Dear Friend,
I’m at my desk with five browser tabs open and a stack of printouts I’ve marked up in three different colors of pen, the fruit of months chasing a single name back through fourteen centuries. The name is Niall Noígiallach—Niall of the Nine Hostages—a High King of Ireland around the turn of the fifth century, and the paper trail in front of me finally confirms what I’d suspected for months: he’s mine. My bloodline runs back to him, and through him to a run of Celtic and other royalty I never once imagined belonged to my family story.
I sat back in my chair and felt something I wasn’t expecting. Not just interest. Pride. A quiet little upgrade in how I thought of myself, as if the DNA of dead kings had somehow raised my own standing in the room.
Nothing about me had actually changed in that moment. I was the same man sitting in the same chair with the same bills on the same desk. The only thing that changed was my awareness. But awareness, it turns out, can be a dangerous thing to hand a proud heart, because the moment I realized who I supposedly descended from, some small part of me started quietly acting like it. That royal blood was never going to replace what actually defines me. It couldn’t. It only distracted me from it for a while, the way a shiny but lesser prize can make you forget, for a moment, which prize you already hold.
The discovery prompted me to write a historical novel set in Niall’s world (I’m about half-way through the manuscript as of this writing), and I’m genuinely grateful to have learned the history and found the enrichment of such writing. Researching Niall gave me a gift I didn’t ask for and don’t take lightly. But gratitude for a gift is one thing. Building an identity on it is another, and I caught myself drifting from the first toward the second before I’d even noticed the pull.
I doubt I’m the only one. Maybe your version of Niall isn’t a king fourteen centuries back. Maybe it’s the promotion, the framed diploma, the name people recognize when you mention where you work, the family reputation you’ve spent years protecting. Fill in your own blanks. The world hands out identities constantly—career, politics, achievements, the “right side” of some argument—and every one of them will hold you up for exactly as long as you can keep producing it, and not one day longer.
John the apostle had a different answer, and he gave it to himself long before he gave it to anyone else. Throughout his own gospel, he never once refers to himself by name. Instead, seven separate times, he calls himself “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” Not out of arrogance, but out of a settled identity. I believe he’d found the one label sturdy enough to build a life on, and he stopped reaching for any other one.
“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (1 John 3:1). Read that sentence slowly. It isn’t “children of a king,” which would already be more than most of us could claim. It’s children of God Himself, and John seems almost startled by his own words as he writes them—“see what kind of love”—as though he still can’t quite get over it.
That love wasn’t sentimental, either. John is careful to say how it was proven: “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him... he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:9-10). A king’s blood in your family tree might make for a good story at a dinner party, but make no mistake—it has never once paid for anyone’s sins. The identity John kept returning to cost God His own Son, which is a very different kind of pedigree than the one I was quietly admiring at my desk.
Here’s what I keep having to relearn, and I suspect I’ll be relearning it for the rest of my earthly life: a High King ancestor is something I have, an interesting fact sitting quietly in my family tree whether it ever earns a footnote anywhere but in my book. Being God’s beloved is something I’ve been given, at the cost of blood shed on a cross rather than won on some ancient battlefield. Niall’s blood made kings. Christ’s blood makes children of God. Between the two, I know which one is actually the most royal, and it isn’t the one I spent months digging through genealogical records to confirm.
I’m going to finish writing this book. I still catch myself smiling a little every time the research turns up another thread connecting me to that world. I don’t think that pleasure is wrong, and I don’t think curiosity about where your family came from is some kind of spiritual failure to be stamped out. I only know I need the family tree hanging in one place and the reminder of who I actually am hanging somewhere closer, so I know which one to reach for first when a hard day makes me ask the real question underneath all of this: who am I?
Grace & Peace,
Pastor Neal Letteney <><
The Pastor’s Hearth
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Before you leave the fire, I invite you to sit with these three questions:
What label, achievement, or bloodline have I let define me more than being God’s beloved?
If that label were taken away from me tomorrow, would I still know who I actually am?
Do I extend to the people around me the same “beloved” identity I’m asking God to let me rest in?
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