The Girl Who Found Her Name

In 2019, a fourteen-year-old girl named Daysha arrived at a foster home in Memphis, Tennessee, carrying everything she owned in a black garbage bag. She had been shuffled through seven placements in four years. When her new foster mother, Renee Carter, asked what she liked to be called, Daysha shrugged and said, "Whatever you want." She had stopped expecting anyone to learn her name.

But Renee did learn it. She wrote it on a chalkboard in the kitchen. She stitched it onto a pillowcase. She said it every morning at breakfast — not shouting it up the stairs, but walking to Daysha's room, sitting on the edge of the bed, and speaking it gently. Within a year, Renee began the adoption process. The day the judge finalized it, Daysha received a new birth certificate. Same girl, same face, same memories — but now she carried the Carter name. She belonged.

Daysha told a reporter afterward, "I didn't become a different person that day. But I started becoming who I was supposed to be."

That is the staggering claim of 1 John 3. The Father has not merely noticed us — He has lavished love on us and called us His children. And that is what we are, right now, even while the transformation is still unfolding. We do not yet see the finished picture. But the name is already ours, the belonging is already sealed, and the hope of what we are becoming reshapes how we live today.