Why Did You Name Your Son That?

If Ian has one foot in America and the other in Croatia you wouldn't know it by his name. 

Petra and I set a deadline of Christmas day 2009 for deciding on a boy name if indeed baby Bohall #2  was a boy (we already had a girl name picked).  As the day of reckoning approached I was reading Enoh the following book:

In the Olivia series - which we highly recommend - the heroine of the story has a brother named Ian.  After going through the predetermined formula of "look up name, google name and let name sit in our heads" we decided it might be a good fit.  We put it on our top 10 list on the fridge and watched it move up towards the number 1 spot almost overnight.

But what middle name would go well with Ian? 

Petra already had a name she wanted to use.  The idea came from The Kite Runner:

Though less than prominant, Rahim is one of Petra's favorite characters in the novel.  It is well worth your time to read the book and find out why.

But the characters had much less to do with deciding on Ian Rahim than the meaning did.

Ian is Celtic (or Scottish) and means "God is gracious".   We see our son as both a representation of God's gift of grace and a blessing given to us without merit.  Ian is a living reminder that God has been and continues to be gracious to us. 

Rahim is originally Persian (or Arabic) and means "compassionate". It is our prayer that Ian will personify this quality in his own life.  In addition, we realize that it's God's grace that prompts true Compassion. 

Though the intro to the previous post was painfully honest (and decidedly premature), we couldn't be more excited with the birth of Ian.  Childbirth - and the pain that accompanies it - is a profound reminder of how God's purposes are indeed accomplished in a fallen world.  Easy for a guy to say right?

Some pictures of Ian at home: