By Name

. . . and the sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out (John 10:3).


Jesus often went out of his way to teach the crowds about the one lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son. He left the throng to find the one demoniac, the one leper, the one lame. He singled out Zaccheus in the sycamore tree, the woman at the well, the tax collector at the table.

“My sheep hear my voice,” Jesus said, “and I call them by name.”

Yumiko, Ethan, Dakshi, Orji, Jose, Deloris, Michael . . . .

God calls each by name.

Perhaps the Lord spent so much time focusing His hearers’ attention on their individual uniqueness in God's heart is because they had for so long thought of themselves only in terms of ‘the nation.’ Perhaps they had lost the memory that God knit each of them in their mother’s womb, that He knew the number of hairs on their head.

And He knew them each by name.

I hear it often said that God sent his Son to establish the Church, to reconcile it to Himself, to embrace her as His bride, that I wonder if we now think of ourselves only in terms of ‘the Church,’ and have lost the sense of our individual uniqueness in God's heart. Perhaps we have lost the memory that God knit each of us in our mother’s womb, that He knows the number of hairs of our head.

And that He calls each of us by name.