Tuesday, June 8, 2010

And the Lion Shall Lie Down with the ...

Lev Eleos Oldenburg was born on Friday, May 28 at 2:25 AM. Here he is with his brother who, until that Friday, seemed like the smallest three-year-old boy in the universe.


Now picking up Dietrich is like picking up a big bag of rocks and I feel like Lev is simply one of Dietrich's stuffed animals. Everything was new with D but, with time, a lot of those new and "unforgettable" experiences have been forgotten, or at least pushed way back in the memory. With Lev it is all coming back again and it is all precious and "unforgettable," just like the first time.

OK, enough with the comparisons. Lev is a Slavic name that means lion, hence the title of this post. We wanted a name that worked well here and, once we thought of Lev, we couldn't get it out of our heads. He is not named after Leo Tolstoy, although Lev was Leo's real name. From what we've been told, Lev is a rare, dignified and manly name around these parts, but we just like wildlife, and the Messianic connotations. Eleos is the Greek word for mercy, which we feel Lev represents after our previous, tragic birth experience. A great passage using the word is I Peter 1:3-5. All of the beautiful descriptions of the salvific realities in which Christians abide are all by the mercy of God. For us, Lev exemplifies that mercy.

We love Lev and, whether you pronounce it with a Russian tongue, like me (Lyehv), or with Ukrainian tongue, like Josie (Lehv), we think you will love him too.

1 comment:

hjw said...

I posted Congrats on Josie's blog too ... but I wanted to say it to you as well ... Congratulations! And indeed, God is good. What an awesome gift Lev is. I hope to get to meet him one day!