Why Lukas David?

I'm writing this on Lukas's due date, which now just so happens to be exactly a week from when my labor was induced and Lukas's six-day birthday. First of all, thank you for all the wonderful comments and congratulation emails that you've sent to us over the past six days. We have so cherished reading them and knowing that our loved ones are just as delighted as we are about the arrival of our first born son.

As many of you have commented on our choice for his name, Lukas David Höltje, I thought I would take the time to write about why we chose that name. Most of you know that we were looking for names that sounded similar in both German and English so that he could easily "fit in" when interacting in both cultures. Lukas and David both fit that requirement. However, more than this, we wanted the meaning of the names to be something special that we could tell our son about when he is old enough to understand. When we began thinking about names, I was convinced that I wanted a Biblical name so as to give our little one a "role model". Lukas is a derivative of the name Luke and as Luke was one of the New Testament gospel writers, we thought that he would be a great example for our little one to learn about. David is also a Biblical name and many aspects of his life make him worthy of being a role model as he was a courageous boy who trusted God to help him stand up against Goliath and later on was described as "a man after God's own heart".

We also wanted to take into account the meanings of the names that we chose and we wanted them to say something about the person we want our son to be and the way we feel about him. Lukas means "bringer of light" and our son sure has brought light into our lives already in the six days of his existence in the "real world". More importantly, however, we hope and pray that our son will, like Luke in the Bible, one day come to know Jesus, the Light of the world. David means "beloved" and our little guy is exactly that! (A little trivia fact/"inside info.": After seeing Michelangelo's beautiful and masculine statue of David in Florence, Italy a couple of years ago, my affinity with the name David increased even more :-) )

We decided to spell Lukas with the traditional German spelling as we really like the way it looks and it makes more sense to me that if he wants to go by Luke when he's older, his first name be spelled with a "k" rather than a "c" and since our Lukas is half German, it seemed only natural to spell his name this way!