authority being claimed there. It has only ever revealed how badly that authority was wanted.

In the week since, both moments have already started fading, the way these things always do. A name repeated for one news cycle rarely survives the next one. But one name has been repeated so consistently, for so many centuries, that people still mutter it in anger when they get cut off in traffic. One kind of naming barely survives the week it was spoken in. Another kind has survived two thousand years, said constantly by people who no longer even mean it as anything but a curse.

Naming something true requires real authority behind it, and the question is whether anyone standing alone can actually be that authority for themselves.

Preface

Lately I have noticed how I actually arrive at a question. I do not start out looking for an answer. I start by trying to understand the reason underneath it, turning it over until the reason has a shape clear enough to name. Only once the problem has a name do I ask it out loud, in the same form anyone else might ask it, and wait to see what comes back against what I already privately knew. Somewhere in that process I started handing responsibility to something with a name of its own, trusting it to follow through on both what I said it was and what I expected it to do, and I did not notice until recently how much freedom that handoff actually bought me, freedom to go do something else while the trust held. It only works, though, once it gets validated, proven by the thing actually doing what its name claimed it would. That whole process turns out to be the entire subject of what follows, long before I ever set out to write it down.

My own name already carries the pattern I keep finding everywhere else. Nathan was given to me outright, no explanation attached. Christopher means Christ-bearer, an aspiration spoken over me before I had any say in becoming it, something to grow into rather than something I chose. Sawatzky points only to lineage, not to who I actually am, a purely human exercise in keeping track of where a person came from. None of the three were mine to pick. All three are still mine to carry.

A name is not how a thing becomes true. A name is how a thing survives contact with someone who was not there when it happened.

That is the whole claim. Everything below is just the work of showing it.

The Weight of a Closed Trap.

I do not pull my hand back from a flame because I have a word for what is happening to it. The hand is already moving before the sentence could ever form. Naming arrives late to that transaction, if it arrives at all.

Push the same question somewhere stranger. A Venus flytrap has no brain, no nervous system, nothing anyone would call awareness. It takes two separate touches to one of its trigger hairs, arriving within about twenty seconds of each other, before it will act at all. Once that second touch registers, though, it does not hesitate. It snaps shut in roughly a tenth of a second, one of the fastest movements in the entire plant kingdom, fast enough that an insect never sees it coming[3]. It is worth being precise about what that closing actually is, because the obvious reading is the wrong one. This is not defense. Nothing threatened the trap. It is feeding, and it feeds by exploiting the very thing that drew the insect there in the first place, its own need for nourishment, its own desire pulling it toward what it believed would feed it instead. Nothing in there is afraid of anything, and nothing in there is defending anything either. There is no name being formed, no experience being had (except perhaps for the fly), only a mechanism doing precisely what it was built to do.

That is the actual floor this essay stands on. A reaction is not the same thing as an experience, and an experience is not the same thing as a name for it. The flytrap has the first and neither of the other two. Most of what gets called an animal's fear, or an animal's desire, and a great deal of what gets called a person's version of either, sits closer to that trap than anyone likes to admit: wired, automatic, useful, and entirely silent about whether anything is actually being felt underneath it.

Naming is what turns a mechanism into something that can be examined. A trap cannot be ashamed of closing too early, or proud of closing on time, or lie about why it closed at all. The moment a fear can be reflected on, defended, exaggerated, or denied, something has entered the picture that a flytrap will never have. Not more machinery. A witness.

Somewhere in that same early world, a person saw fire for the first time and had nothing ready to say about it except something like, look, I have made fire. That sentence would have been honest, something real had just happened in front of him. It would have been bewildering, since nothing in his experience explained why it could happen at all. And it would have been inaccurate, since he had not made anything, he had only been the first to witness what had already been possible the whole time. All three at once, and none of them cancelling the others out. The thing itself arrived first, entirely impossible to name, and only afterward, once the astonishment had somewhere to stand, did it become ready to be identified. What's in a name, anyway, if not exactly that: not an explanation for how the fire burns, just something steady enough to keep the burning from slipping away before anyone else could be told.

Before the First Meal.

The first thing a human being is recorded doing, before farming, before a single meal of meat is authorized, is walking past every living creature and giving each one a name[4]. Genesis places this scene before the fall, before permission to eat animals exists at all, an easy detail to read past. An entire era of human life was spent naming creatures nobody had any functional reason to name yet.

Naming, on this reading, was never a tool for using anything. It was how a relationship to the created world got established before any use of it began. Adam did not name the ox to plow with it. There was no plowing yet. He named it, and the wolf, and the sparrow, because something in him needed each of them to have a name before he could actually stand in front of any of them.

This is a strange kind of evidence for something argued earlier: naming exists for the witness, not the experience had by. Adam already knew the animals were there. He could see them, hear them, presumably feel the ground shake under the larger ones. What he did not have, until he spoke a name over each one, was a way to hold that creature in mind when it was no longer standing in front of him, and no way to hand that creature to someone else who had not yet seen it. Naming is memory extended outward, and hospitality extended toward whoever comes after.

The Mirror That Was Missing.

A fair question could stop this account before it starts: which came first, the animals or the woman. Genesis answers plainly. The animals are named first, and only afterward is Eve made[5]. That sequence looks, on the surface, like a problem for everything already argued here. If naming exists for a witness, and Adam names every creature alone, who was there to witness him doing it.

Nobody was, and that is the point the sequence is making rather than the hole it first appears to be. Adam naming the animals alone was never the validation. It was the preparation for needing one. A man can exist entirely on his own. His existence has never once been validated by anything except a mirror capable of recognizing it as such, and no animal Adam named was built to do that. He could call every living creature by an accurate name and still not be known by a single one of them in return. The naming came first because the capacity to name correctly had to be built before there was anyone else present for that capacity to actually mean something in front of.

What filled the space before Eve arrived was not empty time. It looks closer to an entire curriculum, delivered by simply watching creation and being asked to respond to it, order, pattern, color, scent, movement, diet, defense, rhythm, and eventually the mechanism every living thing uses to continue itself. Adam was not handed a finished manual. He was taught the way anyone is actually taught, by observing something happen enough times to recognize the shape of it.

What he was left with, after all of that, was rest, and inside the rest, something new, a desire that belonged entirely to him. Having watched creation delight in itself, Adam wanted to participate in that delight rather than only observe it. That desire was, in the plainest sense, selfish, and it does not need softening to be honest. Wanting to be part of the joy he had already watched everywhere else in creation was the exact compulsion of someone made in the image of a Creator who never stops making. It would have been strange for that particular compulsion to skip him alone. Let’s be clear, Eve is not a result of Adam dreaming of her, She’s a result of him needing her. God created uniquely again.

Eve arrives into that need, not before it, and what she does almost immediately afterward is worth noticing on its own. She is the first person in this account to consciously exercise a choice apart from what she was told, reaching for the fruit before Adam does anything at all[6]. Adam's response, when confronted, is not confession. It is blame, aimed outward, at her and at God who gave her to him[7]. Read one way, that looks like cowardice. Read more carefully, it looks like a man encountering, for the first time, evidence that he had a choice in the matter too, and not yet knowing what to do with that discovery except point away from himself.

Choice, once exercised, does not stay contained to the person who exercised it first. What was true of naming is turning out to be true of choosing as well. One instance of it, made visible, changes what everyone standing nearby has to reckon with next.

What the Table Actually Settles.

That reckoning looks different depending on who is doing it, and nowhere is that clearer than at an ordinary table. Three people sit down to a meal of roast lamb. One says it tastes good, one says it tastes like nothing special, one says eating it was wrong before taste ever entered the question. All three agree, without exception, that it is a lamb. Philosophers call the part that held reference, and the part that fractured predication, what gets said about a thing once it has been correctly pointed at[8]. A name secures the first. It has never once settled the second. Fire made this same point earlier, more cleanly, reference and reaction converging for nearly everyone, heat, danger, retreat. At this table, the reference holds while every reaction fractures completely. That gap is where real disagreement actually happens. Nobody here was arguing about what a lamb is. They were arguing about what it is worth.

A Name for Someone Not Yet Born.

Most naming happens after the fact, a label applied to something already understood. One naming ceremony in scripture runs backward from that pattern entirely.

A lamb is chosen on the tenth day of the month, inspected, kept apart from the rest of the flock, watched, and named as the one, four full days before it is ever slaughtered or eaten[9]. That gap is not incidental to the ritual. It is the entire reason for the ritual. The text says so directly: the whole ceremony exists so that a child not yet born, asking a question not yet formed, can be told what it means[10]. The lamb did not need the name to be a lamb. The child who would one day ask what it means needed the name to already be waiting there for them.

The same structure holds for the name this whole account keeps circling back to. Reference costs a person nothing. Agreeing Jesus lived, was a real man, said certain things, and was executed by a real government, requires no risk from anyone, even historians who reject everything else will grant that much. Belief, the kind with consequences, is not reference. It is a predicate a person has to individually own. A shared name gets everyone to the table. It has never, on its own, gotten anyone to eat.

The Name Given Before Breath.

That same advance naming happened to Jesus himself, and worth being specific about how literally. There was a name before there was a ministry, a miracle, or a single recorded word from his own mouth, and the name did not originate with the people raising him. An angel tells Mary what to call the child growing inside her, before he is conceived[11]. A separate angel tells Joseph the same thing, in a dream, using the same name[12]. Neither parent chose it. Neither parent negotiated it. By the time the child is eight days old and formally named according to custom, the naming has already happened twice, from outside the family entirely, and the parents are simply the ones who carry it forward[13].

Naming here is not description catching up to something already understood. It is declaration arriving before the thing it names has even drawn breath, which means whatever Jesus would become was never up for renegotiation by the people closest to him. They were witnesses to a name, not authors of one.

The witnesses do not stop at Mary and Joseph. Forty days later, at the temple for the purification required by law, an old man named Simeon, promised he would not die before seeing the Messiah, takes the infant in his arms and says so publicly, to strangers[14]. A prophetess named Anna, who had spent decades at the temple, does the same[15]. Neither had met this family before. Neither had anything visible to go on, an ordinary infant carried in for an ordinary rite. What they recognized was not evidence in the usual sense. It was something closer to corroboration, arriving from people with nothing to gain by offering it.

So before Jesus ever speaks a word that gets recorded, the pattern is already complete: a name given, not chosen, spoken by more than one source, confirmed by witnesses who had no reason to lie and no relationship to protect. Whatever came after this point in his life, the foundation was never in question. It was established before he could have said a single thing to earn or deny it himself.

Eighteen Unnamed Years.

Once a foundation like that is established, everything built on top of it can afford to be quiet for a while, and that is almost exactly what happens next. Scripture gives one further story from Jesus's childhood, at age twelve, staying behind in the temple during Passover without his parents' knowledge, found three days later among the religious teachers, listening and asking questions, answering their anxious search with a question of his own, did they not know he had to be in his Father's house[16]. Then, in a single sentence, Luke covers the next eighteen years of a life that would eventually be studied more closely than almost any other in history: he grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man[17]. Mark's gospel later calls him simply the carpenter, a word covering stonework and general building as much as wood[18], which is about as much detail as exists for what filled those years. Joseph, present at the birth and the temple, is entirely absent by the time Jesus's ministry begins, and the working assumption, reasonable rather than certain, is that he had died sometime during this silence, leaving Jesus to carry the family trade.

Texts outside scripture try to fill the gap with stories, a boy shaping clay birds and making them fly, striking a companion dead in anger. They are worth naming honestly and setting aside just as honestly, treated by nearly every serious scholar and by the church across most of its history as invention rather than history. What is actually interesting is the silence itself, not what might be hiding inside it. A name had already been given, confirmed by multiple witnesses, before the child could speak, and then, for eighteen years, almost nothing else was recorded. No further sign, no repeated confirmation, no public reminder of who he was, just an ordinary trade in an ordinary town, lived out by someone whose identity did not need constant renaming to remain true. That is the opposite instinct from the one this essay opened with, someone reaching for the sky mid sentence, needing a crowd's applause to confirm a word just spoken. Here the confirmation came first, decades before the work began, and the work required no further audience to remain what it already was.

The silence ends the same way it began, with a name spoken from outside him. At about thirty years old, he is baptized, and a voice, unprompted, says what nobody in those eighteen quiet years had needed to keep saying: this is my son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased[19]. Thirty years of an established name, finally spoken aloud again, at the exact moment everything after it required doing something with it. That is where this account has to leave him for now, at the edge of the work the name was always pointing toward, and where the next one has to pick up.

The Difference Between Blaming and Confessing.

There is a use of naming that runs in the opposite direction from all of this, and it deserves to be named itself, because it is the most common use of language most people will ever put to work.

The first recorded use of naming after a wrong has been done is not confession. It is redirection. The man does not say he ate. He says the woman gave it to him, and names who gave her to him in the same breath. The woman does not say she was persuaded. She names the serpent[20]. Naming, here, is not being used to locate the truth. It is being used to relocate the blame, one name handed off to the next like something too hot to hold.

Compare that to the only honest use of naming available in that same story. Nakedness is not covered with a name. It is covered with clothing, and clothing is exactly what confession has to remove before it can start. You cannot name your own part in something while still dressed in the version of yourself built to avoid saying it. Humiliation, stripped of its cruelty, is simply what it costs a person to stop naming everyone else's part in something and finally name their own. It is a specifically human process. A flytrap has no clothing to remove, because a flytrap has nothing to hide and nothing to own.

We know how to kill rather than pay that cost. Cain proved it first, and nobody since has needed a lesson in how.

What a Memory Cannot Prove on Its Own.

John Locke argued that personal identity is not a matter of the same body or the same soul persisting through time. It is a matter of consciousness, specifically, of memory. You are the same person who did something years ago only insofar as you can reach back and consciously claim that act as your own[21]. Identity, on this account, is ownership, and ownership runs entirely on what a person can remember.

The theory did not survive contact with a simple objection for long. An old general remembers being a brave young officer. That officer, years earlier as a boy, remembers being punished at school. But the general, now old, has no memory of the punishment at all. By Locke's own rule, the general owns the officer's memory, and the officer owns the boy's, yet the general does not own the boy's, a plain contradiction in what was supposed to be a single continuous identity[22]. Memory, on its own, cannot even keep its own math straight.

Here is the harder problem underneath that one. A person cannot tell, from the inside, whether a memory is accurate or invented. A false memory does not arrive labeled as false. It feels exactly as certain, exactly as owned, as a true one. Which means a memory is not actually evidence of what happened. It is only evidence of what someone currently believes happened, and belief, held alone, has never once been enough to establish a fact.

This is precisely why no serious tradition has ever accepted a single, uncorroborated account as sufficient. Courts require it. Scripture states it as a settled principle centuries before any court did: a matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses, not one[23]. A memory, a name, a claim to ownership over what actually happened, none of it becomes more than a private feeling until another consciousness stands beside it and says yes, I was there too, that is what I saw as well. Ownership of the past, like ownership of the self, was never something a person could fully settle alone.

The Room That Answers For You.

Personal consciousness was never actually the problem this account keeps circling. A single mind, reasoning alone, can be wrong, but it is at least reasoning as itself. What repeatedly breaks something is not that, it is what happens the moment that same mind stops reasoning alone and starts borrowing its conclusions from a room. The philosopher Martin Heidegger gave this a precise name, das Man, usually translated as "the they," a mode of existing where opinions, choices, even fear itself, stop belonging to any one person and start circulating as something everyone simply absorbs from everyone else[24]. Nobody in that state is necessarily reasoning badly. They have simply stopped reasoning as themselves.

An entire people building a single tower is the clearest textual proof of exactly this. One language, one unified purpose, and the failure the account records is not any individual's private ambition. It took a whole population moving as one collective mind to reach for something that high, and the record does not say any single person inside that crowd was thinking incorrectly. It says the language was confused and the people were scattered, judgment interrupted at the exact point it had stopped being personal and become entirely pooled[25].

The stadium moment already named earlier in this account runs the identical mechanism at a smaller scale. A hundred thousand people do not individually verify a claim of greatness. They confirm it collectively, by simply being loud together, and the volume gets mistaken for the verification nobody actually performed. That is collective consciousness substituting for truth rather than checking it, the same failure Babel produced, just quieter and shorter lived.

The two or three witnesses already named in this chapter are not a contradiction of any of this. They are the one place collective consciousness is actually asked to work, and the difference is not collective versus individual at all. It is whether each person involved is still independently owning their part of it. Simeon and Anna, named earlier in this account, arrived at the same recognition separately, on their own terms, neither one borrowing the other's conclusion. A crowd applauding a claim nobody actually checked is doing the opposite, absorbing what the room already decided rather than adding anything of its own. Collective consciousness is not the problem the moment it stays several people, each still reasoning as themselves. It becomes the problem the moment it stops being several people at all, and turns into one borrowed opinion wearing many mouths.

What Love Borrows.

Taste needs no borrowed language to be known. The lamb tastes like lamb. It just does, and no metaphor is required to make that fact real to the person eating it.

Love has never had that luxury. It has no sensory organ of its own, no channel that delivers it directly the way a tongue delivers flavor or a hand delivers heat. Every single word ever used to make love nameable to someone else was stolen from somewhere else first: warm, deep, sweet, juicy. The lamb started juicy on its own. Love only ever became juicy because someone, at some point, needed a taste-word badly enough to reach across categories and take one.

Scripture does the same borrowing openly, and at length, because it has no better vocabulary available either. The Song of Songs describes love almost entirely through fruit, wine, honey, and spice, reaching for taste again and again because taste was the nearest self-verifying thing available to lend[26]. Paul does the opposite kind of borrowing in a passage so familiar it no longer sounds borrowed at all: love is patient, love is kind, love does not envy, love does not boast[27]. Read carefully, that is not a description of a feeling. It is a list of behaviors, actions substituted for a sensation nobody has ever managed to name directly. A hymn written centuries later runs into the exact same wall from a different direction, trying to picture God's love as though every stalk on earth were a quill and the whole sky were parchment, and finding even that would not be enough room to hold it[28]. Even scripture, even the best hymn ever written about it, describing the single most important reality in this whole account, cannot describe love the way it describes the taste of bread. It can only describe what love does, or reach for something big enough to fail at holding it, and let the failure stand in for the naming.

That borrowing is not a weakness in the concept of love. It might be the most honest thing about it. A love that could be tasted directly would need no name and no witness at all, the way heat needs no witness to be hot. Instead it has always needed someone standing outside it, translating, borrowing, reaching for whatever word came closest, and a person can say I love you and mean it entirely, and the sentence still requires someone on the other side of the room to receive it before it becomes anything more than a private feeling wearing a stolen name. That is not a flaw unique to romance.

Final Thoughts.

It is fair to ask whether any of this is heading toward the place a lot of these ideas eventually land, awareness as god, consciousness as the divine thing underneath everything, enlightenment as the real name for what this essay has been circling. It isn't, and the reason it isn't is not a preference. It is the one hinge everything above actually depends on.

Every example in this essay has been a name reaching across a gap toward someone who was not there. Adam naming animals no one else had seen yet. A lamb named days before a child would ask what it meant. A word borrowed to make love speakable to someone standing outside of it. In every case, the name was doing the work of a translator, standing between an experience and a witness who could only receive the translation, never the thing itself.

One moment in history breaks that pattern completely, and it is the only one that ever has. "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us"[29]. Not a better name sent down to describe the gap more accurately. The thing on the other side of every gap, arriving in a body that could be touched. John, writing about it later, does not reach for theology first. He reaches for something self-verifying instead: "which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked at and our hands have touched"[30]. Not a name handed to a witness. A witness finally let close enough to skip the naming and touch the thing itself.

That is the guardrail. This is not consciousness discovering it was God all along, arriving at a name broad enough to cover everything. It is the opposite motion, God narrowing down to a single body, a single place, hands someone could actually touch, so that for one stretch of history the gap a name is built to cross did not need crossing at all. No other person, process, or claimed enlightenment has ever managed that, a name and the reality behind it arriving in the same place, at the same time, in front of witnesses who could reach out and check.

Return for a moment to the person standing alone on that field, naming an achievement greatness while looking, without seeming to notice they were doing it, toward the one place in the stadium they had not built themselves. There is a name that never needed that gesture. Scripture calls it the name above every name, not seized by the one who holds it, but given, exalted rather than declared[31]. That is the truest and fullest example of greatness available to be known, comprehended, or understood, not a word spoken over an achievement by the one who achieved it, but a name given by someone else entirely, to someone who did not have to point anywhere to find validation, because that validation was already theirs before the field was ever built.

One more thread is worth naming here without fully pulling it yet. Water opens this whole account, hovering over the earth before anything else exists. At the very end of this particular life, blood and water flow together from his side, witnessed directly by someone standing close enough to see it happen[32]. The same substance the beginning could not do without shows up again at the center, no longer a name for something but the thing itself, offered rather than described. What it actually costs a person to choose that, not just naming him correctly but reckoning with everything the choice requires at once, deserves its own reckoning elsewhere. This account will only say plainly that the reckoning is coming, and that it is worth the weight it will carry.

So what does a person actually do with that, now that the difference has been named. Not look to the sky mid sentence, hoping something out there will confirm a word already spoken. Ask first, before calling anything great, who gave the name, and whether it was received or self conferred. That is the only practical test available, and it costs nothing to run. Does this greatness require applause to keep being true, or would it still be true in an empty stadium, unnarrated, uncheered, alone.

So, what's in a name? Everything, and also nothing. Everything, because it is the only bridge a person who was not there has ever had to what someone else actually lived. Nothing, because the name was never the point. It was always a stand-in, built for the gap, waiting for the day the gap would not be there to cross.

A person notices what affected them negatively, retreats from it, and structures life so it cannot repeat. Positive action reinforced, negative action avoided, no manipulation yet, no name yet for any of it beyond the shape it left behind. Structure. Form. Progress earned the plain way, one burn and one boundary at a time.

We learned to roll onto the balls of our feet to escape a fire, long before we ever invented the wheel. The wheel that moves things comes later.

What comes first is the wheel that contains what almost burned him. The boundary that’s the witness, and the cautionary line to cross for something He cant name yet but knows.

What he needed was a definition of something that had no name yet, but carried the scope of one. Something that said, this is different than that, and I put this there because I was affected both positively and negatively by it. I should acknowledge the behavior. It’s witnessed behavior is greater than mine.

Proceeds to look sky ward, and recognize greatness. What he saw, was exactly what the first guy in this speech, forgot his sunglasses for. It probably made them both squint and take a second look.

It’s the process and the computation of one persons belief in knowing and witnessing actual greatness. Only Love is great. Real love. One Love. One action made great.

One person fearfully and wonderfully made, not made to be wonderfully fearful.

Knowing requires choice and belief in something greater to act in relation to. The riddle is just working out doubt, identification, multiplication, and counting on it.

One places ownership, the other creates more numbers to count by. All of them have names, doesn’t matter what language you speak it in. Its greater than.

12345678910

That’s called,

Conviction.

Nathan C.

*Post Script.

Just now, on a different page entirely, I reached for one of my own favorite phrases, and attempted it to describe a different outcome than the one it actually names.

Philippians 2 12-13. ‘Working out our own salvation with fear and trembling.’

I used it. Not maliciously. Not even carelessly. Choice had already entered the equation before I ever reached for the words, a personal bias already running underneath them, and the bias spoke what I wanted to hear. Not what the verse said.

Same Principle, Same mistake. Same process.

I have carried that verse for years as a kind of shorthand for the whole weight of truly understanding, knowing, and surrendering to something capable of mightily saving a person, and seemingly just as capable of obliterating them without a second thought. That is not a small thing to carry a phrase for, and it is exactly the kind of phrase personal bias likes best, weighty enough to sound earned, familiar enough to stop being examined. Personal bias says what I want it to say, how I want to say it, when to say it, and how to deliver it.

When the truth is, salvation started the second that we recognize a boundary, and that God already had a name for it.

Recognizing it is required. Claiming the recognizing as yours is what blocks the understanding.

That’s the greatest gift of all.

Salvation is a gift that cannot be comprehended by someone who believes they recognized it on their own, and yet recognizing it is still required to understand it at all.

Ephesians 2:8-9.

If heavens remain in the mind, then than He definitely reigns in all of them.

Good thing we have a blueprint and can read it to build something.

——

Footnotes, and references.

1. Matthew 3:16, "As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him."

2. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (1996). "On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."

3. Charles Darwin, Insectivorous Plants (1875), first documented the trigger-hair mechanism of Dionaea muscipula (Venus flytrap); the trap closes when two hairs are touched within roughly twenty seconds of each other, with the closing motion itself taking about a tenth of a second.

4. Genesis 2:19-20. God brings every animal to Adam to see what he would name them, and whatever he called each living creature, that became its name, prior to any authorization to eat meat.

5. Genesis 2:18-22. God says it is not good for man to be alone, brings the animals for Adam to name first, and only afterward, finding no suitable helper among them, forms Eve.

6. Genesis 3:6. Eve takes the fruit and eats it, then gives some to Adam, who eats it as well.

7. Genesis 3:12. "The man said, 'The woman you put here with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.'"

8. The distinction between reference (what a term points to) and predication or sense (what is claimed about it) traces to Gottlob Frege, "On Sense and Reference" (1892).

9. Exodus 12:3-6. A lamb is selected on the tenth day of the month, kept apart, and slaughtered on the fourteenth.

10. Exodus 12:26-27. "When your children ask you, 'What does this ceremony mean to you?' then tell them..."

11. Luke 1:31, "You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus."

12. Matthew 1:21, "She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins."

13. Luke 2:21, "On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise the child, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he was conceived."

14. Luke 2:25-35. Simeon, told he would not die before seeing the Messiah, recognizes the infant Jesus at the temple and says so publicly.

15. Luke 2:36-38. The prophetess Anna does the same, having spent decades at the temple.

16. Luke 2:41-50. At twelve, Jesus stays behind in the temple, found three days later among the teachers, and replies to his parents' search, "Did you not know I had to be in my Father's house?"

17. Luke 2:52, "And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man."

18. Mark 6:3, where his hometown identifies him as "the carpenter," a term covering woodworking and general building.

19. Luke 3:21-23. At about thirty years old, Jesus is baptized, and a voice from heaven says, "You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased."

20. Genesis 3:12-13. The man says, "The woman you put here with me, she gave me some fruit"; the woman says, "The serpent deceived me."

21. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Book II, Chapter 27. Personal identity consists in the continuity of consciousness, specifically in what a person's memory can reach back and claim as its own.

22. Thomas Reid's "brave officer" objection, first stated in Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), demonstrates that Locke's memory criterion violates the transitivity that identity requires.

23. Deuteronomy 19:15, "A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses," echoed in Matthew 18:16 and 2 Corinthians 13:1.

24. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), Division One, Chapter IV. Das Man ("the they") names a mode of existence in which choices, moods, and judgments are absorbed from the anonymous collective rather than owned by the individual.

25. Genesis 11:1-9. A unified humanity, sharing one language, builds a city and a tower to make a name for itself; God confuses their language, and they are scattered across the earth.

26. Song of Songs 2:3-4, 4:11. Love is described repeatedly through fruit, wine, honey, and spice, "his fruit is sweet to my taste," "your lips drop sweetness as the honeycomb."

27. 1 Corinthians 13:4. "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud."

28. Frederick M. Lehman, "The Love of God" (1917). "Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made, were every stalk on earth a quill, and every man a scribe by trade, to write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry."

29. John 1:14, "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us."

30. 1 John 1:1, "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched, this we proclaim concerning the Word of life."

31. Philippians 2:9-11. "Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name."

32. John 19:34-35. "One of the soldiers pierced Jesus' side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water. The man who saw it has given testimony, and his testimony is true."