Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

For Those Who Keep Vigil at Night

This is a word for those who find themselves awake when the rest of the world sleeps.

  • For the one plagued by worry
  • For the one caring for someone who is ill
  • For the one haunted by insomnia
  • For the one begging for their prodigal to return home
  • For the one toiling on the night shift

And, yes, for the one trying to comfort an inconsolable infant in the wee hours.

As anyone who has stood sentry at night knows, everything seems bleaker under the blanket of darkness. Shadows grow menacing. Minutes feel like hours. Anxiety morphs into full-blown fear.

I’m not sure why this is, exactly. We have artificial light, after all, and we’ve long outgrown our fear of the dark. But something about those middle-of-the-night hours releases our monsters from their hiding.

I have a hunch that one of the reasons nighttime is so hard is because it has a way of isolating us. It makes us think we’re the only ones marking this bleak and desolate hour. In the absence of our usual defenses, we feel alone, and rather small.

If you find yourself doing battle by night, I want you to know that you do not keep this vigil alone. There is someone who sits by your bedside, someone who waits with you, someone who toils alongside you. There is someone whose love is not bound by time, someone who sticks by you even when it’s inconvenient, someone who doesn’t clock out when the sun goes down.

The psalmist puts it this way:

The one who watches over you will not slumber.
Indeed, he who watches over Israel
    never slumbers or sleeps.

Psalm 121:3-4

Even when the rest of the world is asleep, God is awake. And because of that, you can rest . . . even if you can’t sleep.

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.

Victor Hugo

God as a Nursing Mother

It may be the season of epiphanies, but in this season of sleepless nights, as Daniel and I wake to feed a hungry or otherwise disconsolate newborn, I can barely string two coherent thoughts together. (Case in point: I recently found the peanut butter in the cabinet with the frying pans and lost in a game of a memory to a three-year-old.)

But the other night, as I thought about this verse from Isaiah, it made some kind of three-in-the-morning sense:

Can a mother forget her nursing child?
    Can she feel no love for the child she has borne?
But even if that were possible,
    I would not forget you!

Isaiah 49:15

I’ve long loved this tender image of the mother-like love of God. But I thought of the love it describes only in terms of volitional love—the love a mother chooses for her child, the love God chooses for his people.

But now, as I find myself overflowing with milk in the wee hours of the morning, it occurs to me: a nursing mother’s love is more than an act of sentimentality. In fact, it’s hardly a choice at all. She has milk to give, milk that must come forth. It’s part of her very nature, and it will pain her not to give what she has.

And so it is with God. Love pours out of him; it is part of his very nature. He must give love.

According to scholars, the Hebrew word for love used in this chapter of Isaiah also means “womb.” God is not distant or aloof; he pulses with love—the kind of mysterious, unbreakable bond that forms between a mother and her child as the child rests beneath her own pulsing heart.

God is committed to you with an irrepressible love—a love that flows out like a life-giving force. He loves you with a womb-love that defies explanation. He is tethered to you, by choice and by nature.

He could no more stop loving you than he could stop being God.

We are never more restricted nor more liberated than when we are in love.

C. S. Lewis

No Room

When I was at the doctor’s office for a prenatal visit recently (something that is beginning to feel like a part-time job these days), I came across a diagram with two side-by-side images, one depicting the internal organs of a woman before pregnancy, and one with a child inside.

I was stunned to see the way the pregnant woman’s insides shifted and squished into odd pockets to accommodate her new resident. The bladder, I noted with special interest, was tucked underneath the baby and all but flattened. This explains so much!

I think about Mary and Joseph knocking on door after door in Bethlehem, looking for someplace that would accommodate them, only to hear over and over, “No room.” I wonder if Mary felt a twinge of irony at those words as she looked at her extravagant belly. You want to hear about no room? Please talk to my gallbladder!

But there’s a secret about hospitality—one that a woman great with child knows in an intimate way: There is never room. You have to say yes and trust that the space will grow to accommodate your guest.

True hospitality means you don’t wait until you have a bigger house, a bigger budget, a bigger heart. You don’t wait until you have more time, more margin, more furniture. You extend the invitation in faith, and trust that your space will expand, proportional to the need.

This Christmas, hospitality looks very different than it does most years. For most of us, there won’t be large gatherings, holiday parties, dinners with friends. So what does hospitality mean in the face of a pandemic and social distancing? Maybe, in reality, hospitality is smaller in scope than we think. Maybe it’s simply about making room within our crowded lives for someone who needs a little love.

This year, maybe hospitality looks like loving the people directly in your bubble. Maybe it means setting aside your crowded to-do list and making space to listen or play with Legos or whisper a prayer. Maybe it means expanding the borders of your heart to love someone who isn’t particularly lovable. Maybe it means saying yes to something you know is right before you’ve figured out exactly how to pull it off.

Maybe hospitality means saying yes before the space is there, before the energy is there, before the love is there . . . and trusting that God will make a space where there wasn’t any before.

Into this world, this demented inn in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes uninvited.

Thomas Merton

Those Twins, Hope and Fear

In the midst of Advent, we find ourselves in the space between.

Between the promise and the fulfillment.
Between the announcement and the arrival.
Between the almost and the not-yet.

There is beauty in the in-between time, as we light candles and imagine a future of fulfilled hopes. But there is also trembling, as we put our most vulnerable dreams on the line, crowded by so much uncertainty.

I’m reminded of that haunting line from “O Little Town of Bethlehem”:

The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight

O Little Town of Bethlehem

As anyone who has ever waited knows, true Advent isn’t just opening windows on a calendar, ticking off the days until Christmas. Waiting is full of hope, yes, but it’s also fraught with angst. There is so much we don’t know: When? How long? How? And what will the waiting cost?

As we count down the days until we meet our baby, we find ourselves in an Advent of our own. When will Baby arrive? How much longer will our waiting be? Will we know when it’s time? What will we find on the other side of our waiting?

There’s a poem by John Donne that includes this gem of a line:

Pregnant again with th’ old twins, Hope and Fear

John Donne

And that’s exactly what waiting feels like, what Advent feels like: hope and fear, mingled inextricably together. We can’t have one twin without the other. We have no choice but to carry the weight of both.

But from where we stand, on the other side of the Incarnation, we have a hint about how the story ends. While we will contend with both hope and fear as long as we live on this earth, one day fear will be swallowed up forever. One day hope will win.

And so we let those twins wrestle inside us as we wait, knowing that Christ’s birth ushered in an era of hope. And when he returns, all our hopes will be forever met in him.  

The Incarnation is the place, if you will, where hope contends with fear.

Kathleen Norris

The Risk of Love

I was talking to a friend the other day about how terrifying this world can be. She agreed and then said something I’ve been thinking about ever since: “I wonder if every decision we make is motivated by either fear or love.”

Love in any form is risky. But when you love a pint-sized human being, you begin to realize just how vulnerable your heart is and how little control you have. You would step in the path of a raging mountain lion for this little person; you would take a bullet headed their way; you would jump into the rapids to save them . . . and yet there are approximately 79 ways they could die before breakfast. And that’s to say nothing of the ways they could rebel against you or reject everything you hold dear or otherwise break your heart.

To the pragmatic mind, love seems like a fool’s choice. Surely the risk is too great, especially when there’s no guarantee about the outcome. If our decision is based on fear, we’ll never put our hearts out there to get trampled. But if our decision is motivated by love, we will have the courage to make the scary, risky leap of love.  

Mercifully, we have a God who didn’t just command us to love; he took the risk of love himself. Madeleine L’Engle captures this idea of love incarnate in her poem “The Risk of Birth.”

This is no time for a child to be born,
With the earth betrayed by war and hate
And a comet slashing the sky to warn
That time runs out and the sun burns late.

That was no time for a child to born,
In a land in the crushing grip of Rome;
Honour and truth were trampled by scorn—
Yet here did the Saviour make his home.

When is the time for love to be born?
The inn is full on the planet earth,
And by a comet the sky is torn—
Yet Love still takes the risk of birth.

Madeleine L’Engle

Bringing love of any kind into the world is fraught with risk. Hurricanes strike. Bombs drop. Cars crash. Doctors bear bad news. The world shifts under our feet. When is the time for love to be born?

So I guess it comes down to this: Don’t wait for the conditions to be right. Take the risk of love. Take the risk of birth. If God himself became love incarnate when it was no time for a child to be born, then we, too, can love . . . even when the timing is all wrong.

Watchers at a Holy Place

It could be argued that the year 2020 has needed a lot of things. At first, the lack was immediate, tangible. We needed toilet paper, bottled water, hand sanitizer. But as the pandemic has dragged on, it’s our emotional reserves that we’ve found most lacking. We paced ourselves for a sprint, then a marathon, only to find that the finish line keeps moving.

We are weary. We are divided. We are out of creative ideas. We are dreading a long winter. And perhaps what we need more than anything else is hope.

***

At the outset, it seemed like a terrifying prospect to be pregnant in a year marked by a pandemic, not to mention social unrest and political upheaval. Besides the imminent concerns of not having Daniel with me at doctor visits and wondering what delivery would look like in the era of COVID, I had other, more existential questions: What kind of world were we bringing a baby into? What kind of fractured cultural legacy were we passing on to the next generation?

But as the months have progressed with Baby Hope (as we’ve nicknamed the baby for now) growing inside me, I think this is actually the best way to weather such a fractious year. With each week that passes, I see Hope growing under my very nose. With each kick beneath my ribs, I reckon with life that marches onward. With each day that brings me closer to meeting this little person, I have no choice but to invest my heart in the future.

And I think that’s what God would want us to do, whether we’re pregnant with a child or pregnant with hope. I think he wants us to keep investing. Keep loving. Keep believing.  

The thing about babies is that, like hope, they tend to grow little by little, almost imperceptibly. We have to be intentional about seeing the hope . . . and recognizing that this place we’re standing, as tumultuous as it may be, is indeed holy ground.

In her book Showing, author and professor Agnes R. Howard writes about the common yet miraculous events that transpire when a baby grows inside the mother:

A pregnant woman is honored as audience and collaborator, a watcher at a holy place, attending God doing something new. She is present at this creation.

Agnes R. Howard

I believe God is at work all around us, unfolding new miracles every day. Even in 2020—maybe especially in 2020. The question is whether we will recognize them or not. Will we be watchers at this holy place?

The pregnant woman gets the revelation first. . . . The rest of us wait to encounter the new person for the first time. The expectant woman is not waiting in the same way. She already has encountered the new person. She already knows something.

Agnes R. Howard

And so it is for those who have heard whispers of the coming Kingdom. We are waiting for the full glory of God to be revealed, but we aren’t waiting in the same way the rest of the world is. We have already encountered the little pulses of hope. We have felt the quickening in our hearts. We already know something.

So as we mark this first week of Advent, I dare you to choose hope. See it. Seek it. Fight for it. And when the fulfillment comes, be ready to cradle it in your arms.

Toddler-Style Lament

I’m no expert in child development, but I have had a front-row seat to my share of toddler tantrums lately. Based on my unscientific analysis, I would venture to say there are two categories of tantrums: the clinging kind and the flinging kind. (Of course, in the middle of said tantrum, it feels like the categories are loud or louder; public or more public).

After the tsunami-force winds die down, I try to catch my breath and take stock of what just happened. It seems like my son goes one of two directions in the midst of his big feelings: he either launches himself away from me or glues himself to me. If it’s a flinging tantrum, he squirms out of my reach and throws himself onto the floor. If it’s a clinging tantrum, he wraps his little arms around my neck or leg—all the while sobbing as if to fill a small bathtub.

I’ve been reading the Psalms recently, and I’ve been struck anew by the chord of lament that runs through so many of them. I’ve had my own seasons of lament . . . times of waiting, times when God seemed silent, times when I had to reckon with a “no” to a deeply longed-for prayer.

In my seasons of lament, I confess that at times I’ve responded with a flinging tantrum. I have launched myself out of God’s arms. For reasons that defy logic, I choose a dirty floor over his loving arms. I refuse to bring him my tears, my confusion, my weariness.

I’m so grateful for the Psalms, because there are no verses that say “Thou shalt suck it up” or “Thou shalt get a grip.” Instead, these ancient songs encourage lament . . . when we do so in the context of holding on to our Father. 

Faithful lament, I would maintain, is akin to a clinging tantrum. It’s beating our Father’s chest with our fists and letting our tears soak his shirt. It’s grabbing him and holding on for dear life.

The other day I was comforting Graham in the midst of a clinging tantrum. I can’t remember what sparked the meltdown—perhaps all the green bowls were dirty or I insisted he wear pants or I parked the car in his imaginary friend’s spot. At any rate, as I held him, I wiped a tear from his cheek. This resulted in a fresh waterfall. “Put my tear back!” he wailed. “I wanted it there!”

So we sat on the floor of the kitchen, the two of us, as the afternoon sun streamed through the window. At last he let out a ragged sigh and rested his head on my shoulder. I silently wondered what it would be like to do the same with my heavenly Father. No more throwing myself out of his reach. No more demanding that he take away the pain. Just allowing myself to be held by him.

If I’m going to pitch a fit, it might as well be the clinging kind. I want to hold on to him until my prayer is answered . . . or until my tantrum subsides.

Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.

Frederick Buechner

A Tiny Seed of Hope

They lie to you about hope. They whisper in your ear that if you don’t get your hopes up, it won’t hurt if that longed-for thing doesn’t come to pass. Keep your expectations low, they say, so the fall won’t be so steep. Don’t get too attached. Muffle your dreams under layers of bubble wrap. This is the only way to venture into the future and come out unscathed.

But according to a reliable source, hope is one of only three things that remain in the end, after everything else falls away. If I’m understanding that right, it means that hope lives on into eternity, even after the thing we’re hoping for has passed away. If that’s the case, maybe I shouldn’t be too quick to brush it off.

***

“It looks like you’re miscarrying,” the doctor told me, not unkindly. It was the height of the pandemic, and we were both wearing masks. I regretted putting on mascara, but it felt like a special occasion, seeing as it was the first time I’d left the house in approximately six weeks. The doctor awkwardly handed me a tissue, trying not to make contact.

“Come back in two weeks for another ultrasound to confirm.”

Back in the car, I regretted (even more than the mascara) the fact that Daniel couldn’t be there with me. We’d initially wanted him there so he could see the baby’s tiny profile on the screen and watch the pulsing heartbeat. But now I wished he could drive me home, because they haven’t yet invented windshield wipers for the human eye.

***

I didn’t enter this corridor of hope blithely. I’ve had my share of ultrasounds that resulted in smudged mascara: one with dire conjectures about our baby’s future and one that resulted in the dreaded silence of a no-longer-beating heart.

In those two agonizing weeks between ultrasounds, I wondered how to pray, how to put one foot in front of the other, how to breathe. I wasn’t sure it was possible to hope, and if so, whether it was wise. If I cracked open the door to hope, wouldn’t it just be an invitation for my heart to get steamrolled in two weeks?

I whispered these fears to Daniel after Graham was safely tucked in bed. I know he was just as scared as I was, but he offered words of bedrock wisdom, words I clung to every day of those two eternal weeks: “We will choose hope until God gives us a reason not to.”

***

Hope, I believe, is never wasted. Every time we hope, even if the hope is just a tiny quivering thing, we are building our hope muscle. Even if the thing we’re hoping for doesn’t become reality, the very act of hoping changes something at the core of who we are.

And if the foundation of our hope is ultimately in Someone rather than something, we will never be disappointed. Whether we get the thing we’re hoping for or not.

Faith is both the dreaming and the crying. Faith is the assurance that the best and holiest dream is true after all.

Frederick Buechner

***

At my appointment two weeks later, I walked into the same ultrasound room, with the same mask on, and was greeted by the same technician. I could hardly bear to look at the screen, knowing in a matter of moments it would announce either life or death, hope or grief. I didn’t want to know, and I had to know.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. My eyes flew open at the unmistakable sound of a tiny heart pumping at 160 beats per minute. “Is that what I think it is?” I whispered.

Sure enough, flickering on the screen was hope incarnate, hope pulsing inside my own body. I hadn’t worn mascara because I anticipated tears that day. I just hadn’t guessed that they would be tears of joy, tears of a hope fulfilled.

Now, by some undeserved miracle, Daniel, Graham, and I are waiting for our new arrival, due at the end of year. And the nickname we’ve given this little one?

Baby Hope.

I know that hope is the hardest love we carry.

Jane Hirschfield

Where Are You?

If there were a rite of passage for parenthood, I’d venture to say it’s not a baby shower or a milestone birthday or watching your child take their first step. Maybe, instead, it’s that first trip to the ER.

Our ER adventure started with the most innocuous of summer events: a bug bite. But by day two, the swelling was getting worse and the Benadryl wasn’t doing the trick. By the time our little boy woke up from his nap, both eyes were swollen completely shut. The pediatrician sent us straight to the ER—forget dinner, let alone combing your hair.

Once Graham and I were on the road (Daniel couldn’t go, per COVID regulations), I heard Graham’s little voice pipe up from the backseat, “How you feeling, Mama?” Before I could come up with a reply that was both honest and calming, he replied, “I feeling happy.” This from a boy whose eyes looked like jet-puffed marshmallows and who could no longer see out the window.

Once we were whisked into our hospital room, Graham was given a tiny gown with rocket ships on it and pumped with even more Benadryl. He let the doctor pry open his eyes and dutifully responded when asked, “Does this hurt? How about this?”

He was a champ . . . under one condition: that he knew precisely where I was. And since his visibility was at practically zero, that meant physical contact. If I took my hand off of him for even a second, he would say, “Where are you, Mama?” So I’d rub his back or put my hand on his arm while singing every hymn I could access from the cobwebs of memory.

By hour three in the ER, as we waited in vain for the Benadryl to kick in, it was well past bedtime. After dozing off in the too-big hospital bed, he’d wake up, startled. “What is you and I doing, Mama?” he asked. I’d hold his hand and remind him where we were. And then he’d breathe a sigh and lean back on the pillow again.

Thankfully, Graham’s eyes recovered (although we never did figure out the rogue bug that got him). The main thing he remembers about his hospital visit was the bed with wheels, which he thought was the coolest thing since Thomas the Tank Engine. But I can’t stop thinking about the kind of childlike faith that requires only presence, not answers.

By all counts, this year has been a year of reckoning for our nation, for our world. Everywhere we turn, there’s pain, suffering, injustice, division. Every day the news headlines bring a new reason for lament. With my jaded, grown-up faith, I ask God, “Why? How long? What are you going to do about all this?”

I want to be more like my little boy, with just one pressing question: Where are you, Papa?It may not make the pain go away. It may not change the circumstances. It may not answer all my whys.

But I’ll be reminded that he’s right here, holding my hand. Always has been, always will be. And for now, at least, maybe that’s enough.

But as for me, God’s presence is my good.
I have made the Lord God my refuge,
so I can tell about all you do.

Psalm 73:28

We Toil and Spin

As we find ourselves in month three of the world according to COVID, one of the strangest parts has been the time warp of it all. Every day we’ve been sequestered feels like Groundhog Day. Thank goodness for the emergence of daffodils and lilacs, and perhaps even the arrival of ants in my kitchen, to mark the passing of the months. But heaven help me if I know what day of the week it is, or what time it is, for that matter.

I was talking to a friend on the phone the other afternoon, and she said, “Argh! I have a feeling my people are going to expect dinner again tonight.” Come to think of it, I had no dinner plans myself—and most likely, no appropriate combination of ingredients to make said dinner.

I don’t have a problem with dinner per se; my problem is that it’s so daily. “That’s what no one tells you about adulthood,” she said. “The dark secret is that you have to provide sustenance for yourself every single night.” (And perhaps also for toddlers who declare, “That not be good,” before even taking a bite.)

I have a hunch that most of us, when pressed, don’t necessarily mind work itself. There’s a certain satisfaction in accomplishing a task, in having something to show for our efforts, in sweating over a tough assignment and earning a rest. Perhaps the part of work that drives us nearly to despair at 4 p.m. on an indistinguishable weeknight is the unending nature of it . . . the Sisyphean feeling of rolling the rock up the hill over and over, only to watch helplessly as it rolls down again.

In the third century, there was a desert father named Abba Paul. While the other monks of his day made their homes on the outskirts of cities, Abba Paul lived alone in a remote area. Unlike the other monks who could sell their baskets in town, he had no way to make a traditional living for himself.

But every day, he wove baskets, praying all the while. Without exception, he exacted a days’ labor from himself. At the beginning of the year, he collected palm fronds and filled his cave with a year’s worth of work, and each day he committed himself to the task of making baskets. Then, at the end of the year, he’d burn up all the baskets—everything he’d so carefully toiled over.

When I first heard this story, it made me want to cry. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have had the gumption to make all those baskets for no apparent purpose. But I’m almost certain I wouldn’t have had what it takes to intentionally take a match to my labor.

The more I’ve thought about this story, though, the more I wonder if my perspective on work is upside down. What if having an attitude of prayer while we work is more important than what we produce? What if the purpose of work is more because our character needs refining than because the world needs our contributions? What if God doesn’t actually require our labor, but he still delights in our efforts?

Whatever is on your to-do list today—whether it’s a sink full of dishes, a stack of papers to grade, a basement full of laundry, never-ending diapers to change, endless data to enter into a spreadsheet, or dinner to make (yet again)—know that your work is not invisible. Even if you have to start all over and do it again tomorrow, none of it is wasted. God sees the work you do in private. He notices the way you faithfully do the little things, with no accolades and no glory. He appreciates your excellence, day after Groundhog Day.

And all the while, he is using your work to transform you into the person he wants you to be. I suppose that’s better than a cave full of woven baskets.

Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment “as to the Lord.” It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.

C. S. Lewis