Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

Dreams Are Made of Bricks and Love

wedding1Four Augusts ago, I walked down a grassy aisle, my eyes never wavering from the man with the blue eyes and the big heart and the contagious laugh. My pulse pounded with joy . . . and a healthy dose of fear. I had never said yes to something big, so unknown before.

Up to that point, I’d made some fairly significant decisions in my life. I’d accepted a job offer, I’d signed a mortgage, I’d joined a church. But if things went wrong and everything fell apart, those commitments could be undone. I could sell the house, quit the job, find a new church.

But this was different. This was forever—for as long as both shall live.

I didn’t know what lay ahead for us. We’d imagined together and planned together and dreamed about the future together, but there was no way to know what twists and turns were waiting down the road.

What would the next year hold? The next decade? The next however-many years God would grant us together? I wasn’t sure, but I knew this: whatever came, I wanted to embrace it by Daniel’s side.

I do. I will.

***

I might be the writer in the family, but Daniel is definitely the songwriter. Earlier this year he wrote a song called “Take That Picture,” and this line in the chorus makes me tear up every time:

These dreams, we made them up
And now they’re true

Four years into this marriage adventure, I see those words unfolding before my eyes, and in my heart. We’re starting to see the vows we made to each other on that dew-covered August morning sprout to life. We’re beginning to see our dreams take root in the soil of us—some of which we imagined and others we didn’t dare to hope for. And still others that are yet to bloom.

But dreams, we’re discovering, don’t just appear out of thin air. As my dad says, marriage is a miracle, but it’s one you work on.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t quite grasp on my wedding day: Dreams aren’t fluffy wisps that simply materialize. They’re forged out of bricks and sweat and tears and laughter and the hard work of love.

A friend recently asked me for advice as she was weighing the pros and cons of a particular dating relationship. “There are some things about this guy that aren’t my mental image of the ‘ideal husband,’” she said. “Which things should I make sure change about him before I agree to take the relationship to the next level?”

I understood what she was getting at, and certainly there are nonnegotiables that should be weighed before making such a big commitment. But there was something backwards about that way of looking at things.

And so, as gently as I could, I said, “My sweet friend, you’re not saying yes to a package. You’re saying yes to a person.”

Getting married isn’t sealing in a particular set of circumstances and then crossing your fingers that certain things will never change—and that others will. It’s choosing that person. And then choosing them again, day after day, year after year.

Maybe an anniversary is a chance to step back and watch as the miracle of marriage, covered as it is in sweat and elbow grease, unfolds before our eyes.

So as we celebrate four years of the Daniel and Stephanie team, I want to thank Daniel for writing the words to this song. And I want to thank God for making them come true.

A Place to Call Home

ManchesterMy husband, Daniel, and I just bought our first house together, which means I’ve been thinking a lot about home lately.

When we started the adventure of scoping out open houses and looking at realtor.com and making our list of would-likes and must-haves, it felt rather daunting. We knew a house is just a bunch of lumber and drywall, but it seemed so much weightier than that. It felt like where we lived said something about our future, our hopes and dreams, our very identity. That’s a lot of pressure for a piece of real estate.

My friend Brooke told me about this quote she heard somewhere: “Our homes are characters in our stories” (more on that here). And my apologies for the terrible pun, but that sentiment really hit home for me. We weren’t just finding a place to put our stuff or go to sleep at night; we were finding a spot that would become a key part of our story for the next undetermined number of years.

If there’s anyone who knows about longing for home, it’s Brooke. Last summer she and her family packed up their essential belongings, rented out their house, and bought a mobile home so they could embark on a yearlong, 48-state tour of the country. Her home has been on wheels for the past year, meaning that in some ways her home is always with her, and in some ways she’s never home. She knows what it’s like to have roots and to tear them up, how freedom is the other side of loneliness, and how home is both the place and the people.

I think God hardwired us to long for home—to want to put pieces of ourselves into the soil of a place, to make memories there, to let the love and the laughter soak so deeply into the walls that they are heavy with moments and days and years.

But here’s something else I’m learning: our desire for an earthly home is never going to be enough to fill the longing in our souls. Even if we manage to find the perfect paint swatches, line the walls with just the right decorations, and fix all the leaky faucets, it won’t be enough. That longing for a haven, a place to truly belong—that only comes when we make ourselves at home in Christ.

I’ve always loved this psalm, but it makes more sense to me now:

Lord, through all the generations
you have been our home!
—Psalm 90:1

It seems appropriate that this psalm was written by Moses, the wanderer. The guy who grew up with a family not his own and in a country not his own, the guy who spent forty years exiled in the desert, the guy who led his people to a Promised Land he never got to enter. I have a hunch this nomad never really had a place to put his feet up and get comfortable in.

But still, he found home. He learned the lesson we all need, whether we’re putting down roots or pulling them up: When you make your dwelling in God, you will always find home.

***

You never know where you’re going if you’re going by faith. If you’re going by faith, you’re always a stranger in this world, because your home is God.
—John Ortberg

Question for today: What’s something you wished you’d known when you moved into a new home? What’s something you learned from moving to a new place?

In honor of my recent move, I’m giving away a copy of Home Is Where My People Are by the talented and charming Sophie Hudson! It’s a wonderful book about the unexpected places and people that make up home, and what God teaches us along the way. To be eligible, tell me about your moving experience in the comment section below. I’ll give a free copy to one randomly selected commenter.

Grace in Under 20 Words

Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

I can relate—it’s so much harder for me to get a point across concisely than to say it in a verbose way, using lots of decorative, superfluous adjectives (not to mention extraneous parenthetical comments that should just as well be chopped out). (Ahh! See what I just did there?)

When I was a kid, I would tell stories at the dinner table, and inevitably my dad would stop me partway through. “Hold on,” he’d say. “Can you tell me the short version?”

I’d just stare at him blankly. There is no short version! It’s either the whole story, complete with narrative arc, character development, and sensory descriptions, or there’s no story at all.

So when my writing group recently did an exercise in which the goal was to write as succinctly as possible, I found myself all but paralyzed. How can you communicate an entire message in such a short space?

I decided to dust off my old English notes and try writing a haiku. Maybe the strictly enforced parameters would help me trim my word count. Three lines, and only three lines. No wiggle room on the syllables either: five, seven, five. Every word would have to count.

Here’s what I came up with—my story of grace, in under twenty words:

Chasing down my dream
God slams the door in my face
The doorjamb of grace

***

My challenge for you today: Can you tell a story of God working in your life in twenty words or less? Or if you’re feeling ambitious, try your hand at your own haiku. I’d be honored to read it—please share it in the comments!

 

Christmas through the Eyes of a Carpenter

stable1My family has a unanimously agreed-upon no-Christmas-gifts policy, and my dad hasn’t set foot in a mall since circa 1986, so I was surprised when he told me he had something for me in the basement—something I needed to open before Christmas.

Intrigued, I made my way downstairs to find a large lump sitting on the Ping-Pong table, draped unceremoniously with a black garbage bag. I raised an eyebrow at Dad before pulling back the plastic to unveil the mystery item.

When I realized what it was, I’m pretty sure I squealed louder than I did the Christmas I was eight and awoke to find my pink-and-purple banana-seat bike under the tree. “It’s a stable!” I exclaimed. “For my nativity set!”

Ever since I’d gotten a nativity set, I’d been looking for a stable big enough to fit the figures, but I’d had no success. And since I didn’t want Mary and Joseph and the rest of the crew to look freakishly disproportionate in their Bethlehem abode, thus far the crèche figurines had been without shelter. Until now. Dad, being the handyman he is, had come up with a solution to my dilemma: he’d built a custom-sized stable himself.

My dad, Joseph, the carpenter.

He pointed out all the details of the stable: the ladder that led to the loft, the perch where a bird could sit, the spotlight that would shine on Baby Jesus, the place where he’d had to cover the blood after cutting his finger. His voice grew animated as he told me that the whole thing was made of found materials—scrap wood, paint-stirring sticks, twigs he and Mom had found in the backyard, sawdust shavings from the basement floor.

On my way home that night, glancing at the work of art in the seat beside me, I couldn’t help but think of another Joseph, another carpenter, another father. Why did God pick Joseph as Jesus’ adoptive father? I wondered. Mary features prominently in the Christmas story, but we don’t hear much about Joseph, and I guess I’d always pictured him as her silent sidekick. But surely God had a reason to write him into the story too.

As I thought about my dad pounding and sawing for months leading up to December, it struck me that at a carpenter’s very heart is the ability to believe in a crazy, far-fetched dream. A carpenter is someone who can embrace a vision before it’s a reality, someone who can take ordinary scraps and see them not as they are but as they could be one day. A carpenter is someone who believes the impossible . . . and then gets to work building it.

stable2Thousands of years ago, when Joseph heard his fiancée was pregnant, an angel appeared to him in a dream:

 Joseph, son of David,” the angel said, “do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. For the child within her was conceived by the Holy Spirit. And she will have a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. —Matthew 1:20-21

Joseph was given a dream that day—a dream made of ordinary-looking scraps: A pregnant girl. A common laborer. A family without clout or fortune or political connections. A community skeptical of his fiancée’s claims. But somehow Joseph was able to take those found pieces and believe that the God-given vision was true: that this baby really would be the Messiah, the promised one, the one who would save the people from their sins.

When Joseph woke up, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded and took Mary as his wife. —Matthew 1:24

In the face of the impossible, Joseph rolled up his sleeves and got to work, doing his part to hammer a miraculous dream into reality.

So every time I see that stable on my mantel, I’ll think of two Josephs. Like those dreamers, I want to see in the scraps around me the visions God is building in my life. The pieces themselves might not be much to look at on their own. But in the deft hands of the Carpenter, they just might become something beautiful.

God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame. —Elizabeth Barrett Browning