Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

Rough Draft Friends

We live in a world where filters reign supreme. A world where people take 29 selfies for every one they post. A world where no one sees the pictures that feature double chins or unfortunate hair days or the moments when everyone in the house is decidedly unhappy. 

In a world like this, it’s hard to feel like a perpetual rough draft. We compare our own raw edges to everyone else’s polished masterpiece. Even if there’s one area we’re gifted in, these editable platforms tempt us to think we have to be really amazing at everything. All at once.

At some level, we suspect that everyone else doesn’t really have it all together all the time. But even so, we can’t help feeling like we don’t measure up.

A while ago I read Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Christopher Cleve. I remember liking it as a novel, but the part I can’t shake is the Author’s Note, of all places. (Yes, I read those things. And the copyright page too. Could I get any nerdier?)

Cleve explains that his book was inspired by his grandfather’s experience serving in World War II:

My grandfather died while I was writing the novel—but, as he might have remarked, it wasn’t necessarily my fault. I regret that he never saw the book. I had finished the third draft of what turned out to be five, but I had decided to wait until the novel was perfect before I gave it to him to read. What a fool I am. If you will forgive the one piece of advice a writer is qualified to give: never be afraid of showing someone you love a working draft of yourself.”

We all need people we can be our rough-draft selves with. Not that I recommend showing up as the rawest version of yourself in front of just anyone. My store clerk/bank teller/delivery guy doesn’t need to hear all my unfiltered, unprocessed ramblings. But we all need a handful of people with whom we can show up and say, “Here I am. The rough draft me.” And they can listen to us and love us and, eventually, help us become a better version of ourselves.

This is the only way I know to get unstuck.

This is the only way I know to move from a rough draft into something more beautiful.

This is the only way I know to avoid missing connection at the expense of perfection.

So here’s my challenge for you today—and for myself, too: Don’t be afraid to show someone the real you—the rough draft you.

***

We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told. We may discover that the better we tell our stories the better we will want to live them.

Maya Angelou

Maundy Thursday Reflections on Toilet Paper

If the grocery store shelves were any indication, you might assume that the best way to treat COVID-19 is with toilet paper and paper towels.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, I suppose: in a time when there’s so little we can control, we can at least have the tangible relief of knowing our cabinets are well stocked.

I confess that I’m a saver by nature, even under non-pandemic circumstances. I like to have backups, and backups for my backups. In this season of unknowns, I’ve been fighting my instinct to hoard everything from supplies to money to time to yes, toilet paper. How long will this last? What if we lose our jobs? What if there’s a global food shortage? What if . . . what if . . . what if?

Then I read the account of Jesus’ feet being anointed with oil during holy week, and it struck me in a new way in this Era of Empty Store Shelves.

A few days before he died, Jesus went to the home of his friends Lazarus, Martha, and Mary. And there, Mary enacted a gesture of extreme love and generosity.

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

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 Jesus in a single extravagant outpouring.

She didn’t hoard her gift. She didn’t measure it out, a little at a time. She didn’t cling to it as her security. She wasn’t consumed by a scarcity mindset.

She embraced the present moment and seized the sacred now. She poured out what she had—all of it.

And I wonder, what would it look like to pour out extravagant love and generosity in this season?

I want to keep my eyes and my hands and my heart open.
I want to love and give extravagantly.
I want to pour out what I’ve been given.

I’d like to think that if Jesus wanted my last roll of toilet paper, I’d give it to him.

Go peaceful
in gentleness
through the violence of these days.
Give freely.
Show tenderness
in all your ways.

God hold you,
enfold you,
and keep you wrapped around His heart.
May you be known by love.

Northumbria Community meditation

Prisoners of Hope

This pandemic has taken so many prisoners, and my heart is heavy for everyone who finds themselves languishing behind bars right now.

The elderly person who can’t have visitors.
The single parent who is never off the clock.
The person battling anxiety.
The person with a compromised immune system.
The person stuck at home in an abusive relationship.
The person who lives alone and feels the ache of loneliness.

Perhaps this virus isn’t responsible for our chains, but it certainly has exposed them. The truth is, we are all prisoners of something—we don’t have much choice about that. But we do have some say in what we will be enslaved to.

I came across this verse recently, and it struck me in a new way in this season of fear and quarantine:

Return to your fortress, you prisoners of hope;
    even now I announce that I will restore twice as much to you.

Zechariah 9:12

Prisoners of hope. What would it look like, I wonder, to be a prisoner of hope rather than a prisoner of fear?

I want to be chained to hope.
I want to shackle myself to it and not let go.
I want it to follow me wherever I go.

The fact that hope takes prisoners implies a battle. There’s nothing passive about it. It requires courage. It’s a fight.

Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.

Mary Oliver

Hope means choosing love, over and over again . . . and asking for forgiveness when we fail.
It means doing the next right thing.
It means getting up again.
It means believing there will be manna enough for today.
It means laying down our weapons, and sometimes our screens.
It means writing a note, making a phone call, baking a batch of cookies, playing another round of Scrabble.
It means listening for the birds and watching for the green daffodil shoots peeking out of the ground.

It means we keep living, one moment at a time. The battle has already been won.

Hope and despair stand always side by side, each determined to outlast the other. If we choose hope, we must join the standoff, with hearts and hands wide open, fighting the urge to fade into despair.

Catherine McNiel

Love Like a Toddler

Children, it turns out, are not programmable. Neither do they bear any semblance to a vending machine: Press button A21 and voila! Out comes a Snickers!

I have to admit there’s something compelling about a vending-machine model for children. Think of the possibilities—you could input helpful phrases like “Yes, Mama!” “Of course, Mama!” “You’re brilliant, Mama!”

At two-going-on-twelve, my little man decidedly does not operate according to preprogrammed instructions. In fact, he relishes the taste of “No!” on his lips. At various times, he has attempted to boycott any combination of the following: diapers, meat, car seats, toothbrushes, and hygiene in general. He has been known to emphasize his point by lying prone on the grocery store floor. He has, on more than one occasion, been observed streaking across the room pantless.

In short, he has a will. And he knows how to assert it.

But I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you the other side of toddlerhood. In recent months, he has also been known to pipe up from the backseat, “Hold mine hand, Mama.” And we hold hands until the light turns green. In the middle of playing with his cars, he will run over to his dad and say, “Kiss right here!” before dashing off to play again. On occasion, in the highest form of love language, he extends a sweaty palm with a goldfish cracker in it. “Here go, Mama!”  

Sometimes I look around our world and wonder why God would give us human beings free will. Maybe it’s always been this way, or maybe parenthood has made me squeamish, or maybe social media is the worst kind of magnifying glass, but it seems like we are drowning in selfishness and violence and bad choices and greed and all manner of mayhem. When I pray, I sometimes find myself asking, “Is this really your Plan A, God? Wouldn’t it have been smarter to program us to be a little nicer than we are?”

But then I hear my son’s little voice saying, “Hold mine hand,” and I can see where he’s coming from. Forced love—that’s no kind of love. Forced goodness—that’s no goodness at all. The Father doesn’t just want obedience; he wants our hearts. Even at the expense of our own willfulness.

The psalmist says, “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). There comes a point when we go to God not just because we’re utterly dependent on him for our next meal, for our very survival. He delights when we finally quiet down from our tantrum long enough to come to him by choice. Not only because we have to, but because we want to.

Just like a toddler.

***

It is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.
Charles Dickens

Here’s hoping his word for the year isn’t NO…

When Your Belief Breaks

Sometimes people assume that faith is a crutch, a sign of weakness. But I would venture to say that believing in something you can’t see is actually an act of strength, courage, heroism even. Cynicism comes cheap and easy. It doesn’t require vulnerability. It doesn’t leave your heart tender and exposed. Cynicism is the easy road.

But faith? That’s another matter altogether.

When I was waiting and hoping for God to bring a baby into our family three years ago, I chose believe as my word for the year. A friend gave me a bracelet with the word etched into it, and I wore it all year. I’m not sure I ever arrived at whole-hearted belief, but wearing it felt like a promise, a down payment, something I was trying to live my way into.

After Graham was born, I passed the bracelet along to a friend who was trying to cling to belief herself. She wore it too, and God did a miracle in her life—both the internal kind and the big-answer-to-prayer kind. Then one day recently as we were praying together, she said, “I think it’s time for you to have this back.”

I blinked away tears as I fastened the familiar clasp. I’d been trying to believe again—for another miracle, another baby. But my belief felt fragile at best, and at times, nonexistent. It seemed too dangerous to put my heart out there to be hurt again. What if God said no? Could our relationship sustain that kind of disappointment? Wouldn’t it be safer not to hope, not to ask?

I found myself choking on the prayers, swallowing the words before they could make their way out. But every morning I fastened the bracelet, and that act itself felt like prayer.

Until one day when I was washing my hands, and without warning, the bracelet broke, clattering onto the cold tile floor. I’m sure there’s a rational, scientific explanation for what happened. But heaven help me, I’m a former English major, so instead my mind swirled with literary terms. Surely this was symbolism. Or foreshadowing. Or metaphor.

My belief is too flimsy.
My belief is broken.
My belief is damaged beyond repair.

But as I read the Christmas story through the lens of someone who is trying to believe, I find I’m in good company.

Zechariah said, “How can I be sure?”
Mary said, “How can this be?”
Joseph decided to divorce her quietly.
The shepherds were terrified.

It appears that God doesn’t choose those with the most rock-solid faith. He doesn’t pick the ones who are sturdy, immovable, fearless.

He chooses ordinary people—ordinary people who serve an extraordinary God. Because our faith doesn’t depend on how hard we hope or how firmly we believe; our faith is built on the One we believe in, the object of our belief. The ground doesn’t become less solid if we doubt it will hold us.

And so as we find ourselves in the season of miracles, the season of the impossible, I want to choose the vulnerable road of belief. Will you join me?

A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment, who believes that this moment is the moment.

Henri Nouwen

If there’s something you are daring to entrust to God in the year ahead, please let me know—I would be honored to believe on your behalf.

***

Postscript: Between the writing and posting of this blog, my servant-hearted husband fixed my bracelet. I have a hunch there’s a metaphor somewhere in there too . . . something about how belief is not a solo activity but a communal venture. Thank you, Daniel, and thanks to all the people who believe alongside us.

Planting Hope

As I think back on this year, it seems like joy and grief have been holding hands.

On the one hand, I’ve received far more grace and love than I deserve, not to mention my share of sticky kisses and toddler snuggles.

On the other hand, there has been altogether too much death for one year. The deaths weren’t entirely a surprise, and I know many people have experienced much greater loss. But by my reckoning, any number of deaths feels like one too many.

This year we lost our little Mo, the baby we never got to meet. We lost my funny, kind, smart grandpa—the one we’d lost for the first time over a decade ago to dementia. And last week we lost my beloved friend and mentor, Ruth.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes it helps if I can put a label on what I’m feeling. Maybe it’s an illusion, but I feel like I can start to untangle an emotion when I can call it by name.

Bereft. I looked it up, and it sounds about right to describe the hollow place that has carved itself out just below my esophagus. “Bereft (adjective): lacking something needed, wanted, or expected.”

I still needed you, Ruth.
I wanted you, Mo.
I expected to have you for just a little longer, Grandpa.
And now I find myself lacking.

One of the problems with grief is that you can’t schedule it. It rears its messy head at awkward, inconvenient times, precisely when you don’t expect it or when you’re not wearing waterproof mascara. You go to the funeral, you attend the burial, you walk through the good-bye ceremony, and you think grief will fit in the box you’ve made for it. But it turns out you can’t plan out when you’re going to feel sad. You can’t put it on the calendar and then be done with it.

***

On a brisk November morning, just after Ruth’s funeral, I told Graham, “Okay, let’s put on our coats. We’re going outside to plant hope.” I had work to do and emails to answer and laundry to fold. But those things would have to wait.

So I grabbed a shovel and started chipping away at the stubborn November ground.

“Do you know what this is?” I asked Graham after we’d dug forty holes and unearthed approximately a dozen worms.

“Onion,” he said proudly.

A fair enough guess. The brown bulb looked much more like a shriveled-up onion than a daffodil. I’ve seen plenty of spring blooms in my lifetime, but even I found it hard to believe this little lump would burst out of the ground in golden glory four months from now.

Isn’t that the way hope is? It seems irrational—impossible, even. It doesn’t take root right away. It’s something we plant today with the wild idea that it will bloom after a long winter.

Hope, it turns out, isn’t one of those splashy flowers that gets planted in May and then disappears with the first frost. No, hope is a perennial. You plant it now, when the ground is hard and cold. And you trust that by some miracle, you will reap an eternal spring.

I don’t know what you need hope for today. But I urge you to dig in, even though there are no blooms yet. Dig in, believing that winter won’t last forever. Dig in, and bask in a little bit of tomorrow’s sunshine today.

The snow, like all other deaths, had to melt and run, leaving room for hope.

George MacDonald

The Gift of Interruptibility

I think the world can be divided into two types of people:

1. list people
2. non-list people

(Do you see what I just did there?)

I wish I could say I’m one of those free spirits who lives spontaneously and serendipitously, bopping from one adventure to the next. But the truth is, I prefer planned spontaneity. I like the kind of serendipities I can put on my calendar. I enjoy adventures I can pack a bag for.

And yep, I like to make lists. (Confession: I’ve been known to add things I’ve already done to my to-do list, just so I could cross them out.)

My list-ish lifestyle worked fairly well for a large chunk of my life. But now that I have a toddler (aka a streaking boy-comet), the lists aren’t working out the way they used to. I keep making lists; the problem is that they’re now long enough to trip over, and not a thing gets crossed off. It’s not so much that I get interrupted from my lists on occasion; it’s that interruptions are now the default status.

At two, Graham is blissfully unaware of to-do lists. But if he had one, it would probably go something like this:

1. Pick up sticks.
2. Play with toy trucks.
3. Read books.
4. Eat snacks.
5. Repeat.

God knew how much I needed this little person in my life for oh-so-many reasons. One of them is his blatant disregard for efficiency.

“Mama play trucks,” he says.

“Mama read book.”

“Mama come too!”

As we walk around the neighborhood at a snail’s pace, stopping to pick up every leaf and rock on the way, I look at the trees that line the street—a corridor of gold and red and burnt orange. I try to memorize the way the sugar maples glow against the October-blue sky. It is so beautiful it hurts. But I’ve seen enough autumns to know it won’t last. One gusty November storm will be enough to disrobe every deciduous tree in sight.

Why is it, I wonder, that the most beautiful things are also the ones that are gone in a blink?

We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God. God will be constantly canceling our plans by sending us people with claims and petitions. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

And so I put away my to-do list. I zoom tiny construction vehicles around the living room. I read the book about the blue truck until I have it memorized. I pick up 17 sticks on the way home. I share soggy crackers.

My list will be there when I get back. But this darling interruption? It turns out he’s not an interruption after all. He’s the one item on my to-do list I never want to cross off.

The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day.

C. S. Lewis

A Letter to Our Son on His 2nd Birthday

Dear Graham,

You have been with us for two years now. Only two years . . . and already two years. In the span of this year, you morphed before our eyes from a baby into a little boy.

Your dad and I sometimes check on you in your crib before we go to bed. We don’t need to anymore, but it’s habit now. Besides, we secretly love those quiet moments, watching your normally active little self in freeze-frame, like a hurricane on pause.

We close the door behind us and marvel at how big you are. “Didn’t those pants just fit him two days ago?” we ask. It’s not just your legs that have grown. But they’re the easiest to measure.

Last year at this time, you were taking your first tentative steps. Your babble was mostly incoherent. You needed help to eat, use a sippy cup, and go down the slide at the park.

Now you are full of opinions and words and dramatic gestures and joy and occasional food strikes. You’ve learned how to string words together and whisper in our ears and rake leaves and mix cookie dough. You’ve learned how to run on your tiptoes and kick a soccer ball and throw rocks in the creek. You’ve learned to beg for Band-Aids and sing silly songs and share your goldfish crackers (when you want to). You’ve learned that a cow says “moo” and a lion says “rawrrr” and a puppy sticks out its tongue and pants. And when I asked you recently, on a whim, what Graham says, you flashed me a sparkly smile and replied, “Happy.”

“Do you think there’s ever another year in a person’s life when they learn so much?” I asked your dad one day. Probably not, we decided. But the more I think about it, the more I realize how much we’ve learned this year, thanks to your tutelage.

This year we’ve learned . . .

  • How to extract a pea from a tiny nostril with a Q-tip
  • That locks aren’t always baby-proof, especially the ones that guard the snack cabinet
  • How to keep a straight face when you say, “No, no, puppy” just before doing something willfully defiant
  • How to find creative protein alternatives during that two-month meat boycott 
  • How to notice every rock, stick, and bug on the way to the park
  • How to read the truck book seven times in a row

Here’s what I’m learning about being a parent: in my eyes, you will forever be every age at once. In your two-year-old face I see who you are right now, with your sticky oatmeal fingers and cheeky grin and affinity for all things with wheels.

But I also see the swaddled bundle we took home from the hospital in an enormous car seat. I see the baby so tiny we were afraid we would break you but who somehow had ninja-like strength whenever it was bath time.

I see the six-month-old who belly-laughed at Daddy’s silly noises and learned to dance before you could walk. I see the one-year-old who adored garbage trucks and flowers and blueberries. I see the 18-month-old who decided one inauspicious day that he was too big for a high chair and insisted on sitting at the table instead.

And at times I see glimpses of the person you may become. In certain moments, you do something beyond your two years, like tell your own joke or give us a pat on the back or insist on wearing a romper with Hawaiian shorts and snow boots, and suddenly the future flashes before my eyes. I see you getting on the bus, going to overnight camp, sitting in the driver’s seat of the car, getting your first job, becoming a dad yourself.

These moments when time folds over on itself are at once beautiful and terrifying. My heart isn’t big enough to hold so many versions of you at once. And so when you blow out your candles, I will try to just count to two and embrace who you are right now, in this moment. And I will tuck the memory in my pocket so I can pull it out again someday.

Happy birthday, my boy. We love who you are and who you were and who you will be one day.

Mom and Dad

Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.

Dr. Seuss

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

In the Season of Raspberries

In my memory, it is forever summer at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. The desert sun is always beating down as we run through the sprinkler. The Columbia River is always cold and clear. The homemade ice cream tastes like spoonsful of heaven. And there are always raspberries in the garden, deep red and begging to be picked.

Every summer when we kids visited my grandparents, we looked forward to picking raspberries with Grandpa. We could have been out playing, but we followed him to the garden, Pied Piper style, even though we knew that meant we’d be put to work.

Green baskets in hand, we’d alternate between filling our baskets and popping the sun-ripened berries into our mouths. As we made our way down the meticulous rows, Grandpa plied us with riddles and puzzles to solve.

Railroad crossing; look out for cars. Can you spell that without any r’s?

Although Grandpa spent nearly his entire career as an analytical chemist, he was truly a teacher at heart. Before being recruited by a nuclear plant at the height of the Cold War, he spent several years as a high school chemistry teacher. But he never stopped teaching. The raspberry patch became his classroom, and we were his students.

When Grandpa finished picking his rows, he’d head over to help with mine. “I got them all,” I would say confidently. He’d just smile, and then, to my utter amazement, fill several baskets’ worth of berries from the bushes I was certain were bare.

***

I got the news that Grandpa’s heart beat for the last time on a hot June day. The raspberries in my own garden—a weak nod to Grandpa’s legacy—were just starting to ripen.

A decade and a half ago, dementia started pulling my grandfather away from us. It began as a slow trickle at first, until eventually the current picked up and swept him away, one memory at a time.

The last time I saw him, he said, “Am I supposed to know you?” When I told him I was his granddaughter, he cocked his head and squinted at me. “No, that’s not it,” he said, as if trying to solve a riddle. “But I do think I know you.”

He gave me a hug anyway.

How do you summarize a life of 90-plus years? If I had to pin Grandpa down to a single attribute, I suppose I would say he was a study in faithfulness. He was married to the same woman for 66 years. He was a member of the same church for 61 years. He worked at the same company for 37 years. He tended the same raspberry patch for four decades. And under his meticulous care, all manner of things flourished.

In the days before his death, the thin space between heaven and earth became increasingly gauzy. Near the end, he could hardly breathe, but when my mom and her sisters said the Lord’s Prayer over him, he opened his eyes and mouthed the words right along with them.

On earth as it is in heaven . . .

Now Grandpa’s mind has been returned to him. He has been reunited with his memories. And I like to think he’s sharing his riddles with a whole new audience beyond the pearly gates.

As I teach my son to fill up his own basket of raspberries, I’m struck by the rich bounty we’ve been given. The raspberry harvest is sweet. But not as sweet as the harvest from a life faithfully lived.

***

What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.

Frederick Buechner

Did you figure out the answer to the riddle? It’s that.