Kenny and I were hiking through the woods, debating which name to use for our firstborn son. We had two names selected and determined we would call our first child “Jamieson” which means Yahweh will protect. The other name we tucked away for another day, another child.

God gave us two beautiful girls after that, Ava and Calla. Our fourth child, another boy, was born 9 months after my dad passed away. We wanted to use my dad’s middle name, Michael, so we decided to choose a different first name than we had originally picked when we were pregnant with Jamieson. So Bryant Michael joined our family. After that we were blessed with another beautiful little girl, Leila Grace.

Long before we knew our little boy’s face, we prayed for him by name, that other boy name we had tucked away over a decade ago. We prayed God would protect him, save him, and bring him into our family. When we were matched with our boy, he was already Warren to us, which means “protector”.

Tears filled our eyes as we learned that his given name was “Anmol” which means valuable, precious. He was valuable and precious to us long before we knew him, long before he was born. And long before he was precious to us, he was precious to God, made in God’s image. And his second middle name, Isaiah, means “Yahweh is salvation”. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me.” This is what is true, the truest reality that allows life to make sense. We long for our boy to know and understand this: that salvation and eternal life come through Christ alone.

How sweet that the two names we picked when we were pregnant with our first child, became the bookends of our family—Jamieson, “Yahweh will protect” and Warren, “protector”. So meet our boy, Warren Anmol Isaiah Kirby. We pray he will be a protector of that which is good and true and beautiful. We long for him to know that he is beloved by us and beloved by God. And we pray that he will soon understand and believe that Yahweh is his salvation.