What's in a Name?

One of the tougher decisions parents need to make is naming their babies. There is a lot of pressure when picking a name. We always picture our child as an adult either playing sports or running a major company (hey a parent can dream), and say their name in association with a profession to see if we find it too trendy or something that will go out of style and sound unprofessional some day.

With Brooks, we actually picked his name while driving down the road and listening to Sirius radio. A Garth Brooks song came on the radio, Bryant looked down and said, "Brooks! That's a cool name!" And I instantly loved it too... so it stuck. We came up with Liam as Bryant wanted our first son to have an Irish name, and Liam is the last half of William (Bryant's first name). So, we went with Liam Brooks Ragan, and we call him Brooks, and it suits him so well.

When it came to choosing a name for boy number 2, I decided to pray about it and see what God wanted us to name him. Within days we were sitting at a Sunday night service at our church and Brent preached about courage and mentioned the stories of Joshua (also the name of his son born in August), and Caleb from the Old Testament. I quietly stored that in the back of my head as a possible name, but wasn't totally sold...yet.

That night we were laying in bed, and Bryant randomly said, "what about Caleb?" I excitedly replied back, "I knew you were going to say that!" So, we decided to try it out for a while, and decided we really liked the name.

Then Bryant went on his trip to South Africa. While there, the group spent a lot of time at Northpoint Church in Johannesburg. During a Wednesday night prayer meeting, the members of the church prayed over the guys from Aspen. A random stranger came to pray over Bryant and part of what she said was, "...And I just felt God say that you are like Caleb..." When Bryant told me this story, we knew that was the name God had for our second son.

Now to pick a middle name. As I mentioned in a previous post, this will probably be a game time decision.