I’m reading a novel by the Indian author Arundhati Roy, and I have to admit something: I’m struggling. It’s not so much the story itself but the names of people and places.
I can’t pronounce names or places correctly or retain them, no matter how many times I read them. They are long and unfamiliar, and I can’t grasp images in my mind. I can’t keep track of who they are and why they matter, or where they’re from and why that matters. I encounter a name, mangle the pronunciation, read on, and a few pages later find myself thinking, Wait…who was that again? And why is that place important? And when I lose the names and places, inevitably I lose the storyline.
Part of the problem is that I have no frame of reference. The names aren’t familiar to me. The geography isn’t familiar. The cultural connections and histories behind them aren’t part of the world I grew up knowing.
And sometimes I have the same experience when I read the Bible. Take those long genealogies. “Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob…” and on it goes, generation after generation, of people and places, some harder to pronounce than others.
We tend to skim those passages. We struggle to read the names, but we don’t necessarily know who they were or why that particular place matters.
But for the people who first heard these stories, those names and places weren’t obscure. They were their story.
Those genealogies were family history. They told people where they came from. They connected them to generations that had gone before. The names carried memories. The places carried meaning. A name wasn’t simply a name—it could tell you something about who you were and where you belonged.
We read those same passages more than two thousand years later, thousands of miles away, and wonder if any of it matters. It does. See, something astonishing happens when Jesus enters the picture.
We’ve been given a place in the story. Written in. Made a part of the family.
Paul writes that through faith in Christ, we are adopted as God’s sons and daughters. We who were once strangers have been welcomed. We who were outside have been brought near. We who have perhaps read the biblical story and thought, This isn’t my family. These aren’t my places. This isn’t my history, discover that God has, through Christ, made it ours.
That’s what adoption does. An adopted child doesn’t have to share the same DNA or the same last name from birth to belong to a family. They don’t come in knowing the stories that make up the family’s past … but over time, they learn those stories and find themselves in them.
That’s what grace does for us.
We open the Bible and encounter all these strange, unfamiliar, and often messed-up people. But their God is our God. Their humanity is our humanity. Their doubts and fears are our doubts and fears. Their search for meaning in life is our search.
And we all find fulfillment in Christ. We share together in God’s great story of redemption, in which we all have a place.
Those biblical names and places are still difficult at times. But I can learn them, and I should. They matter. But I don’t have to understand everything before I belong. I don’t have to know every name before I am known. I don’t have to understand every place before I am welcomed.
I don’t have to comprehend the whole story before I can recognize that I’m in it. And so are you.
The Bible isn’t just an ancient story of people long dead and places long gone. It’s the unfolding story of God’s faithfulness—a story that reaches all the way to us. We’ve been adopted. We’ve been welcomed. We’ve been written into the story.
And someday, perhaps, someone will look back at our names and wonder who we were. They may not know how to pronounce our names. They may not recognize the places we called home. They may not understand all the circumstances in which we lived.
But my prayer is that they will see something in our lives that points them toward the same story: God is faithful. Christ welcomes strangers home. Grace makes us family. And that’s a story worth remembering.
Prayer: God of all creation, thank you for the gift of belonging. When Scripture feels distant and unfamiliar, remind me that its story has become my story through Jesus Christ. Thank you for adopting me and welcoming me into your family. Help me live today as one who knows that I belong, and let my life become part of the story of your faithfulness for those who come after me. Amen.
