Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

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

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.

Where Are You?

If there were a rite of passage for parenthood, I’d venture to say it’s not a baby shower or a milestone birthday or watching your child take their first step. Maybe, instead, it’s that first trip to the ER.

Our ER adventure started with the most innocuous of summer events: a bug bite. But by day two, the swelling was getting worse and the Benadryl wasn’t doing the trick. By the time our little boy woke up from his nap, both eyes were swollen completely shut. The pediatrician sent us straight to the ER—forget dinner, let alone combing your hair.

Once Graham and I were on the road (Daniel couldn’t go, per COVID regulations), I heard Graham’s little voice pipe up from the backseat, “How you feeling, Mama?” Before I could come up with a reply that was both honest and calming, he replied, “I feeling happy.” This from a boy whose eyes looked like jet-puffed marshmallows and who could no longer see out the window.

Once we were whisked into our hospital room, Graham was given a tiny gown with rocket ships on it and pumped with even more Benadryl. He let the doctor pry open his eyes and dutifully responded when asked, “Does this hurt? How about this?”

He was a champ . . . under one condition: that he knew precisely where I was. And since his visibility was at practically zero, that meant physical contact. If I took my hand off of him for even a second, he would say, “Where are you, Mama?” So I’d rub his back or put my hand on his arm while singing every hymn I could access from the cobwebs of memory.

By hour three in the ER, as we waited in vain for the Benadryl to kick in, it was well past bedtime. After dozing off in the too-big hospital bed, he’d wake up, startled. “What is you and I doing, Mama?” he asked. I’d hold his hand and remind him where we were. And then he’d breathe a sigh and lean back on the pillow again.

Thankfully, Graham’s eyes recovered (although we never did figure out the rogue bug that got him). The main thing he remembers about his hospital visit was the bed with wheels, which he thought was the coolest thing since Thomas the Tank Engine. But I can’t stop thinking about the kind of childlike faith that requires only presence, not answers.

By all counts, this year has been a year of reckoning for our nation, for our world. Everywhere we turn, there’s pain, suffering, injustice, division. Every day the news headlines bring a new reason for lament. With my jaded, grown-up faith, I ask God, “Why? How long? What are you going to do about all this?”

I want to be more like my little boy, with just one pressing question: Where are you, Papa?It may not make the pain go away. It may not change the circumstances. It may not answer all my whys.

But I’ll be reminded that he’s right here, holding my hand. Always has been, always will be. And for now, at least, maybe that’s enough.

But as for me, God’s presence is my good.
I have made the Lord God my refuge,
so I can tell about all you do.

Psalm 73:28

God in Flesh and Blood

When you picture God, what come to mind? A stately King on his throne? A grandfatherly type with a beard? A disembodied being? It’s hard to picture God—and for good reason, since no one can look at his face and live to tell.

And that is true . . . to a point. But then Christmas comes and shatters all our preconceived notions. Christmas comes, and we have to rewrite our narrative of who God is and what he is like. Christmas comes, and we no longer have a God in the abstract. Christmas comes, and we have a God whose face we can gaze into, a God in flesh and blood.

After Jesus was born, Scripture says Mary “pondered these things in her heart.” I’ve always loved the idea of Mary pondering, but now I know why she pondered. When you are sitting there nursing your newborn son in the middle of the night, when everyone else is asleep and no one is posting anything new on Instagram, there is little to do besides ponder.

Among the things Mary must have pondered: The Christmas carols have it all wrong. It was not a silent night. All was not calm. I’m pretty sure there was blood and tears and labor pains. And the bit about “no crying he makes”? My apologies to the writer of “Away in a Manger,” but I’m pretty sure the little Lord Jesus cried.

This Christmas, as I hold my own baby son in my arms, I am struck anew by the sheer scandal of the incarnation. I can understand why the old hymn writers presented a scrubbed version of the manger scene. After all, how could a holy God allow himself to be covered in spit-up? How could the God of creation pee right through his swaddling cloths?

God entered our humanity completely—not just the beautiful, put-together parts, but also the messy parts, the sad parts, the ugly parts. He knows firsthand what it’s to be awake in the middle of the night. He knows what it is to be hungry, to cry, to be human.

So why would he do it? Why give up glory and honor in favor of late-night feedings and tears and dirty diapers? In a word: love.

Though he was God,
he did not think of equality with God
as something to cling to.
Instead, he gave up his divine privileges;
he took the humble position of a slave
and was born as a human being.
~Philippians 2:6-7

May we ponder the Incarnation in a fresh way this year—the scandalous reality that God would allow himself to come to us in the flesh. Ponder it now—the God of the universe, with a body we could hold. With a voice we could hear. With a face we could kiss.

God in flesh and blood.

’Twas much that we were made like God long before, but that God should be made like us, much more.
John Donne

What Nobody Tells You about Epiphany

candleEpiphany. I learned the word from Mr. Heagney, my English teacher, two decades ago, and I’ve been smitten with it ever since. Not only does it dance off the tongue nicely, but the meaning itself is magical: a sudden illuminating discovery or idea; a revelation; the moment the proverbial lightbulb goes on.

Epiphany is a remarkable day on the church calendar too: the holiday marking the revelation of God’s Son to the Magi. This was one of God’s brightest ideas ever: Heaven breaking through to earth. Darkness being trounced by starlight. Kings bowing down before the true King. Hope busting through in the most glorious way.

I long for epiphanies myself. I yearn for the lightbulb to go on, for my fuzzy thinking to clear. I’m desperate for that creative idea, or for the key that will unlock my confusion or doubt or fear. I want to see a star from the east and drop everything to follow. I want a sign.

I’ve had a few moments like that in my life. Micro-revelations, perhaps, but glimpses of the divine nevertheless. Yet those moments are rare. Most days there are no stars in the night sky, no signs, no epiphanies. Most days I’m just treading along a dark path, half-hoping, half-praying that I’m headed in the right direction.

What they don’t tell you about epiphanies is that the star doesn’t stay in the sky forever. After the Magi visited God Incarnate, they headed back to their own country, back to their ordinary lives. Maybe their hearts were irrevocably changed, but life went on.

So what does it look to live out Epiphany even when there’s no miracle at the moment, when the star has faded in the night sky?

That’s when it’s time to hold on, my friend. What you saw when you glimpsed the divine—it was real. What you felt in that moment when God touched your heart—it was valid. The words of hope you heard whispered in the middle of the night—they were true.

So keep believing in the epiphanies. Keep looking for them. They will come. But don’t depend on them. Because faith means holding on to the fact that heaven broke through earth, even after the star has dimmed and you have to go back to your ordinary life. Faith means remembering that miracles are true, even when it’s been some time since you witnessed one firsthand.

Faith means holding on to Epiphany even when there’s no sign. It’s choosing to light a candle when the starlight has faded.

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

Frederick Buechner

Baby Son

nativityI am on a double countdown ’til Christmas this year. My new baby niece or nephew is due any day, and the two calendars are racing. Which will make its debut first? Baby Jesus’ birthday, or the birth day of this new baby?

When my sister was little, she prepared for Christmas like it was her job. She convinced Dad to cut down the tip-top of a pine tree from the woods to put in her room, and Mom helped her string lights from her ceiling. By mid-December, Meghan’s room was a full-blown Santa’s workshop. She’d haul up every craft supply she could find and post a note on the door, with dramatic underlines: “TOP SECRET! Keep out.” She’d spend every waking moment the final weeks before Christmas making all manner of glittery cut-out snowflakes and construction-paper ornaments for the whole family.

This year Meghan is doing a different kind of preparation as the days tick down. She’s getting a room ready for the baby. She’s packing a go-bag for the hospital. She’s making weekly treks to the doctor, checking to make sure the baby is in position. She’s prepping two-year-old Addie to be a big sister (including the possibility that, despite Addie’s adamancy that’s it’s a girl, there’s a chance she may be getting a brother).

There is so much we don’t know about this baby. Besides the gender, we don’t know what this child will look like, what kind of personality is tucked into that curled-up body, what this little one will become someday, or how the world needs this child, specifically. And yet our hearts are full of anticipation. So much longing, so much joy over this tiny person, veiled in so much mystery.

And it occurs to me that Mary must have felt much the same. It’s funny, isn’t it, that some of the biggest miracles come to us in such small packages? I wonder why God would come so tiny, so unobtrusive, when He could have come in pomp and circumstance.

In church last weekend my husband played the song “Baby Son” by John Mark McMillan, and I couldn’t help but think of the baby son (or daughter) my family is waiting to meet. So much future, so much hope, packed into seven pounds of flesh.

We thought you’d come with a crown of gold
A string of pearls and a cashmere robe
We thought you’d clench an iron fist
And rain like fire on the politics

Would I have missed Him that first Christmas, I wonder? Would I have been so busy looking for a flashier miracle that I would have overlooked the ordinary mother and her baby? Would I have deigned to believe that God’s plan to save the world could start with something so small?

But without a sword, no armored guard
But common born in mother’s arms
The government now rests upon
The shoulders of this baby son

A field of daffodils begins with a single bulb. An avalanche starts with a tiny snowflake. A classic novel starts with a solitary word. An epic love story starts with a simple greeting. A person begins as a tiny baby.

And the hope for the world began with someone so small you could hold Him in your arms.

God delights in the small things, the ordinary things, the unexpected things. I always thought that was so everything would be unveiled at the right time and so all the prophecies would be fulfilled just so. But now I think there’s another reason too: because God knows we can only handle so much miracle at once. If He gave us the full-blown itinerary, we would melt into a puddle. And so He births some of His most beautiful, magnificent plans as small beginnings.

Have you no room inside your heart
The inn is full, the out is dark
Upon profane shines sacred sun
Not ashamed to be one of us

So I’m spending this season in anticipation, alongside Mary and Meghan. I find myself waiting . . . waiting for Meghan’s baby son (or daughter). And waiting for God’s own Baby Son, who came once and will come again.

Our hearts are ready. We are longing for you. We have made room. Please come!

God’s coming is always unforeseen, I think, and the reason, if I had to guess, is that if he gave us anything much in the way of advance warning, more often than not we would have made ourselves scarce long before he got there.
~Frederick Buechner

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

 

God with Us

On the last day my three-year-old nephew was in town for a visit, his grandma and I asked him if there was anything else he wanted to do before he went back home. Without hesitation, he and his big sister replied, “We want to go to BOUNCE TOWN!”

bounce_house_oswego_ilFor the uninitiated (as I was prior to aunthood), Bounce Town is one of those places with giant inflatable slides and tunnels, moon walks, inflatable castles, and air trampolines. In other words, a dream-come-true for anyone under three feet tall.

From the moment we walked in the door, Tyler had my hand gripped in his own chubby fingers. He wanted to go everywhere with “Aunt Eppie,” as he calls me.

“Aunt Eppie go with me!” he exclaimed, racing toward the slide as I tried to keep pace.

After squirming my way through tunnels made me for people one-third my size and maneuvering around pint-sized torpedoes zipping down the slide, I asked Tyler what he wanted to do next. “Go on the Batman,” he said. “With Eppie!”

tyler_at_bounce_townAnd so I followed him to the Batman-themed inflatable, again contorting my body through various child-sized portals.

Next up was the trampoline. Tyler squealed with delight: “Eppie make me bounce in the air!”

By the time our hour had expired, I was sporting two rug burns, several sore muscles, and one headache. But you know what? It was worth every bruise, every bit of pain.

Because here’s the thing: Tyler can’t enter my world of work and e-mail and adult conversation and grown-up things. So I entered his world. It wasn’t comfortable—Bounce Town isn’t made for giants like me. But I scrunched my body through the tunnels and small spaces—all so I could be close to this boy I love, all so I could hold his hand, all so we could breathe the same air.

On the way home, tired but happy, it hit me that traipsing around Bounce Town in my stocking feet is a pretty good picture of Christmas. God wanted to be with us, but he realized how vast the gap was between us and him. So he entered into the awkward space of a human womb, squeezing himself through a narrow birth canal, experiencing unaccountable pain and discomfort throughout his three decades on earth—all so he could be with us, all so he could enter our world.

Immanuel. God with us.

Even in the tight, uncomfortable spaces of our earthly Bounce Town.

“This is the God of the gospel of grace. A God who, out of love for us, sent the only Son He ever had wrapped in our skin. He learned how to walk, stumbled and fell, cried for His milk, sweated blood in the night, was lashed with a whip and showered with spit, was fixed to a cross, and died whispering forgiveness on us all.” —Brennan Manning

Photo Credit: http://mommypoppins.com/newyorkcitykids/bounce-houses-bounce-castles-nyc-kids (top)

The Raw Grace of Christmas

It’s December 29, and the Christmas letdown is officially here. The gifts have been opened, and now it’s time for returns and exchanges. The cookies and the decorations are on the verge of going stale. The alarm clock is a harsh reminder that Christmas is no longer two blissful weeks of vacation from school. And now it’s officially just winter, without the twinkly lights and festivities to take the edge off.

It is in the midst of this post-holiday malaise that I remember Christmas isn’t really, after all, about sentimentality or fuzzy feelings. And it’s certainly not limited to a day in December. Ultimately it’s about grace in all its rawness and terror and mystery.

Frederick Buchner wrote this beautiful reflection on the grace of Christmas:

Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived our own blindness and depredations otherwise. It could never have happened otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. We have roofed it and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in itself is indeed—as a matter of cold, hard fact—all it’s cracked up to be, then even at best our efforts are misleading.

The Word became flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not beautiful. It is uninhabitable terror. It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space, time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this: “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God…who for us and for our salvation,” as the Nicene Creed puts it, “came down from heaven.”

Came down. Only then do we dare uncover our eyes and see what we can see. It is the Resurrection and the Life she holds in her arms. It is the bitterness of death he takes at her breast.

—Frederick Buechner, Whispers in the Dark

As the Christmas season in all its commerciality winds down, I pray that we will all experience the perennial grace of the Incarnation, which knows no calendar.

The Incarnation: Unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light.

May it ever be so.

 

 

Veiled in Flesh

For all that I’ve been a decorating grinch this year, I do adore Christmas carols—especially the old classics we used to sing by candlelight in my childhood church. I love the soaring melodies of “Angels We Have Heard on High” and the haunting minor chords of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” and I know pretty much all the words by rote. But I guess I’ve never given much thought to how much theology is packed into those songs.

Take “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” as a case in point. Here are a couple of lines from the second verse:

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see
Hail the incarnate Deity

Way back in Exodus, Moses begged God, “Show me your glorious presence” (Exodus 33:18). But God said there was no way Moses would be able to take in so much glory, so much holiness, and live to tell about it. “You may not look directly at my face,” he told Moses, “for no one may see me and live.”

God’s radiance is simply too much for sinful, broken human beings to gaze on without their hearts instantly stopping in their chests. When Moses made his bold request, God told him that the closest he could get was to see the Lord’s backside. He hid Moses in the cleft of the rock, covering him with his own hand. It wasn’t until God had already passed by that he removed his hand so Moses could catch of a glimpse of his glory from behind. But getting to look at God’s face? No way.

That’s why the Incarnation—God himself wrapped in human skin—is such a profound mystery.

Long ago God spoke many times and in many ways to our ancestors through the prophets. And now in these final days, he has spoken to us through his Son. God promised everything to the Son as an inheritance, and through the Son he created the universe. The Son radiates God’s own glory and expresses the very character of God.

—Hebrews 1:1-3

Jesus is God’s glory in human form. For thousands of generations, people longed to see him, to catch a glimpse of his glory, but the most they were able to access was his backside. But now, through the Incarnation, we can come face-to-face with God…and live to tell about it.

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see…

 As we think about the baby in the manger this Christmas, let us gaze with eyes of wonder as we look at the glorious face of God.

 Hark! The herald angels sing
“Glory to the newborn King!”

I’ve taken the challenge of reading the Bible chronologically this year and tracing the thread of grace through it. These musings are prompted by my reading. I’d love to have you join me: One Year Bible reading plan.