Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

Split in Two

To be a woman, I would contend, is to feel split in two. Maybe you’re juggling home and career, or marriage and friends, or kids and calling. Whatever the scenario, we all know what it’s like to try to keep the plates spinning without breaking the ones we care about most.

There’s a famous story about a wise king who settled a dispute by offering to split a baby in two split a baby in two. As the story goes, there was one baby and two women, each claiming the child was hers. Solomon called for a sword and said, “Cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other.”

At this point in the story, every person with a beating heart cries, “Stop!”There are no circumstances that justify a split-in-two baby. No one wins if Baby is dead.

But what about when it’s the mom who’s split in two?

I recently returned to work after maternity leave, and it seems that wherever I am, I have to leave a piece of myself behind. When I’m at work, my heart is still tethered to the 15-pound cheeky boy who is currently doing tummy time without me and the 3-year-old I promised to build an excavator with when I get back. When I’m at home, I can’t help but wonder what emails are piling up and if my brain will ever recover from its current porridge-like state.

And it’s not just working moms who find themselves tugged in different directions. There are women who are at home full-time while trying to pursue something they feel called to. There are women sandwiched between two generations, caring for kids as well as aging parents. There are single women who are trying to figure out how to follow their passion while also covering the bills.

Some days it feels like there just isn’t enough of us to go around. Not enough energy, not enough time, not enough emotional bandwidth. We need the wisdom for Solomon for this. Is the answer to split ourselves into two (or three or four or five)? If we do, will there be enough of us to go around?

The reality is, it will never work to cut ourselves in half—no matter how sharp the sword or how accurate the slice. We’ll keep giving pieces away until there’s nothing left . . . and it still won’t be enough.

So what’s the answer?

I don’t think there’s an easy solution to this—we may have to reconcile ourselves to living in some amount of tension. But I am learning, by baby steps, that there’s peace in bringing our whole selves wherever we are. Instead of becoming fragmented—separating our work selves from our home selves, our mom selves from our professional selves, our daughter selves from our adult selves—what if we stitched our roles together so we could be all there, wherever we are?

I used to think of integrity strictly in terms of moral uprightness. But what if integrity is about being fully integrated—being the same person, no matter where we are?

I’m still figuring out what this looks like. But maybe it means bringing my editor-self to my parenting and using multi-syllabic words with my toddler. Or bringing my mother-self to my work and letting my baby crash my Zoom calls on occasion.

I wonder what this looks like for you, beautiful woman being tugged in different directions. How are you wrestling with the split-ness of being a woman? What might it look like for you to bring your whole, integrated self to each role you’ve been called to?

However we’re feeling split, may we stitch each part of ourselves together so we can fully love, fully live . . . and be fully ourselves.

The glory of God is a human fully alive.

Saint Irenaeus

Unlearning My To-Do List

It turns out that a person doesn’t necessarily need to be able to speak coherent sentences to be an effective tutor. Case in point: the pint-sized spit-up machine who is currently teaching me that sometimes being is better than doing.

I am a planner by nature. I like to make lists and, even better, cross things out. I enjoy the anticipation of thinking ahead…dreaming and scheming for tomorrow or next week or next month.

But when your schedule revolves around a twelve-pound person who can’t think about the future beyond I’m hungry, I’m sleepy, or I’m poopy, planning ceases to be very effective. You don’t know if the baby will nap (or for how long). You don’t know if he’ll wake up smiley or moody or you’d-better-hold-me-or-I-will-scream-like-a-banshee.

And so my tutor reminds me that sometimes we need to set the to-do list aside. Perhaps that’s one of the things children know that we grown-ups have forgotten: we can’t live in the future. We have only been given today. Children (and those with childlike hearts) have a way of inviting us—practically daring us—into the sacred now.

My little guy wordlessly tells me what God has been trying to say to me all along: that while there’s merit to hard work, it doesn’t define me. My worth isn’t predicated on my productivity. My identity isn’t determined by the number of things I crossed off (or didn’t cross off) my to-do list.

In the quiet hours of the night, after my little one is full and content, I sometimes hold him for an extra moment before stumbling back to bed. I marvel at the way he nestles perfectly into me, with his head tucked under my chin and his limbs curled up against me. I’m all too aware, the second time around this parenting rodeo, that he won’t fit there for long. I’ll blink and his arms and legs won’t fit on my lap. I’ll turn my head for a moment and he will be much too sophisticated to snuggle with his mama.

And so I try to soak in the moments as they come. Not every moment, because heaven knows it’s only possible to savor things one drop at a time, not when they come in a virtual tsunami. But I will try to seize the little moments—a dimpled smile, a tiny sigh, a contented gurgle—and freeze-frame them in my heart.

So maybe we don’t need to throw out the to-do list altogether. But perhaps we’d be better off if we could lose track of it for a bit. If we could look into the eyes of the person we’re with and be all there. In the sacred now.

I have calmed and quieted myself, like a weaned child who no longer cries for its mother’s milk. Yes, like a weaned child is my soul within me.

Psalm 131:2

A Letter to My Son: On Coming into the World Broken

Dear Milo,

Someday, precious boy, you will ask me the story of your birth. How much will I tell you, I wonder? You only recently marked one month in this world, so this kind of pondering is admittedly premature. But how will I be able to communicate to you that your arrival was pure miracle, yet simultaneously tinged with brokenness?

The short version, beloved child, is that they had to break you to get you out. Your shoulders were simply too large for my bones. But our doctor was a pro, and she sprang into action immediately when she recognized what was happening. Knowing that time was of the essence, she chose the lesser of two traumas, cracking your tiny matchstick of a humerus.

And so, in the weeks since, your dad and I have been wrapping your little arm with yards and yards of bandage and asking God to mend the bones he knit together in the first place.

“Babies are like starfish,” the orthopedic surgeon assures me as I look at the jagged bones on the X-Ray screen. You will never remember this, I know. And I’m not sure how much pain you can even register at this point. But we will remember, your dad and I. And we feel the pain like a fracture to our hearts.

As I gaze into your blue-gray eyes that seem at once innocent and wise beyond their years, I wonder if the pain we feel isn’t just about this particular injury. As hard as it is to see such a tiny body hurting—especially a vulnerable someone who is entirely dependent on us—it feels even weightier than that.

The truth is, this is merely the first of many encounters with brokenness you will face. The broken bone on the first day of your life is but a foreshadowing of fractures to come. We are frail and human, made of tender bits like bone and tendon, heart and soul. This means we have the capacity to feel deeply and love with abandon, but it also leaves us susceptible to profound wounds.

And as much as I want to protect you from injuries of all sorts—body, mind, and heart—I am aware of my own frailty as much as yours. I would take on a grizzly bear in hand-to-hand combat if the occasion arose, but despite my best efforts, I won’t be able to stop you from getting hurt. And it wouldn’t be good for you if I could.

They say a broken bone grows back stronger after it heals, and I have to think the same is true of the other parts of us too. The places where we’ve been hurt can rebuild us with more resilience, while somehow making us more tender in all the best ways too.

My prayer for you, today and as you grow, is that you will know that brokenness is not an end point. It is the beginning of your story of redemption. If we let them, the broken places can ultimately be entry points for grace.

I love you, my broken and beautiful son.
Mom

Man is born broken; he lives by mending. The grace of God is the glue.

Eugene O’Neill

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