Names are important. The Lord records for us the names of Jesus: Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. The Lord’s name is important…. So are the names of people.
When the 1960’s ended, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district reverted to a high-rent area, and many of the hippies moved down the coast to Santa Cruz. They had children and got married - usually in that order. But the hippies of the 1960’s didn’t name their children Melissa and Michael. People in Santa Cruz grew accustomed to their children playing with little children named Moonbeam, Earth, Love, Stardust, or Precious Promise. All of these children ended up in public schools.
That’s when the kindergarten teacher first met little Fruit Stand. Every fall, according to tradition, parents apply name tags to their children and send them off to school on the bus. So it was with little Fruit Stand. The teacher thought the boy’s name was a little odd, but they tried to make the best of it.
“Would you like to play with the blocks, Fruit Stand?” One teacher asked. “Fruit Stand, would you like a snack?” asked another. His name, by the end of the day, didn’t really seem to matter.
At the end of the school day, the teachers led the children out to the busses. “Fruit Stand,” they asked, “do you know which one is your bus?” Fruit Stand didn’t answer. That wasn’t strange; he hadn’t answered them all day. Lots of children are shy on the first day of school. The teacher had instructed the parents to write the names of their children’s bus stops on the reverse side of their name tags. When the teacher came to Fruit Stand and turned over the tag, there neatly printed was the word “Anthony.”
Now the moral of the story is simply this: before you start calling people names, you may want to make sure you’ve got the right name to call them.
Dr. Mike Rouse
What to do:
✞ Get the name right.
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