12/15/2021 - 12:10 pm
Paige gave birth to Ophelia Belle Van Voorst
8 lbs. 8 oz, 21 1/2"
happy... healthy.
Our 8th child and 5th daughter is Ophelia Belle which means "helpful beauty," or "beautiful helper."
Ophelia
Ophelia is derived from a Greek word meaning, "help, aid, succour, especially in war" according to Strong's #5622 (ὠφέλεια, ἡ, ōphéleia, o-fel'-i-ah).
Your mom is named Paige, which means "servant, assistant, helper." Her name is a take on her mother's maiden name, Page. Your big sister, Penelope's middle name is Page. You are named after your mother's family line, your mom in particular and your big sister. May you grow up to be beautiful and helpful in the eyes of God and man, just like them.
The name "helper" is also fitting in that God made women to be helpers. It is who they are and what they are when they are glorifying their God.
Genesis 2:18
And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.
Woman, however, was not made merely to help Man with his loneliness. She wasn't merely a companion, though she certainly was not less than that. She was a co-laborer. Man had been given the high and noble task of dominating the world. God showed man the pattern by planting a garden called Eden and said, "Now go and do this to all of that," with "all of that" being every other square inch of planet earth. God gave man dominion and commanded him to take it. But man was not capable of accomplishing this goal on his own. He needed help. He needed more hands on deck. What he needed was a woman. And that is what God made for him. This woman was not only an extra set of hands, she was a different set of hands. She was made for hard work just like him, but different work. And to top it all off, she wasn't merely another worker, but she possessed inside herself an ability to house and grow more workers. She had a garden inside of her that could bring forth fruit. Just as man had been made from the ground and woman from man, so woman was given a ground from which all future generations of men and women would spring. She was a helper indeed. No wonder Adam's first reaction was the Hebrew akin to "Whoa! What a woman!"
Before woman there was work. After her creation, there was still work, but now there was poetry. The first recorded words of the first man in the history of the world were inspired by a woman and they were beautiful. She drew that out of him. The grace of God is hard work and hymnody working together in harmony. Callouses build things and caress makes them habitable. Man didn't just need more hands. Another man would have sufficed for that. Man needed a set of hands unlike his own. The woman not only multiplied the number of hands hard at work, but magnified the work by being a different kind of hands. Feminine strength cultivates beauty, nurtures life, makes a home, and makes babies. It is good and godly work that no man could do.
Ophelia in Greek means help, especially in war. Reinforcements are always a breath of fresh air. War is inescapable and everyone has their part to play. While women are prohibited from being outfitted as foot soldiers (Dt 22:5), it doesn't mean they are exempt from the war effort. Everyone is called to contribute to the war effort. The domestic theater of the war nourishes warriors and provides them with a strong desire to defend it. Beauty is dangerous. Better to face a mama bear robbed of her cubs than a man defending a home he loves.
Song of Solomon 6:10
Who is she that looketh forth as the morning,
fair as the moon, clear as the sun,
and terrible as an army with banners?
Beauty is dangerous. It is like an opposing army decked out with waving banners. It strikes fear in to heart of those gazing at the army-clad horizon. Women are like that. They are strong and influential. They move men. They are gifted with powerful persuasiveness. Eve had a great deal of sway in the Garden. She convinced Adam to go against his better judgment. She was deceived, he wasn't. He went into sin eyes wide-opened because of his desire to give in to Eve.
Beauty wins. That is why it is so important that it accompany truth and goodness.
Belle
Belle means "beautiful" in French. In our time, one hardly hears the name without immediately thinking of Beauty and the Beast where the female protagonist is named Belle. She is the beautiful youngest daughter and her beauty wins over her beastly captor and the spell that bound him. Beauty, in the end, wins. It reforms the deformed and reverses the curse.
In Latin, the word bellum means "war." This is fitting since beauty is warfare. It fiercely opposes the ugly and conquers it. Beauty is not burning the house down, but in remodeling it. It doesn't draw beauty out of something, but infuses beauty into it. As Doug TenNapel points out in his Nnewts trilogy, beauty is a weapon. It unmakes the ugly. Beauty overcomes.
....
Ophelia, my prayer is that you would be a beautiful woman of God, inside and out, just like your mom. May you make the world more beautiful and may your beauty destroy many of the works of darkness that surround us. May you help mankind take dominion of God's earth in the name of Jesus: for His sake and for our good. May you make men better by being what only you can be. May you make mankind in every sense of the word: bearing them, raising them, educating then, shaping them, and nourishing them.
Genesis 24:60
And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, "Thou art our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them."
May you be the mother of millions and may they be nourished and raised under your care to join the good fight and be good at fighting it to the extent that the gates of hell prevail not against them. Amen.
God bless you baby girl.
I can't wait to get to know you.
Love,
Daddy
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