Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

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.

Friday Favorites for June

Happy Friday! Here are some of my recent favorite finds. Hope you enjoy them!

For anyone who is a spelling bee wannabe . . .

In honor of the Scripps National Spelling Bee last week, here’s a look at the most commonly misspelled words by state. I’m found Wisconsin’s error of choice particularly amusing. America’s Most Misspelled Words

For anyone who wants to read the classics but doesn’t have time . . .

If Oliver Twist has been on your to-read list for some time now, never fear: now you can get the ultra Cliffs Notes version in the form of an entertaining limerick. Classic Literature Limericks

For anyone who wants to do things “by the book” . . .

As I prepare for motherhood, I admit that I’ve been reading all sorts of books in an attempt to figure out the best strategies. But sometimes I need to step back and remember that there’s going to be an element of mystery and surprise in every big life change. This hysterical article compiles all the contradictory baby sleep advice in one place. I Read All the Baby Sleep Advice Books

For my fellow word lovers our there . . .

You might be surprised to discover that the most complicated word in the English language is only three letters long. The Most Complicated Word in English

For anyone in need of a dose of hope . . .

Professor Bruininks has studied hope for years, and her findings are at once fascinating and encouraging. “Fear and hope do not appear to be two sides of a coin but rather can occur together.” Why Even Pessimists Can Embrace Hope

The Scene of a Miracle

Have you ever been up close to a miracle before?

Maybe you’ve been on the receiving end of a miraculous healing that only could have come as the result of divine intervention. Maybe you’ve experienced a reconciliation that would have been impossible on human terms. Or maybe you’ve witnessed something that simply couldn’t be explained by a natural phenomenon.

I’ve seen miracles before—some of them on a smaller scale, and others that played out in grand fashion. I’ve seen sunsets and majestic mountain scenes that had to have been crafted by a divine hand. I’ve seen hardened hearts transformed. I’ve seen trapped people set free. I’ve seen sick people made well.

And I’ve heard of miracles too—stories from friends and family members and strangers who have had God step in and intervene in some powerful way. I’ve heard their tales of miraculous transformation, and their faith has made mine stronger.

As intangible as faith usually is, miracles bring faith to life through our senses—God breaks through the door of heaven and allows us to see or hear him in a more concrete way than we usually do. (That said, I’m not sure I’ve smelled or tasted a miracle before, although my grandmother’s cinnamon rolls come close.)

I may have seen and heard miracles before, but I can say this for sure: I’ve never felt a miracle.

Until now.

Now, for the first time, I’m experiencing a miracle from a whole new perspective. I find that my body is the very scene of a miracle.

Somehow, some way, there is a miracle growing inside of me—moving inside of me, kicking inside of me (maybe even doing pirouettes inside of me, the best I can tell). I didn’t create this life; I’ve merely been chosen as the setting for this child to grow.

As much as I do my best to create a safe, healthy place for my baby—curbing my coffee addiction, scrupulously skipping the blue cheese, making sure I don’t lift anything heavy—ultimately I play a small role in this miracle.

God is knitting this tiny person together, and I have the privilege of not only seeing it or hearing about it but actually feeling the miracle inside my body.

This pregnancy has had its share of bumps and scares, but regardless of the outcome, I don’t want to forget that this is a miracle—a nine-months-in-the-making miracle that is getting bigger and more miraculous by the day.

And here’s something I’ve learned about miracles along the way: like the fluttering kicks of a baby, they aren’t always obvious right away. They don’t always announce themselves with dramatic fanfare. Sometimes they start small and bashful, just waiting for us to quiet our hearts to notice them. And be grateful for them.

Maybe you are looking for a miracle right now. Maybe you’ve been waiting and longing and praying for so long that you are weary, almost scared to keep hoping.

If this is you, please don’t give up. You may very well be the scene of a miracle yourself. And that miracle may be starting even now, with the smallest of flutterings within your own heart.

I have always imagined miracles to be like loud shouts. Like trumpet blasts. But they are secretive. They are more like deeply buried seeds. . . . Always, God is tugging us toward resurrection, tugging us and this whole weary, winter world toward new life. But the way is dark. The road is long. The path is quiet. It is paved with hunger.

Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky

A Letter to Our Baby

Dear Baby,

Your dad nicknamed you Spark. Months ago, before our scary ultrasound, he decided it was a fitting name. I never figured out how he came up with it, but it didn’t matter. It just seemed right.

And now more ever, the name suits you perfectly.

The doctor said some scary words in that office after your ultrasound . . . words like genetic abnormality and restricted fetal growth and stillbirth and preterm. Baby Spark, we don’t know exactly what’s happening, and as much as the doctors try to pin it all down, they really don’t know the whole story either.

Your dad and I have so many dreams and hopes for you. We wonder what your personality will be like, what you’ll be passionate about, what you’ll like and dislike, what you’ll be gifted at, if you’ll have your dad’s blue eyes or your mom’s single dimple. We’ve imagined so many possibilities for your future.

Spark, we wouldn’t have chosen any of those scary doctor-words for you. We would choose words like healthy and whole and perfect for you if we could. But don’t forget this for a moment: Although we wouldn’t choose this road for you, we choose YOU. No matter what.

And this is likely the first lesson of many to come for us: that as much as we love you, as much as we’re honored that you’ve been temporarily entrusted to us, you are not ultimately ours. You are God’s child, on loan to us. And so we don’t get to map out your life or control what happens to you—we just get to love you and raise you with the wisdom God grants us.

***

That day of the ultrasound, right after we got this news we weren’t expecting, your dad and I were sitting in the lobby of the hospital. Instead of going to a celebratory lunch before we headed back to work, we found ourselves perched on blue plastic chairs, trying to process what we’d heard. I was ugly-crying, not even caring about the stream of people staring at us as they made their way through the lobby.

Your dad was holding my hand, plying me with tissues. After a while he said something I’ll never forget: “I feel like our baby is saying to us, ‘I am a child of God.’”

That moment marked a pivot for me. It was at once obvious and revolutionary. If we truly believe you are a child of God—and we do—then our dreams and hopes and plans for you come second. We choose to surrender all our ideas in favor of what God has in mind for you.

That Sunday, just two days later, your dad played this song with the worship band in church:

From my mother’s womb
You have chosen me
Love has called my name

Spark, we believe that no matter what happens, God is going to use you to shine for him. Maybe that will be because he surprises everyone and you enter this world miraculously healthy. Or maybe you will shine for him precisely because there’s something unique about you that this world would deem less than perfect.

I’m no longer a slave to fear
I am a child of God

And so, Spark, we are trying to choose love instead of fear. We believe you are God’s beloved child. And we believe he is going to use you to ignite hearts for him. You are only the size of a cantaloupe, but already you are shining. Already we love you like crazy.

Love,
Mom and Dad

If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.
Julian of Norwich

When Your Greatest Joy Collides with Your Greatest Fear

If someone managed to do an X-ray of the soul, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that our places of deepest joy are located right beside our places of deepest sorrow. I’ve spent the larger part of a lifetime assuming life should come one emotion at a time. A season of joy, then a season of pain. Heartache followed by a dream-come-true. All compartmentalized into neat categories.

But as it turns out, life rarely unfolds that way. The good and the bad often fly at us scattershot: joy and pain in simultaneous explosions. The happiness is so woven in with the tears that we can’t separate them out without losing both.

There’s an old song I love by Rich Mullins called “We Are Not as Strong as We Think We Are”:

With these our hells and our heavens So few inches apart We must be awfully small And not as strong as we think we are

Isn’t that about right? Our hells and our heavens, mere inches away from the other.

And that’s where Daniel and I find ourselves right now—smack dab in the middle of both. Great joy intertwined with deep sorrow.

Twenty weeks ago, God fulfilled a dream I’ve held on to for years—one of the most tender desires of my heart. My body wasn’t cooperating, my biological clock was working against me, and the doctors said it was impossible. But one brisk morning in January, to our speechless delight, Daniel and I found out there was new life growing inside me.

This is our miracle, our answer to prayer, our little piece of heaven on earth.

But just inches away—and weeks away—we bumped into one of our deepest fears.

***

We went into the ultrasound rather giddy about meeting this baby of ours, naïvely thinking the biggest question would be whether to find out the gender. After much contemplation, we decided to be surprised.

We were surprised. But the gender was the least of it.

After the ultrasound was over, the doctor came in and did a second one. That’s when I felt the first niggling of trepidation. Wouldn’t a doctor be too busy to repeat what the tech just did? But I was on such a high after seeing the baby’s button nose and tiny fingers that I was caught off guard when the doctor called us into her office.

“We suspect a genetic abnormality,” she said matter-of-factly, as if she were mentioning it might rain later.

For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.

I’ve heard Psalm 139 countless times, but honestly, I’ve always skipped over the “fearfully” part and moved right on to “wonderfully.” The images we saw in the ultrasound served as incontrovertible evidence of the wonderful part. Before our baby weighed a full ounce, the kidneys and liver were formed. Before this child was the size of an avocado, the heart was thrumming away at 150 beats a minute. Wonderfully made indeed.

But in that doctor’s white-walled office, fearfully took on ferocious new meaning. I am carrying a wonder inside me, yes. But inseparable from that wonder is fear. Fear about what could happen if something is amiss with just one of the 46 chromosomes. Fear about the ramifications if this baby enters the world too soon. Fear about how fragile life is for all of us, but especially for someone who is currently only about one pound.

This baby is, even now, being masterfully and tenderly knit together by the Creator himself. In the meantime, I need to know: How can I hold on to both the fear and the wonder? I don’t want to revel in the wonder alone and deny the legitimate fear. And I don’t want to let the fear eclipse the wonder altogether. So somehow I need to find a way to embrace both at once.

It’s a risk, this business of loving someone. But isn’t that part of what it means to be made in the image of the Creator who knit us together? He knows full well our frailties and weaknesses and humanness. And yet he loves his children with abandon. To love is to risk being hurt. But it’s worth the risk.

As we wait in the unknown these next four months, I wouldn’t choose any other way than the bumpy road of love. Even if it means that our hells and our heavens, our fears and our wonders, are separated by mere inches.

To love at all is to be vulnerable.
C. S. Lewis

The God of Surprises

This holy week I’ve been thinking a lot about how God has this knack for surprising us. He gives us whispers about his coming, but he doesn’t usually spell out the itinerary for us, like the exact whens and wheres and hows.

This is tricky for planners like me. I want to know how it’s all going to play out. I like to pretend that’s so I can be prepared, but at some level, it’s because I like to think I have some measure of control.

The truth is, this habit of God’s to surprise us is precisely what I need. Because how do you build faith if you have the entire roadmap laid out for you? Besides, I’m pretty sure that if God gave me the whole picture in advance, I’d curl up in a fetal position and never get out of bed. I’m only brave enough for one step at a time.

On Palm Sunday, Jesus fulfilled those ancient whispers about his entry into Jerusalem. But he didn’t come the way the people expected. He didn’t come like a king, on a white horse. He didn’t come with a sword, surrounded by a fierce army. Instead, he came humbly, on a donkey.

Jesus comes. He always comes. But he doesn’t always come in the way we expect.

Shortly before his death, Jesus said he would rebuild the Temple in a mere three days. The people were incredulous—how could he do such a massive construction project in such a short time? But sure enough, three days after his crucifixion, the temple of his body was raised to life again.

Jesus comes. He always comes. But he doesn’t always come in the way we expect.

This Easter, I want to crack my heart open to God’s surprises. I want to follow the clues about his coming; I want to listen for the whispers. But I don’t want to be so stuck in the way I imagine his arrival that I miss him when he comes. I want to be ready for him, even when the way he comes is different from what I’d choose, what I’d expect, what I’d plan.

I don’t know what you’re facing right now, but I have a hunch that you, too, are longing for Jesus to come. Longing for him to show up in your pain and your doubt and your confusion. Longing for him to move your stone away. Longing for him to bring life out of death.

Jesus comes. He always comes. May we be ready for him, even when he doesn’t come in the way we expect.

Friday Favorites for April

Hi everyone! Happy Friday. Here are a few of my recent favorites for this month. Enjoy!

For anyone whose spring break was lackluster (or nonexistent) . . .

Maybe you can’t enter the pages of a book, but you can visit these real-life places that inspired some famous novels! I can see why Moseley Bog would have sparked Tolkien’s creativity. And anyone else want to visit Ashdown Forest with me? 9 Real Life Places That Inspired Famous Classic Novels

For anyone in need of an extra dose of happy . . .

How happy can a word be? Someone did a study that assigned happiness quotients to some 10,000 words. See if this list doesn’t make you a little happier, just from reading it! The 200 Happiest Words in Literature

For anyone who geeks out about stats or books (or stats about books) . . .

I found this article about author’s favorite words fascinating. Find out which writers gravitated toward mauve, cinnamon, and civility. What’s your word of choice? What Famous Writers’ Most-Used Words Say about Them

For anyone who would have written their story a little differently than it’s playing out . . .

So often I start my story in the wrong place. And I wish I could edit it, even though I don’t have the whole picture: “This story starts with our perfect God. Immeasurable. Incalculable. Incomprehensible. Every story starts with Him. And He is writing each one with the aim of pointing to his glory. Every single one. Even the ones I probably would have written differently.” Perfect Start, Perfect End

For anyone who wonders how to live extraordinary in the middle of ordinary . . .

How do you live out a radical faith right where you are—going to work, mowing the lawn, doing the laundry, raising kids? This book is an authentic, humorous, and inspiring look at how to practice things like simplicity, hospitality, and social justice in the context of real life. Highly recommended! The Year of Small Things

Like Eating a Praying Mantis

What’s the longest-term goal you’ve accomplished? Something that couldn’t be checked off after a tough afternoon of grinding it out…one that required not only enthusiasm but also marathon endurance and grit? Maybe you finished your degree after long nights of studying and papers and angst. Maybe you crossed the finish line after hours of training, gallons of sweat, and sore muscles. Maybe you paid off a debt after months (or years) of scrimping and saving and saying no to things you wanted.

There’s something about accomplishments like these that feel significant—not just because we have the thing we aspired to—the degree, the medal, the freedom—but because of what happens to us along the way. When we pursue a big, long goal like this, we are changed along the way. We aren’t the same person we were when we started; we are stronger, tougher, more disciplined. Or maybe it’s not so much that we’ve changed; maybe we had this capacity for toughness in us all along and never knew it. This goal simply allowed us to see that truth about ourselves.

Nine years ago, when my sister graduated from college, she got the biggest gift she’d ever received. I mean that literally—it was a seven-foot by seven-foot crossword puzzle. She hung it up in her bedroom after starting grad school, and I kid you not: it took up the entire wall.

Meghan and I worked on the crossword puzzle together whenever we could—both in person, when I was visiting her, and when she emailed me obscure clues to research. She came to live with me for a summer during one of her internships, and she brought along one big square of the puzzle. Every morning over coffee, we worked a few clues together. When she got a job after grad school, we continued crossowording over the phone before work, and when she became a mom and I got married, we made weekly phone dates during her kids’ naptimes and my lunch breaks.

That crossword puzzle has seen us through a lot of life in almost a decade. Between the two of us, we have experienced marriage, motherhood, new jobs, and multiple moves. We’ve lived a broad gamut of loss and love and heartache and happiness.

Not long ago I was visiting Meghan for the weekend, and we worked on the crossword puzzle over coffee, per tradition. It’s harder to do this than it used to be, so we woke up before our husbands and her kids and tried to do as much as we could before everyone else was ready for breakfast. On that Saturday morning, we found ourselves at a startling spot: I was reading her the very last clue in the puzzle (out of 28,000).

This clue represented nine years and six residences and big life changes and who knows how many hours together. And now it was coming to an end. Meghan gave me the answer, and I found myself with pen in hand, paralyzed. We had been trying to accomplish this goal for almost ten years, but now that the end was here, I didn’t want it to be over. She finally convinced me to write the final letter in the box.

After I got home, Meghan sent me this quote she’d found by someone who had reviewed the same puzzle: “I dread its completion, yet yearn to make it happen as soon as humanly possible. This must be how the male praying mantis feels.” That seemed about right.

We hadn’t just completed the mother of all crossword puzzles. We had learned a lot along the way—not necessary about vocabulary (I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten any new words or factoids I gathered along the way), but about ourselves. We learned that we can accomplish big goals. That we can persevere. That we can take on a seven-foot by seven-foot by nine-year challenge and conquer it. And perhaps most of all, we learned that we aren’t just sisters, but friends. The crossword puzzle united us, even as the rest of our lives diverged.

No one prepares you for the sadness you feel when you accomplish your goal. You graduate, you cross the finish line, you fill in the last crossword square, and you expect the elation. You’re not prepared for the letdown afterward.

So what’s next, once you’ve finished that momentous thing? Here’s my bit of advice, from someone in the throes of finishing: Take time to celebrate. Don’t rush past your accomplishment—savor it. And then, when you feel like you’ve duly marked the occasion, find a new goal. Maybe even a wall-sized one.

Most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is, in a sense, ordinary.
Angela Duckworth, Grit

***

What big thing have you accomplished recently? And how did you feel when it as all over?

What’s Your One Word?

We are already 59 days into 2017. New Year’s resolutions have come and gone, diets and gym attendance are now a distant memory, and the new year has dulled like your car under its coat of winter grime.

In other words: I should have written this post several moons ago.

But have you ever had a dream or a goal or a whisper of a hope that was just too tender to put into words? It feels so delicate, and you’re afraid that if you bring it out into the harsh winds of reality, it will get blown over or stepped on unceremoniously. It seems safer to keep it inside the glass case of your own heart.

But here’s the hard truth about keeping dreams enclosed in a glass case: While they may not get trampled that way, eventually the oxygen will get squeezed out, and the dream will shrivel.

As this year approached, I searched for a word to focus on in the year ahead. The truth is, I’m terrible at resolutions, so I figured if I only had to remember one word, maybe I’d be able to hang on to it—or at least remember it come April.

After a great deal of mulling and re-mulling, one word kept haunting me: believe. I balked at first. After all, I’ve believed in God for a long time . . . for as long as I can remember, in fact, though in varying degrees.

But the implication for this year seemed more personal. We weren’t just talking about “Do I believe in God?” It hit closer to the jugular than that.

Do I believe God is who he says he is in my life?
Do I believe his promises are true for me?
Do I believe he still does miracles?
Do I believe that he is for me . . . that he loves me, personally?

And will I keep on believing in him—whether he says yes or not?

Somewhere along the way, when it came to the deepest desires of my heart, I’d started hedging my bets with God. I wasn’t sure if he’d give me the thing I longed for, so I stopped talking to him about it in a real way. When he and I did talk, I’d hit him up with platitudes along the lines of “Thy will be done,” with my emotions safely checked at the door.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that prayer—it was modeled by Jesus, after all. But I’d forgotten the first part of his prayer—the part where he cried out his desire before his Father so earnestly that his sweat came out as drops of blood.

I wasn’t being pious by holding my request in check; instead, I was showing a lack of belief. Whether God decided to grant my desire or not, I needed to be real with him about what I was asking him for, what I was believing for.

And so, as this year has launched, I’ve begun taking some baby steps toward believing. It feels vulnerable and scary, because when you put yourself and your big ask out there, you’re setting yourself up to get hurt. But there’s an important part of this puzzle I’ve been overlooking: belief isn’t really about the strength of my faith; it’s about the object of my faith.

The God I believe in is a good Father; he is infinitely tender with us. So if he doesn’t give us what we’re asking him for, I have to believe it’s because he has something better than our finite minds can conceive. Better to ask and allow him to say no (or yes) than to always wonder what might have happened if we’d had the courage to really ask.

So what does it look like to believe? I’m still young at this, but so far, this is what I’m trying:

1. Writing my big, audacious request in my journal.

I have a journal with this quote from Alice in Wonderland on the front: “I’ve believed six impossible things before breakfast.” That’s a big goal for a girl who tends to hedge her bets, but I’m giving it a shot.

2. Allowing friends to believe on my behalf.

I’ve shared my big request with some people I love and trust, and it is a gift to know they are hoping and praying for me when I don’t have it in me to muster up much belief on my own.

3. Believing on behalf of other people.

I’ve asked other people what I can believe this year for them. Somehow it feels easier to have faith for their big request than for my own, and there’s something beautiful that happens when we share our tender hopes and beliefs with each other.

***

What are believing for this year? If you’re willing to share, let me know, and I’d be honored to believe with you and pray for you. And do you have any tips for holding on to belief in a tangible way?

 

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.

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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