What's in a name?

Baby names...We never really talked about baby names until after we found out we were pregnant. But we both quickly agreed on a boy's name that we loved...Jackson Ray James. (or Jaxon-we never really decided on which spelling we liked.) Ray is Jonathan's middle name so we wanted to use that for a boy and we both just love the name Jackson (or maybe it had something to do with Stonewall Jackson for why Jonathan liked it so much!) But we could never really decide on a girl name...we had a couple of top contenders but nothing really stood out to us early on. Well, when we found out we were having a girl, we knew we had to tackle that and give our little one a name!

Since Jonathan found out the gender before I did, he started looking at lists of girl names. We like the older/traditional names so he looked at turn-of-the-century names and one stood out to him...Georgia. He told me the name he had found and I had to admit that the name never stood out to me before (cause I am sure I went over that name in all the lists that I looked at!) but I really like it! Then we looked at the meaning of the name "Georgia." We had always wanted a name that had a great meaning behind it. When we searched for the meaning we found that Georgia means "farmer" which we weren't too excited about. We were hoping for something a little more, I guess, deep... So we kept looking for another name hoping to find one that we would love and love the meaning of the name. As we looked through more lists and thought of more potential names, everything was being compared to Georgia. We just had this feeling that Georgia might be it...despite us not being too excited about the meaning behind the name.

One morning, Jonathan was driving by himself up to his parents' land in Oklahoma and the Lord gave him new meaning to Georgia's name. God told him that He wanted Georgia to be a "cultivator of hearts." Jonathan read the definition of cultivate for me after he told me what the Lord had said to him...

Cultivate:
1) to improve and prepare
2) to grow or tend
3) to promote the growth of
4) to nurture; foster
5) to form and refine
6) to seek the acquaintance or goodwill of; make friends with

After hearing this it confirmed that Georgia Renee James would be our baby girl's name! And we pray everyday that she will cultivate the hearts of everyone she will encounter! We are so thankful that God has blessed us with the task of raising one of His precious children and we pray that we will show her what the love of the Father is like and point her to Christ in all that we do!