What's in a name?

What a totally rewarding year.  My son got married to a fabulous, Godly woman who will help him carry on our family name.  That is HUGE!  My youngest is getting married next month to another young, Godly woman.  And my oldest boy will be married soon to a beautiful Christian woman that
is precious and makes him smile like he did when he was a boy (with real joy and a slightly diabolical bent).  On top of that, my oldest brother is alive and healing after a terrible accident.

I have an adversary in the business world that is angry at me and thinks I have really been out to get him.  It’s not true, but it is how he feels so he is fighting back.  Against nothing really, but he is fighting.  At first I was mad, then I took stock of the situation. 

What a sad situation he has.  He was abandoned by his father and mother.  He was taken in by a Sacramento Businessman and raised without rules.  He is, for all intents and purposes, an orphan.  His adoptive father threatened to sue him in court if he used his last name.  It is tragic at best and a tragedy that I can’t take part in.

My father on the other hand, provided for me, wrestled with me and loved my mother until the day he went to heaven.  I was allowed to bear his name from the day of my birth and that was a badge of honor to him.  What a life I was given.  While others are despised by family, I was made a part of one. 

I came across a letter my father typed to himself 47 years ago wherein my father states "God's blessings to me and my family is unabounding, and yet as is said of the disciples, 'they forgot the miracle of the five thousand.' It seems that we shrink in our faith as we encounter the obstacles of life. Allowing others to be our assurance." [sic]   As I read that I thought how proud I am of him and how blessed I am to have been his son, to watch as he and my mother raised us in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.  No threat of loss of our name.

Then I realized that I have a more valuable name that I am allowed to bear, in part because of Mom and Dad, but more because of a great God and Father who took dead and lifeless bones and breathed life into them and called him His child.  Not based on any personal merit in the man, it was a gift.  And I can say with my father “God is good to Israel, even to such as are of a clean heart."