Jacoba: A Name, a Mantle, a Mission

It is just before midnight in Kyiv.The sirens have begun again, that familiar wail that threads its way through every conversation, every prayer. The city holds its breath, and I write within that breath, as though time itself were suspended.

Tomorrow, October 10th, I will launch In Her Words, at jacoba.org, a living memorial and a return. It will go live on what would have been her seventy-eighth birthday, her fourth in Heaven. The site bears her restored name: Jacoba.

She was born under that name, called Jacobie by those who loved her, and later signed Jacobi, a decision she never made lightly. She used to say that when God changes a name, He changes the bearer: Abram to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah, Jacob to Israel. She found hope in Isaiah’s promise, that the one despised and frail would be remade in strength:

“Fear not, you worm Jacob, you men of Israel! I am the one who helps you, declares the Lord, your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel.Behold, I will make of you a threshing sledge, new, sharp, and having teeth.”(Isaiah 41:14–15)

She read that as the rhythm of grace itself. God takes the fragile and fashions it for purpose. “He gives the weak a new name,” she would say, “and that name carries His strength.”

Over these past days, I have reread my parents’ letters from 1968 to 1972, four years of ink and calling. They wrote from opposite sides of South Africa while studying and serving as young missionaries. Their words are disciplined and tender, steeped in Scripture and longing. In 1970, my mother wrote from Israel. How fitting that her first step into international mission began in Jerusalem, the city where the Great Commission was spoken:

“You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”(Acts 1:8)

That verse traced the map of her life before she ever drew it, from Jerusalem outward, from word to witness, from letter to life. She would go on to study at the Bible Institute of South Africa in 1971, where the letters ceased, nearness replacing paper. And in 1972, she served in Japan, her final year of preparation before she and my father married on December 23rd, their vows spoken not only to each other but to the same divine commission that had bound them across oceans.

It strikes me now how the geography of her calling, from Jerusalem to Japan, forms the very arc of Scripture’s promise. And how the line continues, improbably, here in Kyiv. Even the name Ukraine carries that echo of journey and margin. In the old Slavic tongue, U-kraïna means “the borderland,” “the edge,” or “the land at the frontier.” The word itself bears witness to the verse, to the ends of the earth. That a son of hers would one day serve here, at history’s threshold, writing under sirens, seems almost written into her obedience.

Jerusalem was her beginning; Ukraine, somehow, became mine. She often spoke of the mantle, the invisible inheritance of Word and witness that passes between generations. She believed that the Spirit which led her to the nations would rest upon her children in turn. She saw in my life a continuation of that Word, the voice crying in the wilderness, as prophesied in Isaiah 40:3:

“The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’”

That Word became the centerline of my calling: to prepare, to speak, to build roads for grace through the rubble of this age. And so I write here, far from my father’s land and my mother’s house, keeping faith with both. Between the alarms and the silence, between South Africa and Ukraine, it is not her I find, but Him. I stand on the Word that never fails, hold to the promise that remakes me, and follow the name that calls me forward.

Tomorrow I will press Publish. The site will open. Jacoba will stand once more, not as archive, but as living covenant. Because He still gives new names. Because even at the world’s edge, His Word keeps traveling. Because love, steadfast, unarmed, unrelenting, remains the only kingdom worth serving.

And so the watch ends.The vigil kept in the quiet hours between memory and morning is over. Tomorrow, a story kept in trust will walk into the light, not as a monument to what was, but as a testament to Who Is. Because the cartographer of our souls still draws new maps, still renames the landscapes of our lives after His own heart. Because the breath that first spoke creation into being still whispers purpose into dust.

So let the word go forth. Let it be a seed on the wind, a testament carried from the Karoo to Kyiv. For love is the ink in which the truest stories are written, the quiet force that unmakes empires and rebuilds the world, one mended heart at a time.

It is, and has always been, the only story worth telling.