Before You Had a Name

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. — Genesis 1:27

Into the Word

I have spent a lot of my life asking the wrong question. I did not know it was the wrong one until I stopped long enough to notice nothing was being answered.

We ask what we should do with our lives. We ask how we can be successful, happy, secure. We build entire systems around these questions: career plans, self-help frameworks, therapy, philosophy. Still, something remains unanswered, and the problem is not effort. We have been asking the creature instead of the Creator.

The better question is “Why did God make me?”

It sounds close to “What should I do with my life?” But “What should I do?” starts with us, and “Why did God make me?” starts with Him. Everything that follows depends on which one we begin with.

The Clock That Stopped

Think about clocks: a sundial in an ancient courtyard, a wristwatch on a traveler’s wrist, a cuckoo clock marking each passing hour, the digital display on a modern phone. They could hardly look more different.

And yet they share one purpose: to tell the time. That single function is what makes a clock a clock. The design, the material, and the mechanism all come second. A wristwatch without its band is inconvenient, but still a watch. A cuckoo clock that loses its song is quieter, but still a clock. But a clock that cannot tell the time is a dead clock, however beautiful or old it may be. Without its purpose, it is only an object pretending to be what it once was.

A clock’s worth comes from the purpose its maker gave it, and so does ours. Our value is not something we manufacture. It was given to us, inscribed into us, before we were born.

We all have a purpose. What matters is whether we have found the One who gave it.

Made in His Image

Genesis 1 moves with a steady rhythm. Again and again, God creates and steps back to look, and the verdict is the same: it was good. Light, good. Land and sea, good. Vegetation, good. Sun and moon, good. Creatures of sea and sky and earth, good.

Then something changes.

On the sixth day, after God creates humanity, He looks at everything He has made, and the verdict becomes “very good” (Gen. 1:31).

What is new on that day has nothing to do with what we can accomplish or produce or build. We are image-bearers. The text does not say God created us to be useful. God created man in his own image (Gen. 1:27). We were made to bear His image, what the church has long called the imago Dei, the image of God given to a creature He had formed from the dust (Gen. 2:7).

The way He made us tells us something about how much we matter to Him. You formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb (Ps. 139:13). These are not words for something made from a distance. Forming and knitting are the language of intention and intimacy. Before we had a name, before we drew our first breath, He was already at work, shaping something He intended to love.

Every human being carries this, not only the admirable or the spiritually mature, but the broken, the wandering, and the ones who have forgotten God entirely. Each still bears the imprint of the One who made them. A Roman coin, stained and worn, was still Caesar’s coin because it still bore his image. The image does not depend on the condition of what carries it.

This is the foundation of human dignity. It rests not on achievement, virtue, or the opinion of others, but on the image of God, inscribed before we did anything to deserve it or destroy it.

Made by Love, for Love

Protagoras said “man is the measure of all things.” He was right to ask what a human being is, but he looked for the answer in us.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet calls us “the quintessence of dust.” He was closer than he knew. We are dust, but dust that carries the image of God.

We were made by Love, in the image of Love, for love.

That is how we are built. When we live inside that purpose, something in us settles, the way a branch thrives on the vine. When we live outside it, we grow restless, often without knowing why.

Augustine, looking back on years of restless searching, discovered that God had never been far away. He wrote, “You were more inward to me than my most inward part” (Confessions 3.6.11). The restlessness he had felt for years had been pulling him home.

Until we find our way back to the One who made us, we will keep searching.

The clock fulfills its purpose when it tells the time. We fulfill ours when we live in the love of the One whose image we carry, and that is where coming home begins.

Before We Move On

We spend so much of our lives asking what we should do. The deeper question is why we were made, and only its answer can tell us who we are.

The answer has been there from the beginning. Before we had a name, before we took our first breath, we were already known, already loved, already made in the image of the One who is love itself.

We do not have to earn that, and we cannot lose it entirely. But we can forget it, and most of us, in the noise and pressure of living, do.

The clock that stops telling time has not lost its maker. It has only stopped doing what it was made to do. So have we, and the way back is not as far as we think.

The clock did not give itself a purpose. Neither did you. But the One who gave you yours is closer to you than you are to yourself. He always has been.

A Prayer

Lord, I have asked You what to do far more often than I have asked why You made me.

I have looked for meaning in what I accomplish, in how others see me, in what I can accumulate or achieve, and come up empty, again and again, because I was searching in the wrong direction.

Like a clock that forgot what it was made for, I kept ticking and moving, but I was no longer telling the time.

Forgive me for the busyness that kept me from the question that matters most. For the noise I have filled my life with, so I would not have to face the restlessness long enough to follow it home.

Remind me today that I carry Your image. Not because I earned it or maintained it well, but because You inscribed it in me before I knew Your name. Let that truth reach past my thoughts, past my performance, past the version of myself I present to the world, and settle into the place in me that is still restless, still searching, still not quite convinced that I am enough.

I am not enough on my own. But I am Yours.

You have been more inward to me than my most inward part, all along. I was never as far from You as I felt.

I carry Your image, and that is more than enough.

In the name of Jesus, who is the perfect image of the God whose image I bear. Amen.

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Original source: Before You Had a Name — Bible Portal Insights

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