Ezekiel's First Year

This will probably be a long blog.  Mostly because I plan on just copying and pasting what Tyler wrote about Ezekiel's name 5 days after he was born.

First, I have to say a few things about this boy of mine.

He is, AWESOME.  He makes me laugh everyday, although most of the time I really shouldn't be laughing.  His sheer delight in being ornery is just...amusing.

The thing is, I've always had a thing for rascally boys...I just love them.  I've loved the rascally boys that come through my preschool class, then I married a rascally boy, and now God gave me a rascally boy.  I don't know what it is about them...they're awfully exhausting, and require great deals of patience, consistency and discipline...but they are just so endearing!

He is always busy.   Vi was an observer, so she was pretty content with things, usually just looking at everything around her.  Zeke is an explorer, an adventurer, a conqueror.   He just keeps at it... I have to admire his stamina and stubbornness.  He has fallen down the stairs almost every time we go to my friend Stephanie's house, but yet, he goes for them over and over again.   When I see him crawling towards the stairs (or any other place he knows he shouldn't go, like into the bathrooms), I yell "Hey! Zeke!" to which he smiles that ornery smile at me, and proceeds to power crawl towards the danger.

He is quick to smile, and I am a sucker for it.

He is going to grow into an amazingly awesome man one day.  Until then, here's something my husband wrote:

Sasha and I have many responses on the name of our son, mostly due to the middle name of course. Most people either love it or hate it. His first name is obviously a strong sounding name "The name of a Man's Man", this is probably due to the Z and the K in one name. Most people also relate his name to other people; Ezekiel= crazy prophet who saw some crazy things, yet talked to God all the time. Gambit= Xmen... Done. With that most people focus in on the "Gambit" part and either think it's "super cool" or hipster or stupid. The name started as a joke because we liked the name Ezekiel and we couldn't find anything that could stand with it as a middle name. Sasha likes to throw random names/things/sounds out there with names and when she threw Gambit out there as a joke, we both realized...wait, we actually like that.

  So, of course we told some people and of course some people forbid us to name our sun after a Xmen character. That's is when a joke turned into being stubborn and defiant. The longer we held to our guns the closer it got to d-day(delivery) and we thought “we should maybe be a bit more intentional about this name thing”. That is what I want to talk about. I want to explain that my sons name is awesome because of what it means. How what started as a joke turned into a name with purpose, intent and a calling on his life.

Ezekiel: God will strengthen

Gambit: A calculated risk

In life you cannot avoid risk. You cannot stop and watch as things change around you and expect to have any sort of success in anything. These days are not getting less risky, it is not getting easier to be a strong christian successful male. Success, how I see it, is gaged by the ability to live with risk. You cannot get married without risk, you cannot have kids without risk, you cannot have a job paying above minimum wage without risk. Success is not gaged by the number attached to you bank account but by the quantity or quality of lives you have changed. 

I love his expressions.

 Back to the point. To be a man is to take risks. We jump off couches as soon as we can walk, and the height at which we jump only gets greater as we grow up. We ask out the girl, the girl who is way out of our league, then we ask her dad to marry her. The nature of the gender is to conquer and you cannot do that without risk. And to be successful at being a male you have to know how high you can jump from. This has stayed true for all of my 26 years of life and I have heard nothing about change in the future.

 The charge that I am putting on the name of my son is that he does this all while being “strengthened by God”. This is The God of David, a punk kid who killed a giant with a rock. This is The God of Moses, who couldn’t speak right but went in front of the most powerful man in the world and said “let my people go” and got what he wanted. This is The God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego,  who wouldn’t bow down to an huge golden idol then walked with Jesus in a fiery furnace and lived. These men took calculated risks, but the calculation is not one of this world. It’s not something that can be proven by science or math. The variable in these equations is that these men were strengthened by God. 

So when I say the name Ezekiel Gambit I am saying the name of a man that calculates risk on a level much bigger than himself. He calculates risk based on the strength that he has been given from The God that has loved him before I did.

Happy First birthday Ezekiel!