The story we're looking at today has two interesting bookends. These bookends are two names. Now, names are funny things. Parents can spend an enormous amount of time deciding what to name a child. You want something you both like, something that sounds good with the last name, something meaningful, and preferably something the child won't spend the rest of his life having to explain or be teased about.

Every year the Social Security Administration releases a list of the most popular baby names in America. We don't have the official list for 2026 yet because, apparently, they insist on letting the year finish before they count all the babies. But the most recent list tells us that the most popular names for boys include Liam, Noah, Oliver, Theodore, and Henry. For girls, it's Olivia, Charlotte, Emma, Amelia, and Sophia.

Those are good names. Solid names. Names you can imagine being used on a playground without feeling that you've made a horrible mistake.

Of course, choosing a name at times is complicated because of a bad experience one of the parents had. “How about Frank?” “Absolutely not." “Why not?” “I knew a Frank in high school.”

Apparently Frank did something so terrible in 1985 that the name is now permanently banned from the family bloodline! My daughter teaches first grade and refuses to name a child anything with an X in it. Why? Because names carry associations, memories. They carry history and experience.

In the Bible, names oftentimes carry meaning. Abraham's name tells a story. Isaac's name - "Laughter," reminds us of joy at the arrival of a long-awaited son. Jacob wrestles with God and becomes Israel. Jesus is given a name that means “Jehovah saves,” because, as the angel told Joseph, “He will save his people from their sins.” So at times a name doesn't merely identify you; sometimes a name tells a story, and again, the story we're looking at today is bookended by two names. One of them belongs to a baby. The other one belongs to a rock.

Now, neither one made the Social Security Administration's top ten. The baby is named Ichabod. The rock is named Ebenezer. Two very literary names, right? Unusual names for our time, for sure. But those two names tell us the whole story we're going to look at today.