#5.6: Divine Revelation
Now that we knew we were having a girl, we could pick a name! But, y’all- when I say that Chris and I couldn’t have been further apart on names, I mean like separate planets apart. I was convinced that this poor baby girl was going to be born nameless. Thankfully, I’d heard that they don’t let you leave the hospital without a name on the birth certificate so I was at least reasonably reassured that she wouldn’t remain “no name mari” forever.
Chris leaned toward very traditional names. I leaned a little more unique.
Each evening after work, we would sit on the sofa and go over a new list - adding names, taking names off, and … getting nowhere.
We eventually gave up on Google and did the old fashioned thing. Went to the bookstore and bought three hard copies of “baby name” books. Through our browsing, it hit me. We hadn’t prayed about a name. Was that even a thing? Of course it was! The naming (and renaming) of people in the Bible was of significant importance. Names hold meaning. Why had I not thought of this?
That evening, I prayed that the Lord would reveal to us the name that He had for our sweet little girl. One that was full of meaning and one that Chris and I could actually agree on. The agreeing part - was going to take a miracle.
”What about Olive?,” I asked Chris at brunch that weekend. Chris paused just for a second before he said - “That’s it.”
So, that hot, Saturday, August morning, over avocado toast and decaf coffee at our local breakfast spot, we celebrated the naming of our sweet girl -- Olive Elizabeth Mari.
Nudy’s Cafe- Ardmore, PA
While I would love to be able to tell you what the sermon was about the next day at church, it escapes me. Instead of listening intently, I was busy doodling the name “Olive” all over the Sunday program like a 13-year old girl doodling the name of her first crush all over her math notebook.
Mid-doodle, I felt a tug at my heart to look up “Olive” in the Bible.
It is first mentioned in Scripture when the dove returned to Noah’s ark carrying an olive branch in its beak (Gen.8:11).
After the 40 days and nights of rain, Noah sent out a dove from the ark to see if there was any dry land. Eventually the dove came back with an olive leaf- a signal that the storm was over. Since that time, the olive branch has been a symbol of “peace” to the world. In Genesis 9, the Lord also put the rainbow in the sky as the sign of his promise that he would never again destroy the earth with flood.
The biblical meaning of Olive is, “peace”, and little Olive Elizabeth was our symbol of peace and our very own rainbow (a term for a baby after a miscarriage), after our own terrible storm.
My heart was bursting with this revelation. I continued to dig, and that’s when I came across Psalm 52:8 - “But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God. I trust in the steadfast love of God forever and ever.”
Steadfast. There it was. The word that the Lord had pressed upon my heart at the beginning of the year.
And then I remembered … The Word Alive Conference and Lysa’s words:
When the sorrowful winds of the east blow, I forget they are necessary. When I’m being processed, I forget it’s for the sake of ridding me of bitterness. And when I’m being crushed I forget it’s for the sake of my preservation. I forget all these things so easily. I wrestle and cry and honestly want to resist every bit of this. Oh, how I forget. Maybe God knew we all would. And so, He created the olive tree.
When I asked the Lord for a name for our sweet little girl, I never could have imagined the significant revelation that He had in store, and the way in which it would be revealed. Little by little, step by step.
And, not only the revelation of the name but the timing.
You see, August 2018 was one of the most challenging and also precious months that I’ve ever experienced. I knew when we had our miscarriage at the beginning of the year that 9 months later August would eventually be upon us (although I wasn’t sure at the time how I would ever make it), and that our baby’s due date would come and go.
I expected it to be hard, and I knew it would be painful. What I didn’t expect was that we would be blessed with another baby on the way by this point.
There is no rule book for still grieving the loss of a baby, while celebrating the life of the one that you are growing. And, I’m not sure there is a way to ever reconcile the feelings of such two extremes.
However, what I do know is that even through my tears, the Lord had a plan. I experienced His peace and unfailing love over the course of that year in a way that I had never experienced it before.
And now, looking back on it, August 2018 also represents one of the most special months to me- it was the month that Chris and I decided on a name for our sweet little girl.
Aug 19, 2018