What's in a name?

If you’ve been reading our blog long enough, then you’ve read this post about Ella’s name.  In a nutshell, we initially named her after both Joe and my grandmother, Ella.  It wasn’t until after she was born that we learned that the name Joella means “Jehovah is God.”  We both felt like this was incredibly fitting for our sweet girl.

In choosing AJ’s name we had a little different approach.  We decided early on that we would not use the name we had chosen for Ella if she had been a boy.  This was a new baby and a new start, and we wanted a new name.

Joe has always been a big fan of Abraham Lincoln, and at the beginning of the year he finished reading “A Team of Rivals,” a book about Lincoln and his presidency.  Reading this book gave Joe even more respect for Lincoln and the obstacles he overcame not just during his presidency, but during his life.

It was also during this time that Ella started a segment in school on Abraham Lincoln and would come home each day with another interesting fact about his life.  She bought a children’s book about Abe Lincoln and his hat and would read it often.

As soon as we found out we were expecting another baby, Joe made the request that if this baby was a boy, would it be ok if we named him Abraham.  I agreed that Abraham would be a great name.

A few days later I attended our small group bible study and that night Abraham and Sarah happened to come up in the discussion.  During the discussion we talked about Sarah’s age.  She was very old when she found out that she was expecting for the first time.  For years God had promised Abraham that He was going to expand their family.  But year after year passed and yet they were still without a child.  Just when they had completely lost hope and thought that God wasn’t going to uphold his promise, Sarah became pregnant.

For us, AJ is a sign of God’s promises.  We had a desire in our hearts to expand our family.  Time passed, I got older, and we wondered if maybe God didn’t want us to expand our family.  We explored numerous options to expanding our family and prayed diligently over each one.  What had been clear as the right answer for others, was not the right decision for our family.  Time passed and we started to lose hope.  Just as I was about to declare Ella as an only child, AJ entered our lives.

AJ is the perfect addition to our family.  He loves his sister so much!  I wish you could hear him belly laugh when she plays with him.  I wish you could see his smile when she walks into the room.  I wish you could see him reach out and grab for her when she passes by him.  He is her answer to prayer.  He’s everything she wanted in a little brother…at least until he starts crawling.

And just to wrap up this post, I have to share why we decided to call him AJ.  I love initial names.  I knew a lot of people growing up who went by their initials and I always thought it was cute.  We just knew that AJ would be an athlete, so we decided that he had to have a name that sounded good being announced over a grand stand.  While I love the name Abe, Abe Murray just didn’t have the necessary ring to it.  AJ Murray, however, sounds awesome when being announced in a loud, welcome him to the field sort of tone.