Changed My Name

Yours truly in the halls of the Castillo Chapultepec, Mexico City

“I gave you a name for a resumé”, my mother would say to me years after the ink on my birth certificate had dried. The double ‘L’s and a soft ‘J’ of her names were Spanish signs for an individual's economic death sentence in the United States. My mother had seen enough over her decades and fashioned for me a name for the page. 

That was perhaps a lesson I learned too late: even our names can make us afraid.

Unrelenting in my career, I put my “white name” to work. Steven Foster, generic good employee, for whatever that was worth. Within a decade I had made a ticker tape parade pronouncing my worth on a one page resumé. But at the end of the day, my soul was exhausted. I had been fueled by a fear of the scarce and not the sacred.

A decade deep into our careers, my friends and I had dinner in San Francisco. High ceilings, warm lighting, and to start, a sommelier greeting. That kind of place. We went around the room and talked about what it would take for us to retire. Someone would let out a two comma number. Another would raise a concern. Healthcare! Inflation! More Vacations! Then again and again we would raise our glasses and our numbers. By the end of the night, retirement was out of sight. We would work until we were dead, if we weren’t already yet.

On the way home, in the back seat down city streets, I wondered if there might be a way to leave this place with less of the world and more of myself. I dared to dream of leaving with one tenth of the number that began our evening. A global pandemic gave me the chance to make that wondering a reality.

Now having lived a few years beyond city life and career plights, I proclaimed going rural changed my world. Without work as a house of worship, I have come to enjoy my religion. Earlier this year I came across this sentence and it finally meant something different:

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge…

-Proverbs 1:7

Before I committed a career ending move, my fears were for human made things solved by my resumé: money, status, and a false sense of security. I can now see scarce things look their biggest when we are not in the wilderness. This is why we can’t spell scarcity without a city. If religion was made for reverence then we were made to fear an Extravagant Being. Now I have found for myself, reverence for the Abundant One is the beginning of knowing and from knowing there is a path to peace.

When my mother named me, she at least ensured I had a name from the Bible. Not a Warrior or a King, nor a man with chronology, but a servant with a story. The man in Acts Seven gave his testimony despite an injustice and stoning. His reverence was not ruddered by fears of this finite world. He spoke to attest to the Infinite God and though as finite beings we cannot experience the entirety of eternity, the experience we can see is that God is extravagant with you and me. My name now reminds me: what we fear is what we revere and our reverence reveals our destiny. 

Until next week,

-Steven

This essay was my fourth submission for Write of Passage Cohort 11. For my first, I revealed a bit in The Mark of a Mystic. Then I said what you can’t say on LinkedIn in Commit a Career Ending Move. For essay three, I finally wrote The Thing About Mary. To all my subscribers, my gratitude for each of you continues to grow. If you have yet to subscribe, use the link below.

Thank you to

Priya Nain

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Camilo Moreno-Salamanca

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Taylor Foreman

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Olivia

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Mohammad Khan

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Miche Priest

, Jeremy Côté and many more from Write of Passage Cohort 11

A special thank you to Ellen Fishbein.