“Lucy,” Liesel says. “It’s always been Lucy.”
It was
fourteen years ago now that Liesel and I were preparing for marriage, reading
books, sitting through counseling sessions, and even taking a personality test.
One of the questions we were asked was, “How many children would you like to
have?” To our surprise we had both answered, separately, “Four.” From the start
we knew we wanted four children.
It wasn’t long after that it kind of “came to us”—Liesel
says it was almost like a vision. Four
names plopped into our hearts. We knew we’d have a Moses and a Cates. Then, a
Sunday School class we were taking together turned our heads to Asa. And it
wasn’t long after that when we added a Lucy to the mix. Four names for four
children—none of which were even remotely born yet! But those four names were
in our hearts, and in keeping that promise we bought ornaments in the shape of the
letters M, C, A, and L, collected a Lucy-inscribed Coke bottle years ago, and
on a trip to Oregon in 2016 wrote all of our names in the sand, adding Lucy’s
as a kind of prayer.
The story of the next fourteen years unfolded (to our
delight) according to plan. Moses arrived first (we didn’t actually know he was
a boy until he showed up), then Cates, then Asa, and having the three of them
arrive, in order, and fill out their long-chosen names, created a real sense of
anticipation about the fourth. It was that unfulfilled fourth name that carried
Liesel through a series of difficult pregnancies, gave her a tender hope through
two consecutive miscarriages. We knew she’d come, and that with her arrival
our family would be complete. She is, if you will, Lucy, our caboose.
Perhaps unintentionally, each of our children’s names
follows a pattern. Both boys have first names that come from the Bible—Moses from
Genesis, and Asa one of the kings of Israel. Their second names are
meaningful to us. Moses Root is named after Jeremy’s friend and mentor Jerry
Root, and Asa St John is named for his favourite preacher, St John Chrysostom
(“Chrysostom” was just too much a name to saddle a child with). The girls both
have meaningful first names and theological second names. Cates, a family name
from Liesel’s side, and Hosanna (which means “Save us!”) is a prayer from the
Psalms.
Liesel and I both wanted to give a literary name to at least
one of our children, and since we love the Narnia stories, Lucy was an obvious
choice. Of the four Narnia children, Lucy Pevensie is the youngest and most
spiritually sensitive. She is tender, winsome, steadfast, and caring; she is
the first to enter Narnia, she gets to play
with Aslan and bury her face in his mane. She is the first to see him in Prince Caspian—invisible to her brothers
and sister—and in several of the books she is privy to many quiet, tender, and
intimate conversations with the great Lion. She is a child attuned to the thin
spaces between our world and the divine, navigating easily between those worlds.
Lucy, of course, means light,
and Joy is her second name. By Joy we have in mind, first, that Joy which is a
theological virtue, a fruit of the Spirit. But we also have in mind Lewis’s
longing-which-nothing-on-earth-can-satisfy, what he called sehnsucht—the burning of the heart which is satisfied by God and
God alone. When her names are put together, we think of Psalm 16:11, where it
says that “in thy presence is fulness of Joy”—in the presence of the light, in
the Joy of the king.
So welcome to our lives, Lucy Joy Rios! (Whom, at the
moment, we each adoringly call Luce, or Lulu, or Luli, or even LJ!) You are finally here. In your mom’s words, “You
are the culmination of my dreams come true, the prize at the bottom of my
cereal box. Our table and our hearts are full.”
Lucy, you have completed our
no-longer-little family, and we wouldn’t have it any other way!
