The One-Hundredth-Day Name: A Story of Becoming

She was born a preemie and carried to the corner of the room. There, her father covered her and left her to die. Later, her mother named her. Not immediately though. Historically, a clerk would validate a birth certificate in South Korea only when an infant reached one hundred days old.*

Her mother scribbled with a blue ballpoint pen, a name, which meant “fiery” in Korean. Perhaps the clerk was farsighted or perhaps he was kind and recorded the baby’s name with a slight vowel change. The preemie had reached the One-Hundredth Day and today she’s fifty-five years old. She says she believes God guided the hand of the clerk that morning as sunlight seeped through the windows of the government building.

Last week, we ordered coffee at Panera, and I heard her say, “HJ” when the cashier asked for her name. “I won’t confuse you with my full name,” she told him, as he handed us glass mugs. We filled them with coffee then sat in a corner and began chatting. It’s been a decade since we conversed weekly at “Moms in Prayer” meetings. After we caught up, I asked HJ to tell me about her name.

In South Korea, the historical tradition of story perhaps looks different than how North Americans perceive or tell stories. Different too is how generations perceive stories. Consider the word, “story.” It can mean a blink of seven seconds on social media. But here, I’m referring to a deeper, long-form story. If we believe God heeds the details of our lives, we can also imagine our stories stretch back to the beginning of time, when God planned to redeem us, before creating the world (see Titus 1:2).

HJ’s story appeared to begin dimly. She told me, “Ugly Duckling” is how she imagined herself. While growing up, she felt her opinions and questions weren’t welcomed, so she stayed quiet and followed the rules.

People in her community enforced God’s authority, yet the Bible was read only by the town leaders. HJ remembers wondering why Jesus had no Korean name. The context of Jesus living in an actual place, among historical people, was never explained.

After college, HJ found a job as an environmental engineer, testing water samples for five years, sitting in a quiet laboratory, filling beakers, adding minerals. At the end of each test, HJ sanitized the beaker. She wiped spots from the glass, then held the beaker to the window to examine. That’s when light would channel into the room, casting shapes on the wall and on her arms and face. She remembers this routine. A thrill caught in her throat each time specks of light danced and cascaded onto the mundane. The hope of beauty pressed and called to her.

Next, she sensed light and beauty each time her college friend, Eunhee, whom she described as a “bright bluebird,” invited HJ to venture outside the laboratory. This friend worked for a magazine. She’d take HJ along as she met with people and explored the city.

HJ said her bluebird friend helped foster courage and confidence. And then, a difficult season arrived. HJ suddenly lost her job. She left South Korea just before a major financial crisis hit Asia in 1997. HJ traveled around Europe and completed English-language courses in the UK.

It was the first time she noticed people admiring her. “Your long black hair!” people exclaimed. “Your beautiful tanned skin,” others marveled. It was also the first time she noticed people describing God in a way new to her. She’ll never forget the first time she rode atop a double-decker bus in London and saw large lettering, “God is Love,” painted on a red brick building. Confused, she wondered anew.

How could people call her beautiful, when she’d always pictured herself ugly? And love? How did love fit into the image she’d imagined of a mighty God?

As HJ traveled Europe, she saw beautiful cathedrals; conversely, she met people who declared themselves free from God’s authority. This perplexed her as she began to recognize God as Creator of both beauty and of people whom he loved. This led her to explore God’s character on the pages of a Bible. She returned to South Korea a few years later and her family noticed a change in her.

A change, says HJ, that propelled her for the next thirty years. We sat in the corner sipping coffee, and I listened to stories from the years between her job as the water tester and now, where she lives in Iowa. Here, we call HJ by her Korean name, Hongjoo. She’s a wife, a mother, an active church member, and a nurse to the elderly in a retirement home.

Today, Hongjoo could tell you why Jesus is named Jesus (Matt 1:21), and how Scripture speaks of him from the beginning. She’s rooted herself in the Word of God and surrounded herself with a community that says God’s love was proved in Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection.

Hongjoo’s early days in South Korea caused her to sense God’s authority. When she felt the pull of light and beauty, she sought more. Hope channeled and flowed, turning her gaze toward the true Light, Jesus. In him, Hongjoo found her questions answered, her search for beauty filled.

"I know God meant for my name to reflect the love he has for me,” she said joyfully.

She speaks of God’s kindness shown in Jesus, also reflected in the clerk’s rewrite of the name her mom penned in blue ink. A name her mom meant to mean “fiery” in Korean, was rewritten by the clerk to mean, “A precious pearl.”

Hongjoo asked me why I wanted to tell the story of her name. Certainly, I imagined the correlation in the life of a Christian. A person restored to God by Christ’s atonement for sin becomes a new creation. Almost like being renamed. This is Hongjoo’s story of becoming, and in sitting with her, listening, and imagining, together we are saying, “Look what God has done.”

Whether we live in South Korea, the UK, or Midwest Iowa, humanity looks for the light against a dim backdrop. We inhabit a world where premature babies die and the mundane obscures our sense of hope. Then, when we observe beauty, we are stirred to long for more.

Honjoo’s story about her name reveals God’s nearness from the beginning. As Divine Author and Creator, God infuses light into the narrative. Scripture says of Jesus that he upholds the entire universe (Colossians 1:17) and he restores people throughout the world to himself, which restores us to one another.

Hongjoo says she hopes, like the laboratory beaker, to cast light in front of a reader, so they will look to Jesus and be filled.

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* “Baek il” is the Korean term for the One-Hundredth Day celebration of a child’s birth. Historically, babies’ names were recorded on this day in times past. Due to poor medical conditions, many babies did not survive infancy, especially those born far from hospitals or without money for doctors.

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(Photo on Unsplash by Insung Yoon)