Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Why Ezra?


so, i get a lot of people asking us why we chose the name ezra. it's not a very common name (bonus!). however, old testament names are pretty popular - at least in our friend group...we have an asher, jeremiah, levi and amos and a noah (we think) on the way.

to tell you the truth, we had completely different names picked out before we started the adoption process, but once we started filling out the paperwork, a lot of them just didn't seem to fit. so we went back to the drawing board. then, one day last summer, i felt like the Lord just spoke to my heart and said "his name is Ezra." that really blew me away. first of all, i instantly loved the name. second, i thought, "whoa, God! does that mean this is going to be a boy? for real?" about a week later, i couldn't stop thinking about the name (and the idea of holding a little boy that i couldn't adequately imagine got me so excited), so i decided i needed more information about ezra. i opened my Bible to the first page of ezra and there in the margin, written well over a year earlier, i had copied from a commentary:
theme of ezra: the sovereign hand of God is at work in perfect keeping with his plan at his appointed time.
it was perfect. it just fit. it fit our story. it fit what God had been teaching us over 3 long, hard, painful years. it got me even more excited.

the other day david was talking to our friend joel about the ezra of the Bible and what kind of man he was and joel paraphrased ezra 7, saying "ezra gave himself to know the law, to do the law and to teach the law in that order." i love that. almost as much as i love that little boy.

bonus:
here is our little man at 4 weeks and 8 weeks. i can't believe we are 1 week away from 12 weeks! it's flying by so fast!


1 comment:

Ericka B. Jackson said...

Thank you so much for sharing this Bekah! I feel like God put a certain name on my heart for our little girl and have been praying for confirmation. Maybe I need to accept that He has already confirmed it in several ways!

Love EZRA by the way!