She Has a Name
The word for Tuesday, August 25, 2026 is She Has a Name.
The anchor verses are John 20:16 and Isaiah 49:16.
Yesterday the city of New York announced that a woman killed at the World Trade Center on September the eleventh, two thousand one, has been identified.
Twenty five years.
For twenty five years there were remains in a laboratory that belonged to somebody, and nobody could say who. They knew a person was there. They could not say which person.
The method that finally worked is called forensic investigative genetic genealogy. It puts DNA testing together with family tree research, the ordinary kind of family tree research people do about their great grandparents. It has been used on cold cases. This is the first time it has ever identified a victim of that day.
The chief medical examiner for the city, a doctor named Jason Graham, called it a breakthrough and said something about the whole effort that is worth having. The World Trade Center is the most complex forensic identification effort in the history of this country.
A detective who works on it said why it took so long, in about five words. The technology really was not there.
She is the one thousand six hundred fifty fourth person to be identified.
Two thousand seven hundred fifty three people died there. Nearly eleven hundred of them still have no name attached to what was recovered. That is around forty percent, and it has been twenty five years, and I am not going to tie a bow on that.
Her family asked that her name not be made public.
So we do not know it. We are told that a woman was found, and that somebody now knows exactly who she is, and that the people who love her have an answer, and the rest of us are not given the word.
Which is right. The name was never ours.
It exists. It was lost for twenty five years and it was not lost to everybody, and now it has been handed to the people it belongs to, and they are keeping it.
Now go to a garden outside Jerusalem, very early, while it is still dark.
A woman named Mary Magdalene is standing outside a tomb crying. The stone is moved. The body is gone. As far as she knows, somebody has taken him, and the last thing she was going to be able to do for him has been taken too.
She turns around and there is a man standing there, and John says plainly that she did not know it was Jesus.
He asks her why she is weeping and who she is looking for.
She takes him for the gardener. And what she says is one of the most human sentences in the Bible. Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.
She is going to carry a grown man's body by herself. She has not worked out how. She is just going to do it.
Then HE says one word.
Mary.
That is the whole thing. No argument. No proof. No explanation of what had happened between Friday and that morning. HE says her name and she turns and she knows.
She had been looking straight at HIM and could not see it. What broke it open was hearing her own name said by somebody who knew it.
And what HE chose to say is the thing. HE could have said I am risen. HE could have said do not be afraid, which is what angels say. HE could have explained the last three days.
HE said the name HE had been using for her the whole time HE knew her.
There is a line in Isaiah that GOD speaks to people who were certain HE had forgotten them.
Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.
Graven. Cut in. The word is about carving, the way a name goes into stone.
And four verses after Mary hears her name, the risen Christ walks into a locked room and shows the disciples HIS hands.
The marks were still in them.
You may believe that your situation has slipped past GOD's attention. That you have gone unaccounted for. That whatever file you were in got closed, or lost, or was never opened.
There are people in New York who worked for twenty five years on remains that could not be named, using methods that did not exist when they started, because the person was worth the wait.
GOD is not working from an incomplete list. HE has never had to develop a method. HE has never had to wait for the technology. There is no set of remains anywhere on this earth, in any condition, that GOD cannot name.
And HE is not going to publish your name to satisfy anybody watching.
HE knows it. That has always been enough.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one who believes you have been misplaced.
- 🙏 To the one still waiting after decades for something nobody can promise.
- 🙏 To the one looking straight at the answer and not recognizing it.
- 🙏 To the one whose name almost nobody says anymore.
Grace and Peace.