What if God, in asking Adam to name all the animals, was giving him the power to decide what their qualities & characteristics were to be? eg. What is a Lion? How does it behave? What does it eat? Where does it live?...
What if we still exercise this power, knowingly or unknowingly, when naming our children?
Did creation go all pear shaped because through shame we lost our identity as the beloved children of God, the name givers, the stewards of creation?
Am I freely giving out life-giving names to people around me, or am I still caught up trying to selfishly build my own identity by soiling the names of others?
That's a really interesting point about the naming of children. A lot of people have wondered if we live up to our name or if our name lives up to us. Do we become what our name says about us or is it the other way around? In the Bible, many people changed their name based on what was happening (take Naomi, for instance), yet others lived up to what their name meant...
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