NAMES.

God has had countless names throughout the history of humanity. I started looking into all the recorded names across time, across cultures…and it’s a lot. Humans have used names that attribute characteristics understood and seen within that particular moment of their existence.

Recently, I’ve seen American Christians become worried or upset at others referring to that supreme, creator spirit as anything but the names they understand or have seen in Jewish scripture. But I have come to see that outlook as such a narrow, restrictive view of such an expansive God. As if everything we could know or understand must be confined to the records of one culture, in one time, at one point in all of human history. I want to challenge that. Like I ask my kids “Do you think that humans could fit EVERYTHING about such a BIG GOD into such a small book?”

Just a skimming of the surface, I found names like “YHWH, ELOHIM, ADONAI, GOD, CHRIST, SPIRIT, UNIVERSE, HASHEM, LORD, FATHER, CREATOR, I AM, SOURCE, ALLAH, EL, GREAT SPIRIT, GICI NIWASKW, MAKER, PARA BRAHMAN, DIVINE, WAHEGURU, WELLSPRING” and so so so many others. These were just a few names that referred to God seen as a supreme, creator being.

For me, sometimes the term God can get wrapped up with the evangelical baggage that I’ve found damaging. So a lot of times I use names like Spirit, Source, Love…names that point to what I know to be true about this God. Whether I call my husband Jared, babe, my love, jerkface…none of it changes who he is and the truth about him. It always about how I relate to him.

So I’d love to encourage you to feel freedom in that. If you have trouble using the specific name “God” because of trauma or spiritual abuse or whatever it might be, that’s okay. If i’ve learned anything in my short time on this earth, it’s that God/Spirit/Source/Divine is above all things, love. And love is grace and patience and freedom and joy.

And if this is triggering for you, I’d love for you to question why. If you believe that God is and was always the same, then the time and change captured in the Bible was God revealing himself in a new way to humanity. Which means God could still be unfolding and revealing himself in new ways. It doesn’t mean God is changing. It means humanity is changing.

God has the same ability to connect with humanity as God did long before biblical times, during biblical times, and long after biblical times. That connection is what matters.