The White Stone

George MacDonald

Revelations 2:17

"The giving of the white stone with the new name is the communication of what God thinks about the man to the man. It is the divine judgment, the solemn holy doom of the righteous man, the "Come, thou blessed," spoken to the individual... The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man's own symbol-his soul's picture, in a word-the sign which belongs to him and to no one else. Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone. For no one but God sees what the man is... It is only when the man has become his name that God gives him the stone with the name upon it, for then first can he understand what his name signifies. It is the blossom, the perfection, the completeness, that determines the name : and God foresees that from the first because He made it so : but the tree of the soul, before its blossom comes, cannot understand what blossom it is to bear and could not know what the word meant, which in representing its own unarrived completeness, named itself. Such a name cannot be given until the man is the name. God's name for a man must be the expression of His own idea of the man, that being whom He had in His thought when He began to make the child, and whom He kept in His thought through the long process of creation that went to realize the idea. To tell the name is to seal the success - to say, "In thee also I am well pleased."

I sobbed as I read this. He has whispered to me my name... and to be reminded that He knows that I will indeed live up to that name in the end is decadent encouragement that the race is worth running, the struggle worth the pain.

Read it again, and sit quiet. Do you know the name He calls you by?

"God's name for a man must be the expression of His own idea of the man, that being whom He had in His thought when He began to make the child, and whom He kept in His thought through the long process of creation that went to realize the idea. To tell the name is to seal the success - to say, "In thee also I am well pleased."