etcetera:

by Jenifer Kelly

Recently, my youngest son and I have been reading a story that has led to some beautiful discussions about being beloved sons and daughters of God. It has left me longing to settle more deeply into my God-given identity and to believe more fully that the name he calls me is, in fact, my true name, the name that holds for me everything that matters in this life and the next. It has left me reflecting on what would change for me and us as a church if we really heard and believed wholeheartedly that we are christened with belonging, infinite worth, and absolute belovedness.

Mio, My Son, by Astrid Lindgren is a story of a nine-year-old boy called Andy, orphaned at birth and raised by a very unloving couple he called Aunt and Uncle. Andy shares that the couple told him they didn’t even like boys and that they only took him from the orphanage because there
weren’t any girls. They scorned him for playing and laughing too loudly and chastised him for being too muddy after playing outside. When his uncle talked to him at all, it was to tell him to go away, as he “couldn’t stand the sight of him.” In their harmful words and actions, Andy learned his name to be “the one who is too much” and “the one who is not enough.” He carried the curse and burden of this naming deep in his soul. With no one to see, name, and bless his dignity or to delight in him, Andy was completely disconnected from his true identity,floating in a sea of shame and loneliness.

Andy’s Aunt Hulda told him that his mother had died in childbirth and that his father was actually a bum. Some days he would lie awake at night crying for his father. Despite Aunt Hulda’s words, he knew in his heart of hearts that his father wasn’t a bum and longed to be with him.

As it turns out, all the days and years Andy had been aching for wholeness and love, his father, a noble king of another land, was also aching for him. His father, the King, was tirelessly searching for him and seeking to bring him home to his kingdom. Finally, when Andy was nine
years old, a messenger sent by the King found him and took him to his father’s castle in Farawayland.

When Andy arrives at the castle, he says, “I recognized him as soon as I saw him. I knew he was my father. He opened his arms and I ran right into them. He held me close for a long time. We didn’t say anything to each other. I just held my arms around his neck as tightly as I could.”

He begins to heal and flourish with his father, whom he calls “My Father, the King.” The title depicts his realization of his own royal sonship. His father, the King, doesn’t rule him from afar in an untouchable throne room. Instead, he stays close by him, keeping him within his loving
reach. He approaches him with play and delight, building paper airplanes with him and marking the kitchen door each month to see how much he has grown.

And in this connection and intimacy, Andy hears what his heart had most hoped for all along. His father calls him by his true name, his REAL name.

“Mio my son,” he says, “and it sounds so warm and comforting. It turns out that my real name isn’t Andy at all.”

“I searched nine long years for you,” says my father the King. “I used to lie awake at night saying to myself, ‘Mio my son.’ So I’d know your name well.”

Mio then goes on to narrate, (as if talking to his aunt and uncle), “That shows you. Calling me Andy was a mistake. Like everything else when I lived on North Street. Now it’s all been set right. I love my father the King, and he loves me.”

“My Father the King” and “Mio my son” answer each other. Mio is who he is because of whose he is. Mio is now anchored in belovedness and in worth as a son of the King. His identity as son is inseparable from the identity of the one who names him. In this truth, shame cannot stand.
Mio is no longer the boy who is too much or not enough. And from this place of connection and healing, Mio grows in confidence and courage….so much so that he ends up following a call to battle and defeat the cruel abductor of the children from Farawayland.

At one time or another in life, we have been named in ways that have shattered shalom, tasting shame that has left us disconnected from God, others, and ourselves. We have developed ways of relating out of our pain that have reinforced our false names and shame stories and brought
us further harm and heartache. But God, in his great mercy and beautiful, pursuing love, has called us home to himself. He has removed our shame in Christ and has shown us our true identity of belonging, belovedness, and infinite worth.

Are there parts of you that have been wrongly named by shame and that are longing to come home to God? Where do you still need to hear your father, the King call you his beloved? What might be healed in us—individually and collectively—if in our deepest parts we truly knew the name by which God knows and calls us? What confidence and courage would we have to then
live out our kingdom callings?

“I have called you by name, you are mine.”
—Isaiah 43:1