God's spotlight

When we first saw this sweet face with the name "Rayna" attached, I felt like God had shone a spotlight on her for us.  Of all the thousands of orphans available for adoption, she might be the one meant for us.

The adoption agency presumably picked the security name Rayna completely arbitrarily, but we know the meaning of that name, and we felt like God was singing His song for our family again.  And over the next few weeks He gave us some interesting confirmations that caused us to continue to believe this.

Meanwhile, we learned that the Chinese orphanage gave her the name Jin Rui, and her nickname as she's grown up there is Rui-Rui.  We've been pronouncing it, "Roo-ee--Roo-ee," (which seemed like a bit of a mouthful!)

Yesterday, though, we finally had our first Chinese language lesson and the woman tutoring us went over all of the letter sounds with us.  When she got to, "ui," she told us it was pronounced, "aaay."

"Wait a minute," I interrupted her, "So, how would you pronounce Rui?"

"Raaay," she answered.  (This, of course, is very happy sound to me, being a Wray all my life!)

I went and got the Chinese documents we have about our daughter and showed them to our tutor to make sure I understood correctly and that there wasn't something in the tonal element of the language I was missing.  "So what would her nickname be?" I asked.

"Raaay-Raaay," she said.

So...... for the last 6 years, our daughter in China has had the same nickname as our Ray-Ray here in our home!  Both of our daughters have had the same nickname!

When Pete and I talked about this later he said that when the language tutor told us this, he decided he shouldn't make eye contact with me right then because we might get too emotional in front of her.  :)

I told the kids about this later and Colsen's response was, "I mean, it's like it's God's spotlight telling us that this is the one that's supposed to be in our family!"

My thoughts exactly.

We got new pictures of her yesterday!