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An Unusual Pastime
On the twenty-fourth day of November in 1901, a school teacher rolled herself up inside of a wooden barrel, then plummeted over the edge of North America’s spectacular Niagara Falls. She did this stunt willingly, as did many others before her, and in doing so, became the first person to survive it.
That’s a different way of amusing yourself but, as a child, I also had an unusual pastime. My parents owned a baby-name book which they had used while choosing names for their children. They kept it on the top shelf of the bookcase in our study, and, when younger, I had enjoyed standing on tiptoe, pulling it down and reading it, wondering which names I’d choose for my own children when I grew up.
I liked reading the common nicknames associated with each name, the name’s country of origin and the different ways of spelling each name, but most of all, I liked reading the meanings of each name and I loved reading that my name meant butterfly princess. I thought that was so pretty, and I felt sorry for girls named Catherine, Candace and Karen, which all mean, pure.
“How boring,” I would think. “How ordinary. How lacking in mysticism.”
A Changed Mind
But my thinking about the word pure has changed now because the longer you live, the more sins you become guilty of, so the longer you live, the less pure you sometimes feel. As a born-again Christian, when God looks at me, instead of seeing my sins, He sees Jesus’ perfectly lived life, His death and His resurrection, so in God’s eyes I’m clean, but when people who’ve known me a long time see me, they remember the times I have either fallen or jumped into sin. They know that beside my name should sit the word sinner. That's not a nice word, but it well and truly belongs beside my name, and when I first realised that, for years, I had a severe case of lacking assurance of my salvation. It kept me awake at night and grew so intense, walking up or down stairs terrified me.
"What if I trip and fall,” I would think. “What if I die, shooting straight into the flames of eternal Hell?"
A Comforting Letter
But then I came across a letter an old, reformed preacher had written for a dying Christian friend whose trust in God had lapsed during her last days. Thomas Brooks wrote the letter in 1675. In it, he lists eight reasons why Christians should no longer fear death. His fourth reason states that death frees Christians from all reproach and disgrace on their names. Thomas Brooks says, “Heaven wipes away all blots” and he says God will write the names of all the saints in “characters of gold.”
That means that, in Heaven, your name and my name will no longer carry all the transgressions we’ve committed along our way here on Earth. Instead, in God’s eyes, and in the eyes of others, the word pure shall sit alongside it. So, thanks to Thomas Brooks, I no longer view the word pure as a boring meaning for a name. Instead, it’s a joy knowing that someday, perhaps soon, my name will mean pure also.
References:
1. John 15:18 NKJV
2. https://ww.gracegems.org/Brooks2/death.htm
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