Thank you so much for sharing our joy with us! What an amazingly exhausting week we had. And now the amazingly exhausting wait for our acceptance letter (LOA) and TA (travel approval).
Many of you asked me when we can go get him now that we know who he is. Well, I wish I could say that it would be this week but not so much. I would have to say that I think it will be 4-5 months from now before we can go. Maybe longer or maybe sooner. Only God knows. But on average that's what people wait after accepting a referral.
So why the name?
Obviously what you name your child is a huge decision as you definitely want to name them something that means a lot. And something they can grow into. It's as if you are speaking something over there lives. So we spent many months thinking on this.
As we stated before we are going to name him Micaiah James *chinese name* Woods. With Adiah and Rhett we chose to keep one of their Chinese names as one of their middle names and we will do this with him as well.
Micaiah is a prophet from the bible. You can read about him in 1 Kings 22. I had forgotten about this story but when I was at a women's event at our church our Worship pastor's wife, Aunie, was speaking that night. She had another message prepared but God laid on her heart that day to change her message and speak about something else and use this scripture. In this scripture, Jehosephat and Ahab were wanting to take over some land that didn't belong to them. They wanted to do it but decided to consult with some prophets to see if God would look favorably on them if they did. Would they succeed, basically. So they consulted with 400 prophets and each prophet told them to go for it (my words). Jehosephat didn't really feel satisfied with that and asked if there wasn't any other prophet they could ask. Ahab said "
There is still one prophet in whom we can inquire of the Lord, but I hate him because he never prophesies anything good about me, but always bad. He is Micaiah son of Imlah." In other words, he never tells me what I want to hear. He just says what God tells him.
You can read the rest of the story but I loved the name when I heard it so I came home and studied that scripture some more. I looked up what the name Micaiah means and it means "who is like God". So after talking with Brian we agreed and decided on that. I'm SO glad Aunie changed her message that night! We plan to call him Kai.
James is Brian's dad's name. Brian always said if we ever had another boy he would like to name him after his dad. Brian says that Papa Jim (what the kids call him) didn't have the easiest upbringing as the youngest of 4 boys in a preacher/carpenter's home in West Texas. There was love but over the years Brian has learned there were also a lot of challenges. So Brian has watched as most of his dad's life he fought for things that weren't easy, but always believed he could. I see so much of that in Brian even today - and we both want that trait to be true for our latest son. He may have not had the easiest beginnings in life - but he will be a Woods now! So Micaiah James is the name - and his Chinese name (we'll have to write about that after we are allowed!) and Woods round it out...
May he always say what God tells him, never settle for going with the crowd, and always believe that with God he can achieve anything - even when he knows it won't be easy!
