It was the year 2012. One of those many years that was expected to be the end times.
In that time I was going through a time that I will call a marked period of deep spiritual renewal and personal growth.
Through various periods of deep effective spritual experiences I had the thought to change my name.
I did this based off of the biblical tradition of God changing someones name after a time of important personal change.
The first thing I did was I started personally relating towards using my Saints name. Who is my patron saint you might ask?
My patron saint is Adam… the one who screwed everything up. He was also the first to return to God and offer sacrifice in covenant. He also for a good while walked around naked in a Garden and ate a bunch of delicious veggies and fruits while talking to animals. Might sound like a trip to Vegas for many but however you slice it “win win”.
I always loved the primitivity inherent in imagining existing like Adam.
The closeness to the source..the awareness of my dustness. I am not a self made man. I am a ‘God made’ man.
That was the humility I wanted to embody in my life. Would to God I could have more of that.
As time went by more name change thoughts came to the fore. I felt like more than ever I was learning what it meant to be a man ‘as me’. I was returning and I was ‘becoming’. I was even what I was becoming.
In the Bible Jacob was “the supplanter” one who took anothers place; if but by ‘sacred trickery’ by trickery no less. However in time Jacob ‘Yakov’ would be supplanted by an even higher destiny..to be Israel “He who contendeth with God and wins.”
James is a transliteration of Yakov in English. As James somewhere I felt a deep sense that in many ways I had a leprechauns luck but always at a hip jarring price. I may march into heaven but always with limping gate about me. I still to this day feel like Israel D. Adam Broxson, one who has struggled manfully with God and won the prize of God, an apostle who conserves energy by not wasting it, knowing I am but mankind made of the red clay; for I am the one who dwells by the rivers of running ‘living’ water who bears his fruit in due season as I dwell by the brook.
I may have not changed my name at the Marshall North Carolina Courthouse like I almost tried to do many years ago but that name still lives within me like an identity. Who knows maybe it will become my penname so it keeps a more religious than civil signifigance? All I know it that a rose by any other name is not always just as sweet. Sometimes who we are inside evolves and how it reflects outside does as well. I am a new man, a grown seed changing. I am happy to be..even “who I am becoming.”