Names and Baby Journals

I posted this picture on my Instagram account over eight months ago.  Way before we announced our adoption publicly, and before we even had told most of our family that we had definitely decided to adopt.

My caption said:
New journal tonight. ❤️

That night we started journaling to our little girl.  Much in the same way that we journaled to Edmund the first day we found out we were pregnant (his journal is the animal print on the left, hers is the right with the umbrellas).

As we've been journaling to her I have wanted a name to call her.  An endearment of some kind in Chinese.  But when I tried to look up words and their translations I didn't feel like any of them fit.  So I just left it alone and hope at some point to find the right endearment.

One Saturday when my step-dad and mom came back from church they were sharing about what they had studied in church.  One thing that my step-dad shared was how in Genesis 20 there is a word when dealing with Sarah that has a root word that in Hebrew means "longed for."  I immediately thought of our daughter and how she is deeply longed for.  But when I did a brief search I couldn't find the Hebrew word.

Shortly after that I was reading Proverbs and felt that I should stop at a particular verse and do verse mapping.  (Verse mapping is an incredible Bible study tool, I highly recommend it!)  As I got to the part where I look up the original words and their meanings I remembered about Genesis 20, so I paused and went there using the app I use for word study during verse mapping.  When I found the verse I pulled up the word "silver" and then clicked into the root word.  The root word for silver is kacaph which means, "to long for, yearn for, long after, to long for deeply."

And suddenly I thought, what if "silver" translated in Chinese was something nice and easy that I could call our daughter?  Something that to me and in Hebrew meant deeply longed for?  So I looked it up.

The translation for silver is Yín.

Simple and perfect.  I felt a rush of peace and joy.  I had a name to call her.  An endearment that shows exactly how I feel for her.

Yín, deeply longed for.

银