Throwback Thursday: Svante the Swedish wheelchair

(I plan to post "Throwback Thursday" every two weeks, remembering great moments in my life with a disability...)

It was the end of June, 2012, when I found myself sipping a celebratory iced raspberry mocha at my favorite coffee shop, and do you know why? Because I was the proud parent of Svante the Svedish veelchair! 

I had originally planned to name him James Bond - not for the dashing action-packed 007, but for the stout wheelchair man who first took measurements and detailed notes to create him way back in January. I also considered a green-based name like Kermit, because I ordered a green frame. But today the green frame proved to be really too dark and subtle to be worthy of an iconic green name, and James Bond was absent in the delivery room, and I learned he actually had very little to do with its development. 

Do you know who was responsible for the development and deep green-ness? The Swedes! And so, since the Swedes get overlooked and underappreciated so much, I decided to pay tribute to their excellence in wheelchair building by giving my chair a Swedish name. "Svante" is a common Swedish boy name, and it means "holy." I had not planned on my first adopted international child to be green and have six wheels, nor for him to be from extreme Northern Europe, but of course, God's plans are often not my own. 

Here is the prayer from Ephesians 3 that Svante and I chose to strive to live out fully together: 

"And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge —that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God."