Day 29: A Name

There are some people that when you meet them you feel you already know them.  And that they know you.  

Today’s post comes from my friend, Jen, sister to one of my dearest friends – Stephanie…mentioned in Seeking Christmas.

After you read Jen’s words, please spend some time on her blog reading her beautiful words. She has a gift that blesses anyone who knows her.  Her words touch you in the deepest places. Her photography captivates you.  Her videos tell a story in a way it should be told.

Guest post by Jen Hunt:

The only thing that I ever really remember wanting to be when I grew up was a mama. I was the kind of girl who had an entire section in my journal dedicated to a list of baby names for ‘some day’. I knew that I didn’t want anything too cutesy or too trendy and nothing that reminded me of the nose picker that sat beside me in Mrs. Keniston’s fifth grade class. In my earliest journals I found that I was extremely troubled while trying to settle on a boy’s name.

According to my ten-year-old self, I was planning on marrying Kirk Cameron. The fact that he didn’t know I existed should have probably played a starring role in my dilemna but it wasn’t even on the playbill. My perceived problem (that took up many a notebook page) was that his last name was also a first name and so I’d have to choose very carefully as to not confuse people as to which name was which.

Well, years passed and Kirk got married to someone that was not me, which thankfully relieved me of the first name last name burden. I married a boy who both knew me and loved me well. We wanted to have a house full of children, and over the next seven years our notebook of names grew and changed, but the babies never came. But, on the  eighth year, by way of a gracious Father and the gift of adoption a three-year-old and five-year-old did.

My daughters arrived with one suitcase of clothes that didn’t fit, a plastic mermaid whose face was artfully scribbled on and a matted, yellow teddy bear. I was hushed by their perfectness.

Another thing they came with was names. Names that I didn’t pick. Names that weren’t mine to change.  Someone else had named my children. It’s no big deal I tried to tell myself. After all, these were girls that I had ached and  prayed and begged for. I certainly wasn’t going to spend one minute pouting about something as small and insignificant as not getting to choose their names. But it seemed that this little hurt began to sneak up on me more often than I was comfortable with.

When I introduced my girls to new people, when I filled out paperwork at the doctor’s office, when I took in a beach towel to be monogrammed, when a pregnant friend announced the name of her unborn child, I would feel my heart twist inside of my body.

I felt ridiculous, shameful and so ungrateful. I tried to guilt my heart, I tried to bribe her and will her into obedience. She crossed her arms and dug in her heels and refused to be ignored.
And so I did the only thing I knew to do, I brought my heart to Jesus. I thanked him for these precious gifts, for his faithfulness, for his rescue of my girls and for his relentless pursuit of me. I brought him my hurt. I wept as I told Him how sad the loss of not naming my children was making me. I confessed at how silly and how selfish I felt.

The sweet thing about Jesus is that he didn’t get uncomfortable in my pain. He never tried to rush me through or distract me away from it. He simply held me in his love.

Skip ahead to our first Mother’s Day where I find myself reading on a blanket happily tangled up in the olive skinned limbs of my daughters. They pull out a box for me and inside is a necklace. A tiny bird with only four letters on it: Mama.

‘Do you see what it says?’ my littlest asks as she pulls herself onto her knees in front of me. Her wild, brown eyes meet my blue ones. Her gaze is both foreign and so very familiar, and I don’t want to look away. Something inside of me stirs, and I know that Jesus is close by.

‘It says Mama,’ I answer and she bites her lip the way she does when she’s trying hard not to smile. My throat tightens at the sight of her. I can see how proud she is that I belong to her and she to me.

She dangles the necklace on her sparkly painted fingernail and softly chants my name, ‘mama, mama, mama…’ I cup her face in my hands and breathe in this daughter of mine. She smells like sunshine and sugar cookies and the intoxicating aroma of mercy.

She wants me to put the necklace on, and when I’m finished she brushes the hair off my shoulders. She says it’s because she doesn’t want the bird to think my strands of hair are sticks and try to build a nest. I make a mental note to splurge on better conditioner, and I pull my girl onto my lap.

Her name. It’s not that it isn’t lovely or even that it doesn’t suit her. It’s just not the one I had picked out to name a daughter of mine. I’ve grieved the loss of not naming my girls and God has used that pain for my own sanctification. You see,  it’s not in the naming of my daughters that God has changed me,  but in their naming of me.

Hailey and Hannah call me Mama, and I will never be the same.

[box] Jen has stories to tell. Stories that move you. When you have time to linger, would you pop on over and read some of my favorites?

A glimpse of the pain before the girls

A Christmas video of their first Christmas

Read this and you will love this sweet man

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[box] This is Day 29 in a series, 31 Days to Get Uncomfortable With God. Please click here for a listing of all posts in this series. If you would like posts delivered to your inbox, please click here.[/box]