On the last evening of booty camp, all of the league skaters circled up on the center of the rink alongside all of the fresh meat, the new recruits. Miss Brehave went around our circle, ensuring that every new skater had the contact information of her mentor, confirming that we all knew the league requirements and practice schedule, and making sure that we had assigned ourselves brand new roller derby names.

No one should ever underestimate the importance of a new name. Language swings like a sledge hammer, building things or destroying them every single time it lands. Of all of the tools that God might have employed to invent our earth, He selected the word, speaking light and land and life into existence by the extraordinary invocation of the phrase, “Let there be…” I’m convinced that part of our image-bearing divine nature includes the weighty responsibility and peerless power of speaking things into existence with our words. Naming things doesn’t merely take note of them; it enacts them, inflects them with the particular intonation of my own, inimitable voice. Consider John’s opening exhortation: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:1-3). The Word is the creating God and the mode of creation. The Word is Christ Himself.

One school of linguistic philosophy holds that ideas can’t even exist apart from the language that describes them. In other words, if we don’t have a word for a thing then, to our own minds, that thing doesn’t yet exist. Naming makes things real, makes them possible. The evidence for this argument comes from a hypothesis developed in the first half of the twentieth century when anthropologists studying a remote tribe in South America noted that only one word described the colors that English speakers distinguish as blue and green. They posited that, because this tribe lacked the language to render these colors discreet, the people of that area could only actually see shades of a single color. If they looked across a grassy field on a cloudless morning, they would see two shades of one color rather than swaths of green and blue. Recently, researchers have uncovered lots of intercultural evidence to support the argument that language delimits understanding.

I used to be extremely skeptical of the idea that our vision is limited by our vocabularies until I visited the Indianapolis Museum of Art with an artist. A decade or so ago, my friend and I perused the contemporary top floor together, when we came upon a giant canvas painted entirely in red. Dismissively, I remarked that a solid red canvas seemed awfully esoteric as a museum piece. My friend, the artist, began to point out shades of alizarin, crimson, magenta, and vermillion, colors that my eyes simply didn’t discern. Because she could name them, she could see them. Yesterday, I had a similar experience on a stroll around my lawn with an edible plant expert. He was lecturing to a group of my homeschooling friends about the ease of yard foraging, pointing out the medicinal and therapeutic qualities of plantain, wild carrot, yarrow, and wood sorrel, plants that, for me, elided under the category “lawn.” Before yesterday, I never saw them, and I certainly never tasted them. Today, my lawn looks like a mosaic smorgasbord, a buffet that I scavenged from to dress last night’s hamburger with newly-namable greens! I see the colors because I can name them.

If I needed more evidence for the way words can create and destroy, I wouldn’t need to look any farther than my family. My words transform the postures of the people that I love, for better or for worse. I’ve witness the growing and shrinking all around me as people become the words that I assign them, as I unconsciously exercise the divine, image-of-my-Creator responsibility to speak life (or death) into existence as every word becomes a predicate to “Let there be…..”

It’s no small event, then, when we take on a brand new name, a whole new word for ourselves. More than an alter-ego, our new names christen very real possibilities into existence. It’s no small event to become a roller derby girl.

The practice of inaugurating a derby name takes different forms in different leagues. The Arch Rival Roller Girls of St. Louis, I’m told, hold a naming ceremony for newly rostered league members, derby monikers assigned rather than assumed. Our Diesel Dollz allow new skaters to adopt derby names of their own choosing, and that as quickly as possible. On that cold January night, a dozen or so of us committed to new identities; Katie became “Stormageddon;” Courney became “Tanker Bell,” and I became, once and for all, “Meta Phorocious.”

Because I am a student of words, I took the practice of renaming myself very seriously, inviting family and friends to offer name ideas in an open discussion. My very creative family, riffing on my recent English degree, came up with a long list of fabulous possiblilities, from “The Ph.D-stroyer,”and “VirSpinnia Woolf,” to “Shakesmeare” and “Indie Spin-Dent Claws.” It’s funny, now, to think that my derby name could have gone so many different directions, like imagining the names I might have given my girls if they had been boys or vice versa. It’s funny because “Meta Phorocious” (an option suggested by my best friend’s husband) is entirely, indelibly my derby name, now, and the names that went by the wayside sound like strangers. Because we only answer to our derby names when we are at practice or on the track, I don’t even know the legal names of many of my teammates. Invariably, when someone finds out that I skate derby, he’ll bring up other members of our league as common relationship ground. It never works. I only know my derby girls by their derby names. And strangely, when I dress out for derby, even my kids call me Meta.

One morning, about a month into my roller derby initiation, the power of my new name hit home with fresh force. As a kind of homeschool gym class, I often took my kids to a fitness facility, where I also joined in strength and flexibility workouts. One of the leaders that day was encouraging me to double and triple jump a rope. Instinctively, I dismissed her. But before I could complete the sentence, “I could never do that,” this thought snapped into my head: “I’ll be Meta Phorocious can.” And she did. I did. I, Meta Phorocious, jumped that rope.

I wonder what would happen if membership in a church body, the named, operative sentinel of God’s coming Kingdom, involved taking on a brand new name. After all, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” (2 Cor 5:17).   If we have “put on the new self,” couldn’t we call her by a new name? (Ephesians 4: 24). What would happen if we, born again, adopted as sons and daughters of God through grace, took on new names to correspond with our identities. Would we face temptation with the strength of an identity made concrete by the Word?

“Will you join in the buzz that comes from belonging? Will you join us in gossip today, Amy?” Amy might, but the new man, my spiritual Meta Phorcious, she has the strength to jump that rope and walk away.

“Will you love the mean, the filthy, the overlooked?” Amy might turn her back, but Meta Phorocious knows the full power of Grace, the power of Word that is light, that darkness cannot overcome. Meta Phorocious can.

“Will you let the Father’s approval be enough? Will you stop scrambling for the validation of your own mute idols?” I know Amy! She cannot survive an hour without the promise of affirmation. But Meta Phorocious can. The new creation knows her worth. She is a daughter of the One True King.

As my body grew derby strong and I found my skate-legs as Meta Phorocious, my carriage and gait off the track began to reflect a quiet confidence that I had never known before. I wonder if a new name would help us to remember that our Daddy owns this company, that all the people and places of this world are under my Father’s care, and I have royal blood, the blood of the King of Kings, in my very veins. I wonder if we would walk more purposefully, speak more gently, love more recklessly if we really believed that we had a new name, a new identity, because of the Word made flesh.