Theran and I chose Ryler’s name when I was 40+ weeks pregnant, and no earlier. Had he been prem, he would have been extremely name-less. Friends forced babysitting services upon us and we landed up at a dessert spot down the road with coffee and cake and our ‘notes’ (not lists, notes). These included a billion pieces of paper with different words, in different languages, different meanings and parts broken up into different understandings with the majority of it all involving a generous amount of creative license.
You see, names are a pretty big deal in our family.
We had been in a season of very, very rich and beautiful community, the kind that changes who you are – the Ubuntu kind. We had lived amongst a community so intertwined and raw, so desperately loved and needing of each other, so open and real, we had changed. We lived amongst beauty, amongst hope and amongst struggle. We’d paid each other rent when we were out of jobs, we spotted each other’s coffee, textbooks and specials at The GAP. We cried, loved, laughed, and laboured together (literally, the baby-being-born kind). We had shared the heartbreak of miscarriage and sick parents and the joys of new life, dreams fulfilled and half marathons completed. It wasn’t so much the big stuff that changed us, although obviously it does, but it was that space in between. The space in between the first coffee and the second on a good friends’ couch or the taste of delicately flavoured food between mouthfuls. It’s the sound of the music between the notes.
The spaces (the points of time) between the beats of a heart is when the blood is forcably pushed into the new ventricle or atrium. It’s that space. It’s not the beat itself that is the big deal, but that time in-between, when the blood gets to where it’s going and does its job. Sure, it needs the heart to beat to do it, and the heart receives due credit, but the movement of the blood doesn’t get a pat on the shoulder when it does. But that’s when the magic happens.
Think about your in-between.
And so on April 29th 2014, just before 7am, after a beautifully real and intense labour (another significant space between), and water birth, Ryler Cael became Ryler Cael – We are : We become in the space between. We are, because YOU are.
And so to our dear Ryler – may you become an inspirer, a community builder, an intentionally relational being, an arm-lifter of the weak.
And as his daddy said to him on the day he was born, ‘the love is in the space between us; you’ll always be safe there’.
