Samuel Jeffrey

Samuel means God answered our prayers. Jeffery means God's divine peace. This is what we are naming our son. The name he was given at birth means "terror, or god of fear" and there is no way we will speak that over him.When we got word that this boy was available and found out his name was Deimas, I immediately looked up what it meant. We were calling him Baby D at first because we didn't like what his name meant and our last name starts with D, too. We just kept praying about what his name should be. When we had been trying to get pregnant for about 6 months, we decided when we did, if it was a boy, his name would be Samuel. We had been praying for a child and it was getting pretty emotional and hard to have faith... I wasn't thinking about naming our adopted son Samuel, I just wasn't really putting the pieces together. :)

Then I was looking through a jewelry catalog and saw a necklace that simply said 1 Samuel 1:27 on it. I looked it up in the New Living Translation, which says "I asked the Lord to give me this boy, and He has granted my request." I don't think it could have been more clear to me that this was that child. We hadn't been approved yet, we didn't even know how the process of changing his name worked yet, we just both agreed that Samuel was his name. We started speaking that verse over our lives and every time we said his name we were claiming that God had answered our prayers. 

We don't know what his middle name is right now, but I knew it needed to be something that means peace. There are so many stories of redemption and deliverance in the Bible that involve God changing someone's name to something that spoke over them a fulfilled purpose. I prayed about it for a week, then looked at a baby name website where you can put in what you want your baby's name to mean and it lists the names that mean anything close. I simply entered the word 'peace' There were some weird names, then I saw Geoffrey, and I knew. We prefer Jeffery as the spelling, but the meaning is the same, God's divine peace.

I hadn't really thought about it, but one of my best friends said that she loved that we were part of Christ's redemption story for this baby. At that moment, it became clear that all of our heartache and tears were for a reason, to love this child and raise him as God's. I've cried many tears of joy over being chosen for this amazing role as this child's mother, and I know that we would never have made the decisions leading up to this if we hadn't gone through the trials of temporary infertility. 

Through this, I hope you understand that God's plan may not make sense, and we may want to give up sometimes. But giving up on what He has at the end of that particular trial may be giving up on being someone else's path to the Savior...