Lily-an's Name

I just realized that Mike didn't update the whole story on how we came to the name Lily-an. As he stated, her name came to me in a dream early last July. I had a dream that I was holding our daughter and calling her by name. Then I actually had to write her name down in the dream, which was rather odd and memorable, how often do you write something in a dream? The name I was saying and wrote down was Lillian. I didn't share the dream with Mike right away. I just kind of tucked it away. At that particular time I was struggling to keep my hope and faith alive. I didn't want to share it right away because I was afraid Mike might not like the name and that it would dash the little piece of hope I was hanging onto, that the dream was God's little burst of encouragement to me. But the next Sunday after the dream I just felt God urging me to share the name with Mike. So during the middle of the service I whispered to him "I think I know our baby's name" and passed him a slip of paper with Lily-an written on in. We had both discussed that we would like to give our child an authentic Chinese name. Lillian was not very Chinese:-) So I changed the spelling to Lily-an. At this point, however, I had no idea what the Chinese ending "an" meant. Flowers are very symbolic in Chinese culture, but I didn't know the particulars on the lily either.
Needless to say Mike liked the name. So after church I got out my Chinese name book and started looking up the meanings. I decided to choose a Chinese symbol to represent Lily. There were many types of lilies that had different meanings, but I settled on the Morning Star Lily which symbolizes strength and determination. "an" can mean either peace or white and I thought those were both appropriate as well. Then comes the kicker. I wanted to know what a Morningstar Lily looked like (the gardener in me) so I Googled Morningstar Lily. But instead of a bunch of horticultural websites, the first listing was a Chinese name. You can't imagine the goose bumps I felt when I opened the page.

http://www.guanweixing.com/ychildgal2/ymshandandan.htm

The second listing was also a Chinese name. All I could think of after I listened to the song called "Morningstar Lily" is that God just gave me a glimpse of our daughter's personality. Light and full of joy.

http://www.last.fm/music/Lei+Qiang/_/Morning+Star+Lily

After going through some of the darkest days of this wait, that dream and those two websites confirmed in my heart that God still had his hand in all of this. Now we had a name, and I remember telling Mike that maybe this means our daughter has been born. When I had that dream Xiao Hua would have been about two weeks old.
It is incredible to look back and see how perfectly God has directed every part of this journey.