Capture Your Grief - Day 16 - Full Moon Retreat

I'm not sure that I've ever written about the reasons we chose Abigail's name, other than mentioning that it was the one name while she was alive that Gary kinda liked, and I really liked.  All of our children have a biblical name.  We not only were looking for names that we liked the sound of but we wanted them to all have a name that when they read about the character in the bible that we named them for, that they would have a role model.  Someone worth emulating, someone who's life pointed toward God.  Britt's first name is Elisha like the prophet.  Ruth is named for my favorite book of the Bible.  Rebecca is named both for a women in the old testament who showed great faith, and she has a virtue name as well.

Abigail has two Biblical names.  I like the story of Abigail in the Bible.  She was initially married to a foolish and disagreeable man, who insulted David.  But we are told that she was not only beautiful but wise, and her quick action and wisdom averted danger from her household.  Shortly after that the Lord struck down Nabal that he died, and Abigail married David.  There is another Abigail that I have often admired, who was a wise women and revolutionary for her age - Abigail Adams.  She was considered too sickly as a child to have a formal education, but her mother taught her at home, and she was on of the brightest and most vocal of young women of her age.  She argued for women's rights to property, business, education, and the vote; that slavery be ended, and blacks given an education.  Yet, she was also a passionate wife and mother.  Her husband, John valued her opinion and though they disagreed at times, he respected it a great deal.  She also was endlessly supportive of him as a lawyer just starting out, a member of the Continental Congress, and later on an Ambassador and President.  She spent months on end managing their farm, business, and children while he was away.  She also had six children one of which died at 2 and another that was stillborn.  She was a feminist in the truest sense of the word, both a woman apologetically embracing who she was as such, but also unwilling to be less than who she could be.  She is, to me, the most fascinating woman of the Revolutionary period.  I had hoped for that kind of wisdom, fire, and respect in a daughter.

10-17, Gary captured a photo of the moon at the farm this morning as the sun was rising.