I love to tell women about how much God loves names. All through the Bible, He gives people names or changes their names. A new identity in Him.  Abram to Abraham. Sari to Sarah. Jacob to Israel. Simon to Peter. Saul to Paul. In Revelation 2:17, God says, “I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it.” Isaiah talks about it. Ezekiel talks about it. I mean, new names are  everywhere.  And better yet, He still does this. God has given each of us “a new name.”  A pet name between Him and us.  This new name is such a gift from Him. Affirmation of how He sees us.

So I frequently invite women to ask God to reveal their name. “Go ask Him to tell you what your  name is. Look up your name meaning. Watch for Him to tell you again and again until you believe it.”  Here are a couple of girls’ stories.

Jana,

So I went to the website that gave us our name meanings. They didn’t have my name listed. So I just gave up.

Well, God put it on my heart to look again somewhere else. He gave me its meaning: “Princess”!

That’s what he’s been calling me the last couple of months, but I wasn’t sure it was really from Him. I just thought that I would share that. 🙂 God is good.

~Tia

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Jana ~

I’ve been meaning to email you since last class, but finally am making time to do it. I just wanted to share a couple things that have been going on with me. I left class last week angry (as you mentioned might happen)! I basically half-a$$ed the exercise, got in my car, and cried the entire way home. I came to the realization that I feel like I don’t have TIME to breakdown. I don’t have TIME to think about all this heavy, emotional stuff. I don’t have TIME to be so completely broken which then makes me feel like I need to fix everything, take time for myself, etc. So instead, I’ll turn my head and be fine =) Right? Because that’s way easier!

There’s so many things I want to share with you – my ‘journey’ on value, being be-loved, recently this notion of affirmation – and I’m aware they all are connected. And I get overwhelmed thinking I need to conquer all of them at the same time since they are all staring me in the face.

I was sharing last night in my small group how I’ve somewhat acknowledged the fact that I don’t want to ‘go there’ with the Lord. I get this picture of someone taking tiny, tiny baby steps towards the ledge – not really wanting to peer over and see what’s on the other side, knowing I could be cheating myself from the beauty and freedom of the view.

For whatever reason, I’ve been meaning to look up the meaning of my name. I know we’ve touched on that a couple times during class, so I finally did it this morning. Wouldn’t you know this is what I found:

Jamie

Meaning: truthful

Verse: “Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.” – Proverbs 3:3

Which is obviously the same context of scripture we talked about last night! Ah, I thought that was cool =) I also saw another version where they used the words kindness, trust, and mercy interchangeably with love and faithfulness. What website did you use when you looked up our names?

I’m way past my 3-sentence mark =) but wanted to share. Even though sometimes I don’t want to admit it, I know the Lord is working on my heart ever so slowly – or maybe it’s just that I’m ever so slowly starting to turn to Him.