Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

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

Imperfect Love

I was recently at a bridal shower, and the bride-to-be was counting down to her wedding. The day was fast approaching—just 20 days left. After asking all the requisite questions about the wedding, I said, “How are you feeling about the being married part?”

“A little nervous,” she admitted. “I just want to do it perfectly from the very beginning!”

I understood what she meant. In fact, a younger version of me might have uttered those very words.

In the moment, I didn’t say anything. But I’ve been thinking about her statement ever since, and this is what I wish I’d said.

***

Dear sweet bride-to-be,

The best moments of marriage aren’t the times you do it perfectly. The best moments are the times when you make a crack wide enough for grace to slip in. Or at least that’s how it’s been for me.

Like the time I left the bag of chicken in the trunk of the car. For three days.

Or the time I made a financial mistake that set us back $5,000.

Or the time I made a crockpot dinner . . . and forgot to turn it on.

Or the time we’d been gone all day and had a cranky toddler on our hands and it was dinnertime, and we arrived home only to realize I’d locked us out of the house.

Or the time our son’s hand got burned on my watch.

Or the time we got the news that we’d lost our unborn baby and I cried and cried until it looked like I’d been in a boxing match.

The times you do it perfectly aren’t the times that bind you together. If I’d done it perfectly from the very beginning, we would have missed so much.

We would have missed driving home from the car wash with the car mat on top of the roof, our arms burning with the effort and our sides splitting with laughter.

I would have missed getting a hug when I felt like I deserved a financial lecture. And we would have missed seeing the ways God would provide.

We would have missed conspiring about creative ways to dispose of two gallons of pot roast.

We would have missed the chance to pray together in the ER and learn how to wrap six feet of bandages on a tiny, squirming person.

We would have missed the sacred gift of shared pain, of loving a child who made it to heaven before we did.

Sweet bride, there is something better than perfection. It’s called grace.

***

The very nature of marriage means saying yes before you know what it will cost. Though you may say the “I do” of the wedding ritual in all sincerity, it is the testing of that vow over time that makes you married.  

Kathleen Norris

Ordinary Love

Dear Daniel,

I don’t know how long it takes to fall in love with someone. But I do know precisely when it started: under the gazebo on our first date.

We were munching on the picnic you brought, and as I took a bite of pineapple, a thought ran through my mind: This man treats everyone with kindness and respect. And I was right.

Who would have thought, nine years ago, that we would someday be married and have a baby and live within walking distance of that very gazebo? (Okay, I was secretly hoping those first two would come true, but number three was a surprise.)

This might sound strange, but after we moved into our house and I realized how close it was to our first date spot, I was a little worried. Would the place become too ordinary somehow? Would I cease to see it as a sacred space, commemorating the origin of the Daniel and Stephanie Team?

Truth be told, I was a little nervous that the same might be true of marriage too. Would the sacredness of love wear off amid the ordinariness of life? Would I start taking it for granted if we brushed our teeth at the same sink and paid the water bill together and picked up each other’s dirty socks? Would our love become mundane?

But almost a decade into this, I’ve discovered that the best love is the kind that’s found in the beautiful ordinary.

Ordinary love is the way you load my toothbrush every night. (And the way you inevitably make me laugh with a mouthful of toothpaste.)

Ordinary love is the way you change the oil in our cars and change our son’s diapers.

Ordinary love is the way you fix the leaking ceiling and take out the trash and rush home for family walks after work.

Ordinary love is the way you play the guitar for us after dinner and the way you put chocolate chips in the Saturday-morning pancakes.

Annie Dillard says, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” So I suppose we don’t have to wait for grand gestures or epic moments to build something beautiful. These ordinary moments that we’re stringing together, one day at a time, are creating a life of love.

***

When Graham and I go on walks to the library, we sometimes pass the first date spot. Almost without fail, I point it out to him. “See that gazebo?” I say. “That’s where Mama and Daddy went on their first date.” Although he’s too young to roll his eyes, I’m sure that day will come. But that’s okay. Because we are writing this story of ordinary love together, and he is part of it.

How long does it take to fall in love? I propose that it takes a lifetime of ordinary moments, stitched together with toothpaste and laundry and chocolate chip pancakes.

***

God’s great love and purposes for us are all worked out in messes in our kitchens and backyards, in storms and sins, blue skies, the daily work and dreams of our common lives.

Frederick Buechner

A Father’s Tender Love

Mama Robin has been building a nest in the pine tree beside our driveway again. For weeks, Daniel and I watched as she tirelessly collected twigs and string and who-knows-what-else to line her nest. One warm evening in April, as Daniel played his guitar on the front stoop, I was delighted to see her flitting away in search of the juiciest worms to feed to the little heads peering over the edge.

It felt like spring. Like hope. Like new life.

Then one windy May afternoon, not long after another doctor’s appointment where they poked and prodded and scanned me and the little life inside me, I pulled into the driveway to a horrifying sight. One of those tiny baby robins lay on the driveway, motionless. The wind had tossed it out of the nest before it was ready to fly.

Even on a good day, a sight like this would be enough to make me teary. But in this agonizing season of waiting to find out what will happen to our own precious baby, it was almost enough to undo me. I pulled into the garage as quickly as I could and tried desperately to think of something else—anything else.

This, I might add, is the real danger of being an English major. It’s not the common warning people gave me when I was in college: that I’d never get a real job and would end up perpetually waiting tables or otherwise underemployed. As it turns out, the more pressing problem is that I see everything in my life through the lens of literary analysis. Case in point: Surely this is foreshadowing! Or at the very least, symbolism! Something dreadful is going to happen in the next chapter, and this is how I’m being prepared for it! My life might as well be a suspense novel, for all the clues and meaning I infuse into the smallest scenarios.

The next morning I went outside, dreading the prospect of seeing the tiny bird again. But to my surprise, the driveway was clear.

“Daniel . . . was that you?” I asked.

Sure enough, he knew the sight would break me into a thousand pieces, so when I was otherwise occupied, he quietly removed all traces of the little bird. I hugged him tight, grateful for his tenderness.

“This wasn’t the first time,” he admitted.

Apparently he’d found a similar scene on several other occasions and had removed the evidence so I wouldn’t have to register the trauma.

The English major in me swooned. Because in that moment I realized I wasn’t living in a suspense novel; I was living in a love story. Sure, it’s not what you’d expect in a typical romantic comedy, and it’s not always what I imagined love would look like when we said our fresh-eyed vows almost six years ago. But it’s real. Because sometimes love means scraping away a bird carcass to protect the one you love.

In that moment, I felt double love for this man—for the husband he is and the dad he’s going to be. Our child hasn’t been born yet, but already he has the tenderness of a father. And in his eyes I see a reflection of the tenderhearted love of the Father himself.

Not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it. And the very hairs on your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are more valuable to God than a whole flock of sparrows.
Matthew 10:19-31

We don’t know what life holds for this baby of ours. But I know for certain that this child is loved and protected by the love of two fathers: an earthly father and a heavenly one. And when the winds of life blow, this child will not fall without those fatherly arms stretched wide to catch him.

Birthday Party for a Book

My memoir, I Was Blind (Dating), but Now I See, is having its first birthday, and I want to give YOU presents to mark the occasion! See the end of this blog for the free giveaways.

This book is my story, but I hope you will find that it’s your story too. On one level, it’s an account of my misadventures in dating and some of my more embarrassing moments, but on another level, it’s the story of a human being who is longing for something and praying for something when it seems like God is being silent. How do you keep hoping and praying when year after year it seems like God is saying no?

Here’s an excerpt from the book about prayer and a pair of Keds.

***

In many ways my dad was old school when it came to raising us kids. He had high standards, and we were expected to work hard and pull our weight. He could be firm with us, giving us what he called “sensitivity training”—as in making us less sensitive. Most nights at dinner he’d try to toughen us up through spirited banter and debate, playing the role of devil’s advocate so we’d be ready for the real world.

But I knew without a doubt that he loved me. My mind wandered back to a scene with the twelve-year-old me. My family was on a cross-country trip to visit my grandparents, and I was decked out in my favorite outfit: Wardrobe and accessory coordination was not something to be taken lightly in the early ’90s. I was sporting a black-and-white polka-dot shirt, black stirrup pants, polka-dot earrings, and a hair bow to match. Then there was the pièce de résistance of the outfit: my brand-new knockoff Keds in—you guessed it—black and white. I was sure of it: Those kids in Washington State had never seen anyone as cool as me.

But before we arrived at my grandparents’ house, Dad spotted a sign for a state park just off the highway. It would do us good to get out of the car and stretch our legs for a bit, he declared, brushing off our protests that it was raining.

“Oh, you guys are babies. That’s not rain—it’s just mist.”

And so we set out on a hiking trail, despite the ever-thickening “mist.”

I flipped up the hood of my coat, hoping to salvage what was left of my mile-high, amply hair-sprayed bangs, and trudged on. But then we hit the bridge. At least I thought it was a bridge. It was hard to tell because at the moment it looked like one giant mudslide.

There was no way I was going to let my beautiful new shoes touch slop of that caliber.

“Can we head back?” I pleaded. “Or at least go another way?”

But one by one, my family members crossed the bridge ahead of me. I stood rooted to the spot, sure they’d turn back once they saw I was serious. I will not budge, I steamed silently, arms akimbo. But they didn’t throw so much as a backward glance in my direction.

I had melodramatic visions of being found several days later by a forest ranger, having survived on grubs and rainwater, black-and-white shoes still more or less intact. But despite my efforts to be brave in the face of abandonment, I felt my eyes starting to sting, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t the rain. I didn’t want to be separated from my family, but there was no way I could change my mind now. I’d made my stand.

Then, through a curtain of tears and rain, I saw my dad heading back over the bridge. Wait . . . why is he coming this way? I wondered. Would I get a lecture? Would he tell me he was disappointed I was being a wimp?

But as he got closer, I saw the twinkle in his eye. “Hop on my back,” he said, crouching down. I couldn’t believe it. I was way too old to be getting piggyback rides. But the rest of my family was on the other side, waiting, and I knew this was the only way. So my dad carried me across that muddy bridge, knockoff Keds and all.

I supposed if I was looking for a model of how a father responds to persistent prayer, this moment when my dad came to the rescue of a daughter whose outfit was in jeopardy was as good a model as any.

I read that familiar passage from Matthew 7:

You parents—if your children ask for a loaf of bread, do you give them a stone instead? Or if they ask for a fish, do you give them a snake? Of course not! So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good gifts to those who ask him.

It struck me that nowhere did it say the father was compelled to give his child precisely what she asked for, that the child could special order what she wanted from a gift catalog. It just said a good father would give good gifts to his children. What if the gift God wanted to give me was different from the one I’d been asking for? What if the thing I thought was good was merely a snake dressed up as Mr. Right?

A good dad will fulfill his daughter’s request—but only if it’s the right gift, at the right time. Sometimes he may give the gracious gift of saying no. But always—always—he cares about his child’s request.

In his classic book on prayer, C. S. Lewis puts it this way: “Someone said, ‘A suitor wants his suit to be heard as well as granted.’ . . . We can bear to be refused but not to be ignored. . . . The apparent stone will be bread to us if we believe that a Father’s hand put it into ours.”2

Perhaps God wasn’t a stern father after all, with a snake in one hand and a stone in the other. Maybe he was more like a good dad—with a twinkle in his eye and his child on his back.

Gift #1: 20 Days of Prayers

Have you ever felt stuck in your prayer life . . . like your prayers keep bouncing off the ceiling or you’ve just run out of words somewhere along the way? I’ve collected some of my favorite prayers over the years—for times when you’re lonely, for times when the future seems uncertain, for times when God seems far away. You can download this free pdf (beautifully designed by my friend Sarah) on the right side of this website.

Gift #2: Blind date with a book

After all the flopped blind dates I’ve been on, I’m still pro blind date (be sure to read the epilogue!). So in honor of blind dates, I’m hosting a “Blind date with a book” raffle this month. Share this post (or any post about my book) in the month of February, and I’ll enter you for the chance to win a free book. I’ll match you up based on a series of reading-preference questions.

Gift #3: Tyndale offer

Tyndale.com is offering 25% off I Was Blind (Dating) but Now I See for the month of February. If you buy a copy for you or a friend, I’d be happy to sign a nameplate and mail it to you.

***

Whether you find yourself with a date or not this Valentine’s Day, please know that you are loved—without limit and without condition.

I have loved you . . . with an everlasting love. With unfailing love I have drawn you to myself.
Jeremiah 31:3

               

How Long Is Five Years?

wedding walkingDaniel,

We have been married five years now, and all week I have been thinking about the strangeness of time. In some ways, it’s hard to believe it’s been five years already. And in other ways, it seems like we’ve been a team much longer.

As I’ve been pondering how long five years is, this is the best I’ve come up with: Five years isn’t very long. And five years is long enough.

Five years isn’t very long.

It’s not long enough to get old together, not long enough to be the adorable gray-haired couple at the restaurant next to us. They haven’t uttered a word to each other since they sat down, but I get the feeling they’ve had more conversation with their eyes than I’ve managed with all my many words in the past hour.

Five years isn’t long enough to have more years behind us than we have ahead of us, Lord willing. It’s not long enough to know what legacy we’ll leave behind. We saw your grandpa last week, surrounded by his thirteen children, many of whom are gray-bearded grandfathers themselves now. “Grandma Sheila would have loved this,” he said, shaking his head in wonder at the hundred-plus progeny surrounding him, all because he married his high school sweetheart seventy years ago.

Five years isn’t very long.

And yet five years is long enough.

It’s long enough for you to load my toothbrush 2,000 times, long enough to put 60,000 miles on our car, long enough to fall asleep partway through 200 Friday-night movies with you. It’s long enough to attend seven weddings and two funerals and a dozen family vacations together.

Five years is long enough to make ice cream together and walk to the library together and ride our bikes together (you at half your normal speed). It’s long enough to laugh until we almost lose bladder control over things that would make no sense to the general population, and long enough to cry a jar full of tears . . . some in spite of each other and some because of each other.

Five years is long enough to navigate who is going to make dinner and pay the bills and empty the dishwasher, even if it’s not the way our parents did it or the way we figured it out so neatly out on our premarital class worksheets. And it’s long enough to renegotiate when things fall apart because one of us is writing a book or adjusting to a new job.

Five years is long enough to say goodbye to the first place we lived together. It’s long enough to buy a house, and long enough to bail water out of the basement of said house while wondering what, exactly, we’d gotten ourselves into. It’s long enough to dig out a tiny garden, and long enough to eat the first tomato we planted with our own hands.

Five years is long enough to win and fail, to hope and despair, to wait and wonder, to break and heal. It’s long enough to sing and forget the words and remember them again.

Five years is long enough to know that although I loved you with my whole heart the day I said “I do,” I somehow love you more now than I did then. Something mysterious has happened along the way: I still love you with my whole heart, but it turns out loving you has broadened the borders of my heart.

Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply. . . . The more you have loved and have allowed yourself to suffer because of your love, the more you will be able to let your heart grow wider and deeper. 
Henri Nouwen

Five years isn’t very long. But it’s long enough to know that five years isn’t long enough.

Happy fifth, my love. Here’s to many more years of the Daniel and Stephanie Team.

When Love Is Pronounced “Donut”

donut

Did you know that sometimes people are actually saying “I love you,” even when like the words coming out of their mouths sound altogether different? It’s true. Case in point: Sometimes people try to form the word “love” and it comes out sounding like “donut.”

When I was a kid, we’d go to Washington State every summer to visit my grandparents. There were so many fun memories from those July days: picking raspberries in Grandpa’s garden, going waterskiing on the Columbia River, and playing endless games of shuffleboard in Grandma and Grandpa’s backyard.

But one of my favorite memories from those trips was waking up early to the heavenly smell of homemade donuts. Without fail, Grandma would get up before the crack of dawn so she could whip together the first batch. By the time everyone else woke up, the countertops were lined with doughy goodness: traditional circle donuts, donut holes, and donuts dusted with powdered sugar. By the time I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and ambled to the kitchen in all my pajamaed glory, Grandma had been on her feet for hours.

I’m not sure I could have articulated it then, but now I know that what she was saying with those donuts was “I love you.” If Gary Chapman ever adds a sixth love language to his classic book, I’m lobbying for it to be food. Because food is, without a doubt, the way Grandma communicates love.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to realize that love doesn’t have as narrow of a definition as I used to imagine. Maybe I’d watched one too many romantic comedies or Disney-fied fairy tales, but I used to have the notion that love was primarily a happily-ever-after sort of thing that’s found only on rare occasions. And I had the idea that if you loved someone, you probably had to make an eloquent speech about it.

But now I’m starting to realize that there is so much love all around, if only we can recognize it. And there are a lot of ways to express that love beyond the traditional “I love you.”

When your mom says, “Call me when you get home,” she’s really saying “I love you.”
When your dad says, “I can fix that for you,” he’s really saying “I love you.”
When your friend says, “Let’s get coffee,” she’s really saying “I love you.”
When God paints a sunrise for you just as you’re walking out the door, he’s really saying “I love you.”

And of course, when your grandma makes you donuts, she’s really saying “I love you.”

One of the greatest gifts of writing my memoir was getting to relive a chunk of my life and trace all the love that came in unexpected places. No, it didn’t come in the form of a husband and kids during that season of my life the way I’d planned. But even so, God was pouring out so much love onto me that it seeped out through every crack and crevice.

How often do we miss the love because it doesn’t come in the package we expect?

Today is National Donut Day, but I’d like to hereby proclaim it National Look-for-the-Love Day. So whatever form loves comes to you in today, whether via donuts or otherwise, I urge you to recognize it for what it is. Embrace the love, even when it comes in an unlikely package.

***

So what’s your story? When has love come to you in an unexpected way or from an unexpected source?

Share the love . . .

If you share this post, you will be eligible to win TWO Dunkin’ Donuts gift cards—one for you and one to share with someone you love.

What It’s Like to Be Married to an Author

book signing 1On the day I brought home a real-live copy of my book to show Daniel, I exclaimed, “Look! We wrote a book!”

He was quick to point out my pronoun usage: “No, YOU wrote a book.”

But I hadn’t misspoken. This has been a Daniel-and-Stephanie Team project from the beginning.

***

I will never forget one woman’s response after Daniel and I got engaged. While everyone else in the room was squealing and asking things like “When is the wedding?” “What will your colors be?” “How did he propose?” she posed a different question altogether: “Do you make each other better people?”

I remember staring at her rather blankly. I stammered something I hoped was vaguely positive, but the truth was, I didn’t really know. I knew that Daniel was a good man and that I wanted to be on his team forever, but did he make me a better person? Did I make him a better person? I hoped so.

Four years and a book contract later, and I now know: He absolutely makes me a better person.

***

Not long after Daniel and I got married, I got this harebrained notion that God was stirring up words inside my brain and heart and that I needed to find some way to get them out. It was Daniel who encouraged me to start the blog, and it was Daniel who convinced me to press “Publish” on that very first entry when I got cold feet.

A couple of years later, it was Daniel who encouraged me to pay what seemed like an extravagant expense for a “real” website.

Then, when I discovered I had a book inside me, it was Daniel who assured me I could do it. When I took days off from work to write, he didn’t complain when he came home to find that not only was the house a mess and there were no thoughts of dinner being circulated, but I had very little actual writing to show for myself.

When the book was finally about to make its debut into the world and I panicked that people would actually be reading it, it was Daniel who prayed for me and reminded me that this was God’s book, not mine.

Yes, WE wrote a book.

So it only seems fitting, now that the book has made its way into the world, that Daniel joined me for one of my radio interviews.

Recently I was interviewed by Frankie Picasso on The Good Radio Network. The morning of the interview she contacted me with an inspiration: “What do you think about having Daniel call in at the end of the show?”

He was game (can we say “Husband of the Year”?), and it was absolutely my favorite interview I’ve done. I’ve been telling my side of the story all this time (all 293 pages of it), and I loved being able to hear his side of things.

Thank you, Daniel—you do make me a better person.

A marriage made in Heaven is one where a man and a woman become more richly themselves together than the chances are either of them could ever have managed to become alone.
–Frederick Buechner

***

To listen to the interview, you can download it or listen online at FrankieSense and More.

Wasted Love

If you had been alive during that first Easter, who would you have been?

Would you have been Peter, bold and brash, defending Jesus in the only way you knew how?

Would you have been John, quiet and steadfast in your heartbreak?

Would you have been one of the women who wiped Jesus’ brow on his agonizing climb to Golgotha, showing love even as your hopes crumbled?

Would you have been Thomas, asking for proof yet keeping a sliver of belief alive?

I’m not sure who I would have been. I like to think I’d cling to hope even before I could see how everything unfolded, but I’m not sure. I’m much better at believing in miracles in retrospect, after I have the whole picture.

But it’s easy to identify the person I would like to be. I want to be Mary, who poured out her perfume on Jesus’ feet.

Just before he died, Jesus went to the home of his friends Lazarus, Martha, and Mary. And there, Mary enacted a most extravagant gesture of love. Here’s the story:

Mary took a twelve-ounce jar of expensive perfume made from essence of nard, and she anointed Jesus’ feet with it, wiping his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance.
John 12:3

You might think everyone around would have been impressed by Mary’s act of generosity. Instead, she was judged for being wasteful.

Judas Iscariot, the disciple who would soon betray [Jesus], said, “That perfume was worth a year’s wages. It should have been sold and the money given to the poor.”
John 12:4-5

According to some scholars, this jar of perfume was likely Mary’s dowry—what would have been given to a suitor to pay the bride price. The perfume was essentially her past and her future . . . and she lavished it on an uncredentialed rabbi from a backwoods town.

Jesus replied, “Leave her alone. She did this in preparation for my burial. You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”
John 12:7-8

Sometimes I find myself assuming that Jesus would have been ultra-practical—frugal, even. “Waste not; want not”—that’s in the Bible somewhere, right? Somewhere near “God helps those who help themselves”?

But to my surprise, Jesus didn’t chastise Mary over the apparent wastefulness of her act. He didn’t tell her she should have focused on her savings account or reserved some her retirement. He didn’t even criticize her for not giving to charity.

He told her that her lavish devotion, her extravagant love, was beautiful.

And this Holy Week I wonder: What am I willing to “waste” on God and the people he’s given me to love?

Am I so concerned about being careful and judicious and economical that I fail to shower my love in unpractical ways?

What would it look like for us to show extravagant, “wasteful” love this week?

  • Maybe extravagant love looks like scrapping our to-do list and doing some leisurely Bible reading instead.
  • Maybe extravagant love looks like “wasting” the afternoon playing with your favorite little person, even if the proof isn’t captured on Facebook or Instagram.
  • Maybe extravagant love looks like doing something for someone who will never be able to pay you back or properly thank you.
  • Maybe extravagant love looks like “wasting” the morning by going on a walk and taking in the world God made.

Because here’s what I think—and I have a hunch Mary would agree: If it’s real love, it’s never wasted.

Seven Decades of Love

g-and-g-weddingMy grandparents just celebrated their 70th anniversary. I keep trying to wrap my brain around that number, but I can’t seem to. SEVENTY YEARS. When they got married, there was no Tupperware, no credit cards, no White-Out, no barcodes, no disposable diapers.

They’ve lived through a lot in these seven decades. They rejoiced when Grandpa made it back safely from World War II, and they got married as soon as possible, on a Tuesday morning. They had twelve children in the span of fourteen years. (Remember the part about no disposable diapers?!) They built a huge bench on one side of the kitchen table to accommodate their growing family and made do with a seemingly insurmountable person-to bathroom ratio.

They witnessed the birth of the next generation (their grandchildren) and now the next (their great-grandchildren). They marveled as family reunions numbered in the hundreds . . . and reached unprecedented decibels. They persevered after Grandpa’s stroke, moving into a place that required less upkeep.

Now Grandma and Grandpa have a daily routine of simple love: eating lunch together and then taking naps side by side in their reclining chairs. Grandpa sleeps a lot now and no longer talks much, but Grandma cheerfully carries the conversation.

One of my favorite stories about Grandma and Grandpa is how they got engaged. Grandpa was flying planes in Europe while Grandma spent Thanksgiving with Grandpa’s parents and brother. After dinner, Grandpa’s brother pulled out the ring on his little brother’s behalf, having gotten specific instructions on size, style, and cut. Grandpa may not have been there physically, but his love was. Their love tethered them across an ocean, across multiple time zones, across a war.

In some ways, it’s not so different now. Grandpa is there physically, but he’s not the strong, vibrant, intellectual man he used to be. Still, their love is no less present. Even now, their love tethers them across sickness, age, loss, and change.

When I wished Grandma a happy anniversary last week, she said, “Honey, we’re so blessed. We’ve had so many more happy years than hard years. I wish you and Daniel all the years and all the love we’ve had.”

In 1943, just a few years before my grandparents got married, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, wrote a letter to a young bride and groom from his prison cell in Nazi Germany. These were his words of counsel: “It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”

Daniel and I just celebrated our 5-year engagement anniversary. In some ways that seems so long—have we really known each other for half a decade? And then I think of Grandma and Grandpa and their seventy years, and I realize we are still so new at this. We don’t know what the future holds in the years ahead, but whatever comes, I pray for that tethering love . . . the kind that sustains through war and age and time. And I thank God because that love isn’t something we have to manufacture ourselves. It’s something that overflows from him.

Only 65 more years to go, my love! (But don’t do the math . . . )