JustDad.Blog

If you had to change your name, what would your new name be?

So this is an interesting question for me because I’ve already had to contemplate it.

Explanation: Im adopted and my adopted parents got a pretty messy divorce.

Im the season before healing had really started to take root I had at least people ask me if I had considered changing my name.

I was actually born with a different last name… I was a ward of the state and bore my birth mother Faith’s last name.

When I was adopted I changed my last name to what it is now.

So because people asked, entirely unprompted by me, I turned my attention to the Lord to see what he thought about the notion.

In that vein, I asked a friend of mine who heard from God on a regular basis to pray about it.

I was distant from my adopted dad at the time and if I was going to legally change my name I didn’t want to create even more distance between us.

I asked my friend if she thought it would be ok to change my last name from this to that (my biological birth name)

She came back with a whole new name…which is actually where the name Sam comes from.

I went through a long journey with this… I wasn’t sure if it was from God or not…

I have since decided that God was in fact prompting me to ask Him… so that He could give me a new name. In discovering my new name and it’s meaning… I was able to connect with my legal name and it’s meaning..

I decided not to legally change my name, in part because I didn’t have the financial resources to do so, and in part because that wasn’t what the new name was all about.

So therefore my name is both Sam AND Jonathan. I don’t prefer one over the other. My wife calls me Sam… my brothers and sisters call me Jonathan.

Both speak to my identity as a child of God and to my calling in the Lord.