What's in a Name? ~ 2

What's in a Name?

‘Trust.’ Now why would any parent call a child ‘Trust’. Naming him a quality and not just a name. Something ordinary like Richard or Elliot. Something more distinguished. As a kid, Trust had been given all sorts of nicknames - Trusty Rusty, Truss, Russ, Trusteroony……..  Children, especially twelve year old boys, were not the nicest, but Trust’s posse was always posturing and joking with one another. One day, Trust looked up his name on the internet. He learned that trust means 'belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone’. As he was scrolling around he also checked out baby names to see if any of them meant Trust. It took a long time, but he really was curious. Rai, a Japanese boy's name, meant trust and it did sound almost ordinary.

From that moment, he called himself Raymond. He announced the change to his family and friends and when anyone called him Trust or any of the other nicknames, he corrected them. As he grew older, he met new people that did not know him by any other name. Now Trust/Raymond was eighty-five and reviewing his life.  A whole lot of living had carried him through the years. He finally felt quite grateful for being named Trust. As a young man, he had wrestled with his name as he did when trying to get a too tight jacket off his growing shoulders. When he took the new name, he felt like he had thrown that old jacket away and into the dustbin. But he hadn’t. In reality, he had folded that name up carefully, placing it in his front pocket. Unknown to him, it became a light for him. A light that glowed dimly but always shone through his eyes. The trust that he learned how to use was always wrapped in kindness. 

Later, Raymond had been doing some genealogy research online and in suitcases stored in the attic. He had come across old letters between his mother and her sister, his aunt that told the story of his parent's life before he was even a thought. His mother and father had tried to have children, had lived in an inhospitable land and had no reason to believe that either situation would change. No children had been conceived despite a ten year marriage and the land they lived in had grown completely and dangerously unsettled. His mother and father, now in their thirty’s put their trust in a move far away from their homeland. Some of the people they had to work with were completely untrustworthy, but there were more who could be counted on to honour their promises, large or small.

Once his parents were settled in their new home, far from the culture and beliefs they were raised with, his mother came to his father with the joyful news that she was pregnant. Once more they had to trust others. Trust in a new medical system, a doctor whose accent was foreign to them and new neighbours for advice about raising children in the midst of this great change.

The pregnancy, though not without it’s difficulties, was fairly uneventfall.  Emotional ups and downs rocked his mother’s carefully organized life. When he was born, a squalling, red-faced and energetic baby, Trust was the only name they felt they could give him. Trust they had placed in others, the God they had grown up with and in each other had steadied their lives. Now this child was born that would trust them without question to love and shelter him. They chose to honour that Trust.

And so, at eighty five, Raymond, who had been named Trust, began to tell this story. The story that his parents had kept hidden as part of a past they had left behind. There were those who listened with interest and there were who just thought it was the ravings of an old man. After all, who would ever name a child ‘Trust’?

“There are few things more powerful than a name. 

A single phrase that somehow becomes a symbol for an entire existence.”

~ Lance Conrad, The Prince of Creation