In the poetry group I belong to, a prompt is given each month. This month's prompt was "Sing your name -- and see what comes." So far two poems have come, including this one:

        Sometimes I wish my parents had put something other than 'Janice' on my birth certificate. Maybe then, I'd have a song named for me like "Billie Jean" (Michael Jackson), or "Long Tall Sally" (Little Richard), or "Michelle" (Beatles), or . . . even "Waltzing Matilda!" Maybe then, I would have heard my name sung to me, at least by my mother. In fact, I can't recall my mother singing to me at all. One day at church, when I was about 3, standing on the pew next to where my mother was seated, I asked her why she wasn't singing like everyone else was. She said, "I can't sing." As young impressionable minds usually do, I took on that identity for my own, growing up never singing. Many years later in a theology class on liturgy, as the class sang a Taize song in canon, our blind professor walked by my desk and stopped abruptly as if he stepped on a slice of glass. He said to the off-key voice (mine) "You are atonal, aren't you?!"

       Only years later did I hear my name sung during a retreat. It was the silent voice of some angel or prophet or Spirit singing through the lyrics from Isaiah 43:1,4: "I have called you by name, Janice, you are mine. You are precious in my sight and I love you." These lyrics marked the turning point from years of spiritual tepidity and acedia to a renewed conversion to Christ. By coincidence, the theme song for the Isaiah Missions I subsequently preached for 10+ years was "Because I Love You" again Isaiah 43 put into lyrics.

       I never thought much about singing; I certainly never thought about singing my name. I leave the singing to my soul. Then sings my soul, my Savior God to thee; how great thou art, how great thou art! Then sings my soul, my Savior God to thee; how great thou art, how great thou art!