Mana!

I think everyone would wonder how their parents came up with the name at least once in a life time. When I was in my teen I went to the bible dictionary expecting to find something exciting. To my surprise or disappointment, the original meaning of Manna, "Man hu" was translated as "what is it?". That was what the people of Moses uttered when they saw Manna from the Heaven for the first time. I tried to come up with more positive implication, but "What is it?" was pretty tough to spice up.

My name also has a Chinese character means love and charity. So, when we read the scriptures we replace love to my name Mana.
The Mana of God means the love of God in our family. I hope this is not blasphemy, but I think it's kind of cool.

Later, I discovered other meanings of my name from St John chapter 6. Manna is the bread of life, the love of God, and that also means Savior, Himself.

" I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.

53 Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you." (ST. John 6:51-53)

I really appreciate my parents name me after something so dear to my soul. I often ponder His love when I think about my name.

P.S. I heard a rumor that my parents already decided my name or Chinese character, but my cousin was born before me with the same name. (Chinese characters can be read in several ways, so it is possible to have multiple different names from the same characters) Then, they changed the phonetic pronunciation without changing the Chinese character. Well, my parents said they don't know or they cannot remember much if that is true when I asked about that.

*The first picture is our Temple trip to Edmonton Temple,
but we missed the session
because we shopped too much!