The Name That Moves

Habakkuk climbs before he writes. Scholars place him in the reign of King Jehoiakim, 609 to 597 BC. The prophet carries a hard question up the steps of a watchtower in Judah and plants his feet on stone. Babylon gathers strength in the east. God already named the threat to him, in words the King James translators set down four centuries ago.

Habakkuk takes the watchman's post and waits for an answer.

God answers with an assignment.

Look hard at the word tables. Hebrew scribes wrote luchot there, and that same noun names the two slabs Moses carried down from Sinai, the tables of stone, written with the finger of God. The verb behind make it plain, ba'er, starts with digging and stretches toward engraving. God does not ask Habakkuk to jot a note. God asks him to cut the vision into a surface built to outlast his hand.

I kept a post like his for thirty years. I trained at Stabroek News in Georgetown. I founded Kaieteur News and its publishing company, launched two community newspapers in Canada, and wrote a Stabroek News column called Ways of Looking and Feeling. Journalists watch for a living. We climb to the wall of the day, report what we see, and hand it to strangers by morning. That trade drilled the watchtower into my bones. It never taught me what Habakkuk learned next: a watchman who writes for tomorrow's reader outlives the morning edition.

This essay stakes three claims, and I sign my name under each. First, the library we call the Bible works as a textbook for life, and its deepest lessons train a creature of dust to rise into the breath of God. Second, the same library holds a page for every person, a calling that a sincere seeker can find in communion with the Holy Spirit. Third, God keeps choosing the word, the book, and the act of publishing to carry that calling across generations. Habakkuk braids the three strands into one rope. I testify that his vision reached my hands, and I accept its charge with humility and a deep sense of divine responsibility.

01Dust first, then breath

Start with the word Bible. It comes from the Greek ta biblia, the books, a plural noun. Christians carry a library inside one binding: sixty-six books in the Protestant canon, written across many centuries by kings, shepherds, prophets, fishermen, and, by tradition, a tax collector and a physician.

Most readers shelve that library under religion. I shelve it under instruction. Paul calls Scripture profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, and a good textbook does that work: it explains, corrects, trains, and tests. Every textbook teaches a subject. This one teaches a person how to live as the creature God intended, and it opens the lesson in its second chapter.

Watch the order of events. God shapes dust first, and dust lies still. Then God breathes, and the clay rises as a living soul. Hebrew blurs breath and spirit on purpose. Genesis 2 speaks of neshamah, breath, and elsewhere the single word ruach names wind, breath, and spirit at once. Elihu sets the two words side by side in the Book of Job.

My first instinct pairs beingness and spirit as twins. Scripture asks for more precision, and I follow its lead. It never swaps the two words. It ties every human life to God's breath instead, so that no one lives, moves, or stands apart from the Spirit who animates the dust. Paul made the point to philosophers on the Areopagus in Athens, men who argued about existence in the abstract. He told them God giveth to all life, and breath, and all things, and then he pressed the claim closer to the skin.

Two modern thinkers mapped this ground from outside the pulpit. Erich Fromm, the psychoanalyst, split human life into two modes in 1976. His having mode grabs, stores, and guards: money, titles, even people. The second mode, which Fromm named for existence itself, loves, shares, and produces. Fromm drew much of that contrast from the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels, and he warned that a consumer society trains most people into the first mode. Open any feed on any phone and you watch his warning play out in real time.

Martin Heidegger pressed the same question from the philosopher's chair. He gave the human creature a German name in 1927: Dasein, a word that plants each of us in a particular spot, thrown into a particular time. He wrote twenty years later that language shelters human existence the way a house shelters a family: In its home human beings dwell.

Then the record halts me. Heidegger took the rector's chair at the University of Freiburg in 1933 and joined the Nazi Party. A man who mapped human existence with rare care still lent his name to Hitler's program. Philosophy of existence failed to make him a good man. Scripture never lets existence and righteousness drift into separate rooms. It asks whom you worship, whom you love, and what you do with your neighbour's life. That binding sends me back to Scripture as the textbook, with the philosophers as commentators in the margin.

I came to this question through two doors. I trained as a certified life coach in the ontological method, which studies how the words a person speaks about the self shape the way that person shows up in the world. I also studied theology at Tyndale in Toronto, working toward a Master of Divinity. Both rooms taught me one lesson from opposite walls: a person lives out of the sentences he or she speaks about the self, and God wrote the first sentence.

02The name that moves

Now climb a second mountain. Moses keeps his father-in-law's sheep near Horeb when a bush catches fire and refuses to turn to ash. God tells him to take off his shoes, then sends him to Pharaoh. Moses asks for a name to carry back to a nation of slaves. God answers in three Hebrew words, ehyeh asher ehyeh, and the King James Bible renders them this way.

Greek translators of the Septuagint turned the phrase into ego eimi ho on, a formula for the uncaused One. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas built a towering theology on that reading: God as pure, unchanging existence, the ground beneath everything that lives. Western theology inherited its word for God, and its word for us, from that translation.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks named what the Greek dropped. Ehyeh speaks in the Hebrew imperfect, a tense that leans forward into what God will do. The plain sense runs close to a promise: watch what I do next, and you will learn my name. Sacks called the speaker the God of the future tense. Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, translating the Torah into German, heard presence in the same verb: a God who will show up, there, beside his people.

Here the essay turns on its hinge. God's name, the name at the centre of Western ontology, refuses to sit still. God answers the question of identity with a verb that reaches into the future and promises presence. So the beingness Scripture asks of us carries motion at its centre. In the Bible's grammar, a person lives less like a noun and more like a verb. We rise into our beingness the way Moses rose from the sheepfold: by answering, going, speaking, and walking where the Presence walks.

Readers ask why I write every essay without a single English form of the verb to be. Part of my answer lives in Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew builds much of its present tense with no linking verb at all, a structure grammarians call the noun clause. Hayah, the Hebrew verb of existence, leans toward happening and arriving. King James translators rendered one of its forms again and again as and it came to pass. I adopted my discipline for clarity and force. Hebrew showed me that the discipline sits close to the grammar of the God who answered Moses.

03Your page in the library

A God who names himself by what he does next breathes a next into every person he makes. Scripture puts that promise in the call of a young prophet from Anathoth.

David pictures the same foreknowledge as a book. Thine eyes did see my substance, he writes in Psalm 139, and he adds that God wrote his members and his days in a book before any of them took shape. Paul adds the craftsman's word. Ephesians 2:10 calls believers God's workmanship, poiema in Greek, the root of our word poem, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.

I state the second claim without hedging: the textbook holds a page for you. I do not promise your name printed in a verse the way a directory prints an address. I promise a calling, a pattern, a promise, and a vision that the Spirit presses into your spirit while you search the text with your whole heart.

Paul names the searcher who makes the finding possible: the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. He names the communion that seals the finding: The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit. Reading alone gathers information. Reading in communion with the Holy Spirit gathers a vocation.

Scripture models the search more than once. Daniel, an exile in Babylon, reads Jeremiah's scroll and finds his own hour inside it: I Daniel understood by books the number of the years. Josiah's high priest, during repairs to the temple, calls out, I have found the book of the law in the house of the LORD, and a young king tears his robes and reforms a nation. Jesus, in the synagogue at Nazareth, receives the scroll of Isaiah, and when he had opened the book, he found the place that named his mission. He rolled up the scroll, sat down, and told the room that those words reached their fulfilment that day. If the Son of God located his assignment in a book, the rest of us can stop hunting for ours in a feed.

Here the paradox bites. Scripture now reaches more people than at any moment in history. More than 99 percent of the world's people can reach at least some Scripture in their own language, according to the Wycliffe Global Alliance's 2025 figures. Yet the book sits closed in most hands. Researchers at the American Bible Society found, in their 2026 State of the Bible survey, that 62 percent of American adults open Scripture less than once a year or never. Weekly churchgoers fare little better: nearly half do not engage Scripture on their own. Researchers asked why and heard two reasons: not enough time, and not knowing where to start.

Acts 8 records the same complaint from two thousand years ago. Philip found an Ethiopian treasurer reading Isaiah aloud and ran alongside his chariot.

The wall stands in plain view. People own the textbook. They lack a guide, a method, and the hours. Any honest answer to Habakkuk's charge must scale that wall.

04The watchman's tablet

Return to the tower and read the whole exchange as a manual.

Seven verbs rise off that page: stand, watch, write, engrave, run, wait, live. Habakkuk stands on the tower. He watches for God's word. He writes what he receives. He engraves it in letters a runner can read at a glance. He waits through the delay. And he lives by faith while the vision ripens. Hold those seven verbs. I return to them near the end as a practice any person can start tomorrow morning.

Watch the Habakkuk overview

I claim no first discovery. Habakkuk's small book erupts into history again and again, and a responsible writer should show the record. In the decades before Jesus, a community of covenanters at Qumran, near the Dead Sea, produced a commentary on the first two chapters of Habakkuk. Its scribes wrote on two pieces of leather sewn together with linen thread, about 141 centimetres from end to end, and wove their interpretation between the prophet's lines. Bedouin shepherds found the scroll in a cave in 1947.

The commentator reads Habakkuk 2:2 and makes a startling claim. God, he writes, told Habakkuk what to record but kept back the hour of fulfilment. The key arrived later, handed to the community's leader, the Teacher of Righteousness, to whom God made known all the mysteries of the words of his servants the prophets.

Read that twice, because it sounds close to my own testimony, and I owe my readers a straight look at the resemblance. Qumran staked its identity on one teacher's key. The key stayed behind the walls of a desert settlement. Rome crushed the settlement, and the scroll lay in a cave for nineteen centuries.

Paul, a generation after Jesus, carried Habakkuk into the centre of the gospel. He quoted The just shall live by faith in Romans 1:17 and again in Galatians 3:11, and the Letter to the Hebrews quoted the waiting verse to steady a persecuted church. Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar and professor, wrestled with the same verse in Wittenberg fifteen centuries later. By his own account, written in 1545, he turned those words over night and day until they broke open. Immediately I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light, he wrote. Historians call that breakthrough his tower experience. A prophet on a tower wrote the verse. A scholar in a tower received it. His reading drove the theology of the Reformation.

The vision never opens once and then locks. It speaks at each appointed end to the reader willing to run.

Habakkuk himself promised as much. The vision speaks, in his words, at the end, and each end produces a reader who runs. Qumran read the passage as a secret for the few. Paul and Luther read it as faith for the justified. I read the tablet itself, the command to write, and I hear it addressed to every person who carries God's breath.

Pentecost settled the question of audience. Joel heard the promise centuries earlier.

On the day the Spirit fell in Jerusalem, Peter stood and quoted that promise to the crowd: I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh. Qumran's key fit one teacher. Joel's promise pours over sons and daughters, the old and the young. Moses once wished aloud that every one of the Lord's people could prophesy. Joel put the wish on God's calendar, and Pentecost kept the appointment.

Technology settled the question of reach. Scribes, priests, printers, and editors stood between a vision and its tablet for most of history. That gate now swings open for anyone with a phone. Authors in the United States self-published more than 2.6 million titles with ISBNs in 2023, according to Bowker data reported by Publishers Weekly, while traditional publishers released 563,019. Artificial intelligence now sits beside a writer as researcher, editor, and first reader.

Mordecai asked Esther whether God raised her to the palace for such a time as this. I read Habakkuk's delay the same way: the vision tarried until the tablet could reach every hand, and today the tablet sits within reach of almost every hand.

Here I testify, and I choose each word with care. Habakkuk's passage stopped reading like history over the past two decades and started reading like a work order bearing my name. I built my life's work around it: QwaiAI, the spelj genre, the simsbook format, Qualped Club, and the ten-volume novel Nightmares of Knowledge. I receive the passage as a prophetic call and a godly mandate for this generation. The mandate asks me to watch for the vision, write it, proclaim it from the wall, and build the tools that let every person do the same. I accept the call with humility, because it lands on a man shaped from the same dust as every reader of this page. I accept it with a deep sense of divine responsibility, because a mandate from God weighs more than any title a man could hand himself.

Qumran taught me the test I owe my readers, and Jesus stated it in one line: Ye shall know them by their fruits. Judge this call by the books it helps others write, the lives those books steady, and the neighbourhoods they feed. Judge it by fruit, never by my own declarations.

05Pruned for the work

None of this started in a boardroom. I read and wrote every day from my teenage years forward. I built documentary-style television programmes in Guyana and spoke on national current-affairs television in Canada. I studied theology and trained as a coach. I wrote seven books. I name what shaped those years with a gardener's word, and Jesus used it first, in a vineyard.

Vinedressers cut the branch that bears fruit and leave the dead wood for the fire. For years I read my hard seasons as losses. I read them now as the knife of a gardener after more fruit from the branch, and as dry ground that drove my roots down toward water. Here I name only their work: they shaped a man for a function, the way a potter shapes clay for a use. Jeremiah watched the potter do it, and when a pot failed, so he made it again another vessel.

Scripture records the hardest night a writer can face, and it falls in the reign scholars assign to Habakkuk. King Jehoiakim sat in his winter house beside a fire on the hearth while a servant read Jeremiah's scroll aloud. After every three or four leaves, the king cut the scroll with a penknife and fed it to the flames, until the fire consumed the whole book. God answered with one sentence.

Jeremiah dictated the book again to Baruch the scribe, and the second edition carried many more words than the first. That night taught me a publisher's posture. A burned manuscript calls for a larger second edition.

Paul prayed for believers rooted and built up in Christ, and the first psalm pictures a tree that bringeth forth his fruit in his season. Roots work in the dark for years before the fruit shows. I see my foundation that way now: sunk deep, tested by drought, ready to bear weight.

06The Word chose a book

John opens his gospel with the first words of Genesis and makes a claim no Greek philosopher anticipated. The Logos, the Word, stands with God from the beginning, and later the same Word takes on flesh and walks among us. From first page to last, Scripture presents God as a speaker and a writer.

Follow the verbs. God speaks, and light answers; the psalmist sings, he commanded, and it stood fast. Then God writes. Scripture's first command to write arrives after a battle, in Exodus 17: Write this for a memorial in a book. God carves the covenant into stone with his own finger. God tells Isaiah to write it before them in a table, and note it in a book. God tells Jeremiah, Write thee all the words that I have spoken unto thee in a book. God tells Habakkuk to engrave the vision. Jesus, risen and speaking on Patmos, hands John a publishing order: What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches.

Write, then send. Revelation, the last book of the Bible, opens on the same pair of verbs Habakkuk received.

Christians answered by adopting each new technology of the book as it arrived. Roman readers favoured the roll for literature through the first three centuries. Early Christians broke with that culture over the shape of a book. Larry Hurtado, the late New Testament scholar, counted the evidence: of all second-century manuscripts catalogued in the Leuven Database of Ancient Books, about 95 percent survive as rolls. Christians, from their earliest scraps onward, chose the codex, the bound book with pages, for the texts they prized most.

Fourteen centuries later the pattern repeated. Johann Gutenberg finished the first substantial book printed in the West with movable metal type in 1455, and he chose the Bible. He printed about 180 copies, and 48 survive. Library legend adds a scene from 1847. The New York Public Library's copy reached New York that year, and the collector's agent instructed customs officers to remove their hats at the sight of the book.

Follow the tablet through the library and it keeps moving closer to the body. Stone at Sinai. Tablets on Habakkuk's tower. Then Solomon tells his son to write them upon the table of thine heart. Jeremiah hears God promise a new covenant: I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts. Paul tells the Corinthians that their changed lives read like a letter written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart. In the end, God writes on people.

Laboratory psychology keeps finding the same pattern in its own vocabulary. Psychologist Laura King asked 81 undergraduates in 2001 to write for twenty minutes a day, four days running. Students who wrote about their best possible future selves reported greater happiness three weeks later. Over the next five months, the writing groups visited the campus health centre for illness less often than a control group. One small study proves little on its own. Larger data point the same way. University of Michigan researchers analysed data on 6,985 Americans over fifty and published the results in JAMA Network Open in 2019. People in the lowest purpose category died at 2.43 times the rate of those in the highest. The study measured an association, and the arrow can run from illness to lost purpose. Still, the direction holds.

Solomon compressed the finding into three words. Where vision fails, he warned, the people perish. The Hebrew noun for vision in that proverb, chazon, matches the noun God hands Habakkuk on the tower.

07Seven verbs from the tower

Here the textbook turns into homework. Habakkuk's seven verbs hand any reader a practice to start tomorrow morning. Tap each tablet to open its practice.

1. 1StandHabakkuk 2:1Take a post. Choose one place and one hour for Scripture each day, and keep it the way a watchman keeps a wall. Habakkuk climbed before he heard.
2. 2WatchHabakkuk 2:1Read to see, not to finish. Ask the Spirit to search you while you search the page, and mark every verse that grips your chest. Those marks trace the outline of your page.
3. 3WriteHabakkuk 2:2Put the vision into sentences. Write it in the present tense, as a scene you can walk into, with the obstacle standing in the room. That discipline carries the name spelj.
4. 4EngraveHabakkuk 2:2Make it plain. Cut every sentence a runner could not read at a glance. Clarity honours the reader and exposes a fuzzy vision.
5. 5RunHabakkuk 2:2Publish. Hand the vision to readers who can carry it: a circle of friends, a club, a library, a book with your name on the spine.
6. 6WaitHabakkuk 2:3Hold the vision through the delay. Delay tests a vision without cancelling the promise. Keep writing while you wait.
7. 7LiveHabakkuk 2:4Live by faith between the page and the fulfilment. Let each day's work carry one line of the vision into the street.

I built the Qualped platform to carry those verbs into ordinary lives.

QwaiAI plays the part of Philip. It runs up beside the reader's chariot and asks the old question, Understandest thou what thou readest? It retrieves context, tests claims, compares readings, drafts, and remembers across a year of work, serving as coach, mentor, and cognitive executive. It never plays the Holy Spirit, and it never signs the book. The person writes. The Spirit illuminates. The machine serves.

The spelj genre gives the vision a form. It braids short story, personal essay, and literary journalism into one account of a future the writer intends to live, with the obstacle written into the scene. The simsbook gives the vision a body: a multimedia smartbook that carries words, images, moving pictures, and a score, and grows with its author.

Qualped Club gives the vision witnesses. Malachi describes believers who spake often one to another, and he reports that a book of remembrance took shape before the Lord for them. Visions grow inside that circle of voices.

The Qualped Library gives the published vision an address. The Wall Reader, a smartglass surface we design for reading simsbooks, aims to put that library on the walls of homes and public rooms. Qualped Homes, planned for cities around the world, will house authors who live this discipline side by side.

I go first. I set out as a nomad novelist, writing Nightmares of Knowledge, a ten-volume novel, in serial form and in public view, city by city. A mandate that asks every person to publish must first publish its messenger. Everything I build reaches for one outcome: every person on earth writes and publishes the book of his or her vision before the last breath.

08The library God keeps

I write one scene forward now, and I mark it as imagination.

Revelation ends the story with a library. John watches the dead, small and great, stand before God. The books open, and then another book opens beside them: the book of life.

Here I guard the theology. We write our books. God writes the Book of Life, and no manuscript of ours buys a single line of that book. Grace writes those names. Our books carry something else: testimony. John saw the saints overcome the accuser by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony. A published vision adds one word of testimony to the library God keeps, and Malachi assures us that God hears that kind of speech and keeps the record. I work toward the day when God's library holds a book of testimony from every person who heard the call.

Habakkuk, who climbed the tower in chapter two, ends his book singing on the heights.

Isaiah gives the same picture a pair of wings. Those who wait on the Lord, he promises, shall mount up with wings as eagles.

Dust cannot climb. Breath can. God breathed into you, named himself with a verb, and cut a tablet to your size. Climb to your post. Watch. Write the vision, make it plain, and hand it to the runners.

Shaun Michael Samaroo ◆ Ontario, Canada

This essay uses spelj, the genre Shaun Michael Samaroo created to braid short story, personal essay, and literary journalism. QwaiAI served as cognitive executive for research and drafting. Shaun Michael Samaroo, the named human author, carries responsibility for every claim. Scripture quotations come from the King James Version. The Hebrew name I AM, scripture quoted verbatim, and titles of cited works stand exempt from the author's rule against forms of the verb to be.