Aragog

Genesis 32:22-32

"That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. So Jacob was left alone and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob's hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. The the man said, 'Let me go, for it is daybreak.'

But Jacob replied, 'I will not let you go unless you bless me.'

The man asked him, 'What is your name?'

'Jacob,' he answered.

Then the man said, 'Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and humans and have overcome.'

Jacob said, 'Please tell me your name.'

But he replied, 'Why do you ask my name?' Then he blessed him there. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, 'It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.'

The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob's hip was touched near the tendon." 

I've never named something without thought. My road bike's named Diego, for Diego Rivera, and because when I'm riding I can say "Go Diego Go!" I knew I wanted to name my dog Eleanor Rigby years before I got her. When I actually went to pick her out, I chose the dog who fit the name. I'm obsessed with Harry Potter so Aragog was a sound choice for my new hermit crab's name. A lot goes into a name. The selection process, of course, but also throughout the course of the name's existence. People you meet (or pets) create our definitions of names. How we experience them and who we find them to be becomes the meaning of the name itself. There's a whole lot to take out of Genesis 32; I could go on forever if I tried to sift through all of it on here, but I'm going to try to pull out some of what it says about names. We get that who we are is directly connected to our name, the word that describes us most exactly. But we also see that we can change. Jacob was a trickster, but God makes him a God-wrestler. We may have made our names to mean something, but God can erase that, make us new, and give our name a new meaning. What is your name?


(This is completely unrelated. I just really like it).