So sometimes, God sends you a message that He is real. And sometimes He sends it after the fact, years after the fact, and if you let it....it will blow your mind. This was one of those moments.
Yesterday in our attempt to clean up and declutter, we came upon this little piece of paper. It was a handwritten translation of a German "play" passport given to Evelyn by her Aunt Bronwen. Reading the last two words "little bird" just kind of stopped Tom and me in our tracks. We must have missed it the first time we received it almost 3 years ago. But it was like this little sign from God that He always intended for her to be called Evelyn, and he put her name on our hearts as if it were our own great choice, and then let us in on the little secret later.
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| "Dear Evelyn- your name is an English name. It comes from the English form of the French name "Aveline." This is in a turn a familiar form of "Ava", the meaning of which is "Little Bird." |
As many of you already know, we chose not to find out the gender of our babies until they were born.
So flashback to my pregnancy with Evelyn before we knew she was a girl and before we had named her. We are living in our little humble apartment, and Tom is singing in the kitchen a little tune as usual- but this time it caught my attention...it just had such a sweet tune. I don't know why, because I never asked him to do this EVER again- but with THAT song in particular, I asked him to sing it to our baby in my belly. Can you guess the title of this song? "Little Bird" (tune is in this youtube video if you are interested). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrMpo0YDiDY
We had picked out a boy name and a girl name for the big day, initially it was Collin or Monica. We were pretty set on these names, but towards the end of the pregnancy I started feeling more and more that this baby was a girl and I thought harder on what name felt right. The name Evelyn popped in my head, and I talked it over with Tom and he was like "Yea, Evelyn was on our list of names before we were ever even married, I have it here on a word document because I am a nerd." Sure enough, I had forgotten all about that conversation but there it was on his hard drive. So we kept Monica as our number 1 pick and Evelyn as a back up if baby M was to be a girl. When she was born and was in fact a girl, I took one look at her surprising little blonde head of hair and her face and the decision was so easy- she was definitely meant to be an Evelyn.
Tom continued to sing the tune "Little Bird" to her almost every time he rocked her to sleep, so much so that she eventually would make him stop because she had wised up to the fact that this song indicated it was time to SLEEP, which she never liked much.
Finding out that her name literally meant "little bird" was just mind blowing to me! It is not an easy translation to find by a simple google search since it has to be traced back, and had it not been for Bronwen writing that note(thank you Bron!)- I would have never made the connection.
I guess what this immediately brought to mind was wow God really does know us by name, knows our children by name in the womb before we even have a chance to name them ourselves. It specifically made me think of the very verse I chose to post on the day our sweet Evelyn was baptized:
Isaiah 43:1
But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine."
Perhaps this is God's little way of nudging me along, as I pursue my own baptism this Easter- to remind me that he knows my name just as he knows Evelyn's.
People often say to me, "what a beautiful name Evelyn is, was it a family name? " I never really know how to explain that this name was just meant to be hers, but now you know. There is a lot to a name, even if we never can quite put our finger on it.
Our Little Bird, aka Evelyn
