They Spelled It Wrong For Eleven Years

It is one letter. That is what makes it so hard to talk about without sounding ridiculous.

Her name has an h in it that most people do not expect, and for eleven years, in that organization, it has been spelled without the h. On the badge. On the certificates, all four of them. On the list on the wall. In the email address, which was set up wrong on her first week and which she uses every day of her life.

She corrected it three times in the first four years. Politely, in a light voice, once by email and twice in person, and each time the person was apologetic and each time it did not change, because a thing like that lives in about nine places and correcting it properly is somebody's afternoon.

In the fourth year she stopped correcting it.

She is thirty seven and she has never told anybody that she noticed, and she has certainly never told anybody that she stopped.

Here is what she has been sitting with since a Thursday in May, when a new starter apologized for getting it wrong on her second day and fixed it immediately and completely without being asked.

She said thank you, and she meant it, and she went and sat in her car for eleven minutes.

Because the new starter had made it obvious what the eleven years had been. Not malice. Not even carelessness, exactly. It had been the perfectly ordinary friction of a place where nobody had ever thought her name was worth an afternoon, and where she had eventually agreed with them.

That is the part. She agreed with them. In the fourth year she made a decision, and the decision was that this was not worth making a fuss about, and she called it grace at the time, and she has been wondering since May whether it was grace or something else with better manners.

You know the letter. Yours may be a nickname you never liked or a role you never chose. But you know what it is to let something about yourself stand slightly wrong because correcting it costs more than it is worth, and to have done that for so long that you cannot remember whether it was generosity or surrender.

He did not get it slightly wrong

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes an article about administrative systems it will be far too small.

The pit is not the h. It is the moment in the fourth year, and the eleven minutes in the car in May, and the question underneath both of them, which is whether a woman is worth the trouble of being got right.

That is not a question about spelling. It never was. And it does not stay inside an organization; a question like that goes everywhere, quietly, and starts describing what a person expects from every relationship they are in, including the one they cannot examine easily because there is no badge to look at.

Here is the verse.

Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.Isaiah 49:16

Now look at what that costs.

Graven is the mason's word: cut into stone. It is not typed. It is not printed on a badge from a system somebody set up in a hurry in a first week. Cutting a name is deliberate, and it is slow, and it takes the whole attention of the person doing it, and nobody has ever cut a name into anything by accident or in passing.

You are cut and not typed, and you have your own name on His hands with nothing missing out of it. Isaiah 49:16 says graven upon the palms of my hands, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a slow and deliberate attention like that into a woman who has been an approximation on paper for eleven years.

And He did not get it slightly wrong.

That is not a decorative point. God, who made her, cut into His own hands the name of a person He knows entirely, and there is no version of that in which the h is missing, because there is no version of that in which He was going quickly.

And the verse before it takes the measure of the whole thing.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.Isaiah 49:15

I will be careful with that clause, because there is a lazy reading and this article is not taking it. God is not accusing anybody's mother and He is not inviting you to go looking. He takes the strongest bond in the world He made, says even it is capable of failing, and sets Himself past it.

Here the line goes in the same paragraph, because on this ground the picture never travels without it. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. Isaiah 49:15 is a comparison God chose to say something about His own remembering. It does not make God a mother, He is never addressed by any title Scripture does not give Him, and the picture stays exactly the shape He gave it. Scripture reaches for a father's language for Him constantly and a mother's deliberately, and this is one of the motherly ones, and it is His own.

Take that in the car, and know it is not my consolation, it is what is written. Your name is cut, correctly, into the hands of God, and He gave it His whole attention. Isaiah 49:16 is a deliberate act and not an entry in a system, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that below the head into a woman who agreed, in her fourth year, that she was not worth an afternoon.