Name Change Please

Since I can remember, I've been called by a name that's not my name. For whatever reason I'm not sure, I have been called by the name Jackie. Most likely it was my decision, because I felt like my real name was so long and not very popular. Growing up I was a HUGE tomboy. Anyone who knew me can attest to this. So to me, Jackie felt more identifiable with who I was at the time than my real, much longer, proper sounding name, Jacqueline. As I got older and the longer I began to hold on to this name, my real name actually began to fade away. No one knew me as Jacqueline any longer, and neither did I. Around 6th grade, as I mentioned in my previous blog 'Religion Is Not Working', I began to fall away from the church and from God. I had joined a competitive cheerleading team with my friends, and began to gain popularity in school. Everyone in school knew me as Jackie, and by the time freshman year of high school came around, my name had been associated with many things. None of which were any good. When people heard my name they thought of the 'hot girl from Loomis Elementary'. I literally heard those words spoken about me at my 8th grade graduation. And to be truthful, I enjoyed the attention and the labels that were attached to my name. Even long after I had left that high school in my first attempt at returning to church, trying to live a more godly life style, I would still occasionally run into people I knew from school and those labels would still be attached to the name I had created for myself. I had a person who had known me yell out the window of their car a vulgar name that people used to call me and had associated my name with when I was in high school. It felt like no matter how much distance and how much time had past, I couldn't escape from those things I had been and had done which became associated with my name.  From the time that I left school, roughly around the beginning of 2009, till the time that I met my boyfriend Isaac (now husband) in 2011, I would live with that name. In 2011 I had attempted yet again, to return to church. You know all the questions you ask when you first start dating someone, you want to find out everything about them; especially the stuff that no one else knows. Well that is what happened with Isaac. So of course he's asking questions, I'm asking questions, and somewhere in the midst of all of these questions I reveal my real name to him. And I clearly remember him asking why I like to be called Jackie, when my real name was much prettier. I did not believe him, I thought Jacqueline sounded like an old woman. But he became the first person, (besides my mother when she was angry at me lol) to call me by my real name. Jacqueline. To be honest I hated it at first. I had been known by another name my whole life and now here is this person calling me something else. He didn't want to know the Jackie I was before, he wanted to know this person I was now. He didn't associate my name with all of those terrible things I had been. He saw me as a new person, the person God wanted me to be. Since he learned my real name, I don't think he ever once called me by Jackie. We would not be married for another 3-4 years, but he was already treating me with the love Christ asks husbands to treat their wives with in Ephesians. The same love he treats the church with. He was showing me that I didn't have to live with the mistakes of my past, and he wasn't going to think of me that way either. From then on I began to become more comfortable with my new name, and I actually began to enjoy being called Jacqueline. My new name was associated with the new person I had become. When we repent of our sins, go down in the water of baptism, and are filled the Spirit, we take on a new name. A name with no previous attachments to the things of our past. And that name is Jesus Christ. Jesus no longer calls us by our worldly names, we take on a new name, we become a new creature. Old things are passed away, all things are made new. Sometimes the enemy likes to taunt us with the things of our past, but that's when we have to stand up and remind him that we are no longer who he accuses us of being, we are children of the one true God! Thank you Jesus for my name change. I will never be the same. P.S. people still call me Jackie, it does not bother me anymore because I am confident in who I am now as a child of God. I want to use my past to minister to those in my present. When we heal from the wounds of our past, God can turn those things that used to hurt us into something beautiful to help others.