Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

A Letter to My Son on His 6th Birthday

Dear Graham,

This summer we went on a family vacation to the Sleeping Bear Dunes—that veritable mountain range of sand. We squinted our eyes against the electric-blue sky, taking in the towering hills above us. Can we make it to the top? I wondered. It would be a steep enough climb even if we weren’t schlepping water bottles, snacks, and diapers, not to mention two small humans.

Your dad and I listened studiously as the park ranger went over safety guidelines with our group. He told us how sometimes people start the climb but aren’t able to finish, and what to do if you get tired or hot or stuck somewhere between the base and the summit.

We were nodding along, taking in all the tips, when in a surge of panic, I realized you were gone. We scanned the parking lot for your trademark green ball cap. Where could you be? Then I spotted you climbing—no, sprinting—up the dune. Somehow, in the span of minutes, you’d made it two-thirds of the way up, all by your barefooted self.

I tried to call out to you, but the lump in my throat silenced me—a lump that was one part pride, one part fear, and one part I’m not ready yet.

***

You started kindergarten last week. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise—five comes after four, six comes after five, kindergarten comes after preschool. These are linear steps, predictable chronologies. And yet I find myself standing at the bottom of this sand dune, looking up at you with a mixture of pride and fear and I’m-not-ready-yet.

When you were a baby, I heard so many times that the days are long and the years are short. I tried to soak in this advice, but I don’t know if it’s possible to be prepared for the inevitable time-slip of watching you grow up. I am no likelier to freeze-frame you at this stage than I am to preserve a dandelion puff or capture a sunset in my pocket.

You are adamant that I am Mom now, not Mama or Mommy. It’s strange how quickly you are changing while I stay the same. I look at pictures of us together, how you once fit in my arms and how your arms now wrap all the way around me. I remain the same height while you keep inching higher.

As soon as your dad and I think we’ve found a rhythm in a new season with you and your brother, things change. Your brain is growing, your heart is growing, and your soul is growing. Your questions are getting bigger along with your shoe size, and the problems you’re up against are increasing in complexity along with your math problems. And I find myself ever a step behind, racing to catch up.

But maybe I’m growing too, just less obviously than you. At the very least, my rib cage must be expanding, because how else could my heart contain all this without bursting?

And so, as you turn six and climb the mountains God has put before you, know that your dad and I love you. And when you face mountains that you have to climb all on your own, know that Jesus is with you, running to the top beside you.

We’ll be cheering you on, whether we’re ready or not.

Love,
Mom and Dad

Tulip Season

“The tulip field,” he said,
Eyes puppy-wide,
Though I almost missed them on account of my screen.
Not today, I thought,
The inbox as full as the sink as the laundry basket as my List of Very Important Things.

It was the pants that caught my eye.
An inch higher than last week, I swear. His brother’s too.
Everyone warned me this would happen, of course.
The way they shoot up, faster than a field of dandelions, without my assent.

By the time spring comes again, I wonder,
Will you be driving a car, getting a job, calling to check in on a Sunday evening?

So I trade deadlines for hastily slathered peanut butter sandwiches
And we picnic with the tulips.

For tulips bloom bright and brilliant,
But the season is short—
Like morning fog.
Like blinking.
Like last year’s pants.

To My Son on His 2nd Birthday

Dear Milo,

When I went downstairs to dig out the Christmas bins this year, I looked around and realized that ever so slowly, without my being aware of it, our basement has become a graveyard for baby things.

First you outgrew your swing, your legs kicking so energetically that you were becoming a topple risk. When you learned to walk, you no longer needed that exersaucer (the one you did hundreds of laps with while I made dinner). Then came the day when you began protesting your highchair, refusing to settle for anything less than a booster seat like your big brother. It wasn’t long before you started boycotting your crib too, threatening to throw yourself over the side until we finally released you.

As I look at the baby detritus around me, it’s not that I’d wish you back to babyhood. After all, we love the person you’re becoming, and it’s a delight to see your personality emerge with each passing week.

The two-year-old version of you is made of grins and grit, delight and determination, impishness and independence. You live large and love big. You adore dogs and social gatherings and cheese and somersaults and leaping off high places—and, if you have your preference, doing it all without pants on.

You have two speeds: full throttle and asleep. After a day filled with jumping on things and then hurling yourself off, and trying to keep pace with a five-year-old, you snuggle into your bed (not a crib) with a rotating cast of stuffed animals tucked under your knees. Before bed, you inevitably request the car book, pointing out who in our family drives each one (I’ve never envisioned myself as a dump truck driver, but who am I to argue?). You don’t say much, but you certainly know how to get your point across, taking us by the hand to show us precisely what you want or acting out elaborate charades.

Looking around me, I wonder if it’s the rocking chair that hurts most. There’s nothing fancy about the chair—it was handed down by a friend who got it from a friend, and it’s been recovered multiple times. You haven’t sat still long enough to be rocked for some time now, and there’s no reason to keep unused furniture in your room—it would only serve as an unnecessary obstacle to your games of chase and hide-and-seek. Besides, I don’t know how much longer my arms will even be able to hold you.

But doing this the second time around, I know how fast the sands of childhood slip through a parent’s fingers. Now I know how birthday candles accumulate faster than I’ve given them permission to. Now I know how the calendar pages keep turning, even if I’d like to stay in a particular season a while longer.

You won’t remember all the nights your dad and I rocked you in the middle of the night, singing “I Bid You Good Night.” But even after you’ve outgrown lullabies, I think those words and melodies (and the love undergirding them) weave their way into your DNA somehow. Maybe they become part of you, grounding you not only in our love but in your belovedness as God’s child.

So, happy birthday, my little boy who is literally racing your way into your third year of life. Your dad and brother and I love you so much. And please excuse me if I tuck you in more than once every night, while I still can.

I love you, but Jesus loves you the best.
And I bid you good night, good night, good night.

Photo copyright Julie Chen

Split in Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what’s the answer?

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

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

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

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

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

The glory of God is a human fully alive.

Saint Irenaeus

For Those Who Keep Vigil at Night

This is a word for those who find themselves awake when the rest of the world sleeps.

  • For the one plagued by worry
  • For the one caring for someone who is ill
  • For the one haunted by insomnia
  • For the one begging for their prodigal to return home
  • For the one toiling on the night shift

And, yes, for the one trying to comfort an inconsolable infant in the wee hours.

As anyone who has stood sentry at night knows, everything seems bleaker under the blanket of darkness. Shadows grow menacing. Minutes feel like hours. Anxiety morphs into full-blown fear.

I’m not sure why this is, exactly. We have artificial light, after all, and we’ve long outgrown our fear of the dark. But something about those middle-of-the-night hours releases our monsters from their hiding.

I have a hunch that one of the reasons nighttime is so hard is because it has a way of isolating us. It makes us think we’re the only ones marking this bleak and desolate hour. In the absence of our usual defenses, we feel alone, and rather small.

If you find yourself doing battle by night, I want you to know that you do not keep this vigil alone. There is someone who sits by your bedside, someone who waits with you, someone who toils alongside you. There is someone whose love is not bound by time, someone who sticks by you even when it’s inconvenient, someone who doesn’t clock out when the sun goes down.

The psalmist puts it this way:

The one who watches over you will not slumber.
Indeed, he who watches over Israel
    never slumbers or sleeps.

Psalm 121:3-4

Even when the rest of the world is asleep, God is awake. And because of that, you can rest . . . even if you can’t sleep.

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.

Victor Hugo

God as a Nursing Mother

It may be the season of epiphanies, but in this season of sleepless nights, as Daniel and I wake to feed a hungry or otherwise disconsolate newborn, I can barely string two coherent thoughts together. (Case in point: I recently found the peanut butter in the cabinet with the frying pans and lost in a game of a memory to a three-year-old.)

But the other night, as I thought about this verse from Isaiah, it made some kind of three-in-the-morning sense:

Can a mother forget her nursing child?
    Can she feel no love for the child she has borne?
But even if that were possible,
    I would not forget you!

Isaiah 49:15

I’ve long loved this tender image of the mother-like love of God. But I thought of the love it describes only in terms of volitional love—the love a mother chooses for her child, the love God chooses for his people.

But now, as I find myself overflowing with milk in the wee hours of the morning, it occurs to me: a nursing mother’s love is more than an act of sentimentality. In fact, it’s hardly a choice at all. She has milk to give, milk that must come forth. It’s part of her very nature, and it will pain her not to give what she has.

And so it is with God. Love pours out of him; it is part of his very nature. He must give love.

According to scholars, the Hebrew word for love used in this chapter of Isaiah also means “womb.” God is not distant or aloof; he pulses with love—the kind of mysterious, unbreakable bond that forms between a mother and her child as the child rests beneath her own pulsing heart.

God is committed to you with an irrepressible love—a love that flows out like a life-giving force. He loves you with a womb-love that defies explanation. He is tethered to you, by choice and by nature.

He could no more stop loving you than he could stop being God.

We are never more restricted nor more liberated than when we are in love.

C. S. Lewis

Number Our Days

Dear Graham,

You are one year old now. Only a year . . . and already a year.

Time has become a slippery eel of a thing ever since you were born. On the one hand, I can’t believe you’ve only been with us for one revolution around the sun. I can hardly remember life before you. What filled the Graham-shaped spot in my heart for all those years?

On the other hand, how is it possible that an entire year has flown by? If I close my eyes, I can believe you are still the size of a loaf of bread, with tiny fists closed above your head as you slept. But when I go into your room in the morning, I marvel at this jabbering, smiling, squawking person you have become, the boy who toddles single-mindedly toward the potted plants.

After we brought you home from the hospital, all manner of seasoned parents echoed the same advice to us: “Enjoy this—it goes so fast!” I tried to soak in the wisdom, but it didn’t make sense to me at the time. The days stretched on, a blur of feeding and changing and wiping spit-up, eclipsed only by the even longer nights. Time didn’t seem fast—it seemed like it was standing still.

But now it’s starting to make sense. It turns out the best part of parenting is also the hardest: no season lasts forever. When one stage ends, it’s replaced by something else, something equally worthy of being cherished. Case in point: you don’t fall asleep on our chests anymore, and there’s a tote full of tiny onesies you’ll never fit into again. But now you pat us on the back of your own volition, and if we catch you at the right moment, you’ll give us the most delightful slobbery kisses.

By no choice of our own, we have traded rubies for emeralds. They are equally lovely, but we do not have the luxury of holding both at once.

Psalm 90 says, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” What would it look like, I wonder, for your dad and me to number our days with you? Here are some of the numbers from the first year of your life:

  • 1 ER visit
  • 14 pounds gained
  • 365 times we’ve tucked you into bed at night
  • 522 books we’ve read together
  • 2,000-plus meals we’ve fed you

That’s the past year by the numbers (I’ve lost track of the number of diapers). But I’m not sure that’s what it really means to number our days. Numbers have their place, but they don’t tell the whole story. They can’t capture things like wonder and joy and delight and love.

You have taught me so much already, little one. You have taught me to slow down, to notice, to pay attention. Before you, I never realized how interesting a dandelion puff is or how delightful bubbles in the sunshine can be. Before you, I never appreciated watching a squirrel scurry across the backyard or watching the garbage truck pick up its weekly haul.

You have taught me the joy of inefficiency, of putting aside my to-do list and just being present in the moment. You don’t agonize over regrets from the past or fret about the unknown future; you are all in for the right-now—for the sweet tang of a ripe blueberry or the hilarity of your dad’s funny noises.

And so even as time is speeding by faster than I get my mind around, I want to take a lesson from you as we celebrate your first year. I want to enjoy this moment and be fully present in it, not pining for past-you or looking ahead to future-you, just savoring the boy you are right now and thanking God for the gift of curious, observant, silly, joyful, active, bananas-in-the-hair you.

Happy birthday, my boy.

Love,
Mom and Dad

Online Book Club: Liturgy of the Ordinary

Did you read reading Liturgy of the Ordinary by Tish Harrison Warren? If so, you are invited to join the conversation!

Here’s how the online book club works: Just read the book at your own convenience, and then add your thoughts to the comments section. You can respond to any of these discussion questions—or just say what you thought of the book.

As a bonus, I’ll give away a free book to one lucky commenter!

I received this book as a gift when my son was just a few weeks old, and as it turned out, it was perfect for someone whose pace of life had just altered drastically. I had made an abrupt shift from days full of working and writing and serving and getting together with friends to days where the potential highlight was taking a shower.

For someone who is a big fan of crossing things off a to-do list, it quickly became clear that I needed to redefine what it looked like to follow Jesus when large swaths of my time were spent changing diapers, feeding a baby, and deciding how much spit-up on my shirt necessitated a clothing change. This book spoke into some of my biggest questions and wrestlings in that moment.

Discussion #1: Changing the World

Everywhere we look, someone seems to be changing the world. Someone is planting crops using sustainable agricultural practices; someone is rescuing women from sex trafficking; someone is helping small business owners in Kenya. This is all really good news, but sometimes it feels like a lot of pressure for a person whose main task for this season is to keep a small human being alive.

The book made me ponder this question: What if God is primarily calling us to ordinary, everyday faithfulness, not some kind of heroic Christianity? Yes, there are times when he asks us to big things for him, but truth be told, even most of those heroic things consist of a series of small acts of obedience.

“God is forming us into a new people. And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today.”

Do you ever struggle with the mundane moments of life, wishing you could do something grander? How would it shift your perspective to know that God is using our small, everyday tasks to make us into the people he wants us to be?

Discussion #2: The Divine in the Ordinary

I appreciated Tish Harrison Warren’s perspective that there is no distinction between the sacred and the secular, as we often imagine. We tend to compartmentalize the spiritual part of our lives, and we fret when it gets squeezed by other urgent things.

This book reminds us that we don’t have to wait for set-aside moments to connect with God; we can meet him in the ordinary moments, like sitting in traffic, thanking him for our leftovers, or talking with a friend.

“Small bits of our day are profoundly meaningful because they are the site of our worship. The crucible of our formation is in the monotony of our daily routines.”

In what ordinary moments do you tend to connect with God? In what ordinary moments would you like to be more aware of his presence?

Discussion #3: Learning to Be Beloved

One of my favorite chapters is chapter 1, about learning our identity as God’s beloved. When we can grasp that reality, it frames the entire liturgy of our days. We can better recognize and bask in God’s presence in the small moments when we remember that we belong to him and that he delights in us.

“We are marked from our first waking moment by an identity that is given to us by grace: an identity that is deeper and more real than any other identity we will don that day.”

What was your favorite chapter? Was there any story or topic that particularly resonated with you?

Rating: How many stars would you give this book (out of 5)?

I would give this book five stars, in part because it was the right book at the right time. I appreciated the way the author organized the book over the course of a day. It sounds like a simple premise, but the thoughts contained in each chapter are profound, and beautifully written.

I appreciated the reminder that the little things matter. And incidentally, when those ordinary moments are stacked one upon the other, they will end up changing the world—and us.

How many stars would you give this book?

Better than Perfect

Before I became a mom, during those months of fitfully pregnant sleep, I had recurring dreams that I was bombing mommyhood. I dreamed that I forgot I had a baby and left the child alone somewhere. I dreamed that the baby arrived early and I didn’t have any gear. I dreamed that the baby came out talking and I was so surprised that I never managed to say anything back.

You don’t have to be Freud to figure out what was going on there (HELLO, subconscious). Even during my waking hours, I wondered, What if my baby can sense that I don’t know what I’m doing? What if my baby prefers other moms to me? What if I fail at the most important job I’ve ever had?

It wasn’t until Graham was born that I learned something revolutionary: I might not be the best mom. But I am Graham’s mom. He connects with me not because I rise above the other moms in the lineup or because I’ve passed some kind of motherhood test, but simply because we belong to each other. He is mine, and I am his.

It occurs to me that this is true in every other arena of life too. We don’t have to be perfect to be the perfect person for the job. God calls us and equips us for what he wants us to do right here, right now—and he’s not sizing us up against anyone else.

Perhaps more than any previous generation, we are hounded by the monster of comparison. Our grandmothers might have compared their kids’ birthday parties to the ones thrown by the five other moms in bridge club, but they weren’t stacking themselves up against the entire world wide web.

Everywhere we look, we are faced with the shiny images of someone who is doing it better or prettier or more organically. It’s enough to make a mere mortal (especially those of us with perfectionistic inclinations) want to throw in the towel altogether.

But that’s not how God’s calling works. He doesn’t line us up and then choose only the ones with the top rankings. He gives each of us exactly what we need to do this job, in this moment. With these people, with these gifts.

Has God called you to create? You don’t have to be better than everyone on Pinterest; you just have to create.

Has God called you to study or write or make dinner? You don’t have to be the best student or writer or chef the world has seen; you just have to do the thing you’ve been wired to do.

Has God called you to be a daughter or an employee or an aunt or a teacher or a mentor? You don’t have to measure up to everyone else; you just have to carry out your role with the grace you get each day.

To my surprise, Graham seems to accept me as his mom, no questions asked. And so this little 16-pound person is teaching me that I don’t have to be the best mom. I just have to be his mom. And that is enough.

Each of us has his own endowment from God, one to live in this way, another in that. It is an impertinence, then, to try to find out why St. Paul was not given St. Peter’s grace, or St. Peter given St. Paul’s. There is only one answer to such questions: the Church is a garden patterned with countless flowers, so there must be a variety of sizes, colors, scents—or perfections, after all. Each has its value, its charm, its joy; while the whole vast cluster of these variations makes for beauty in its most graceful form.
Francis de Sales

***

I’d love to get your tips! What new role are you wrestling with right now? How have you gained confidence in carrying out that calling?

Waiting like a Mother

It seems to me that waiting well is like walking on a train trellis. (Not that I’ve ever done that, mind you, but the visual seems apt.)

Step too far in one direction, and you’re liable to fall into the ditch of obsessing over what you’re waiting for. You become so enmeshed in that one thing that you lose sight of the people around you and essentially stop living your life.

But step too far in the other direction, and you’re bound to step into the pit of a calloused heart. You end up stuffing down that thing you so desperately desire. You numb yourself, all but forgetting that you made to long for more.

It’s just so hard to keep our feet planted in the sweet spot in the middle.

I’m waiting right now. Waiting for contractions, waiting for labor to start, waiting for go-time. I have been in seasons of waiting before, but in the past these seasons have felt less defined. I didn’t have any way of knowing when I was getting near the end of the waiting—or if I would get the thing I was waiting for at all.

But now, as I’m 11 days past my due date, I find myself in the surreal place of hitting the day I was counting down to and not knowing where to go from here. (That said, I’ve never met a permanently pregnant woman, so I’m confident this will end at some point.)

I don’t know how long I have left for this particular brand of waiting, but I don’t want to waste it. I want to enjoy the anticipation of wondering what’s ahead while also savoring the right-now.

The truth is, we’re all waiting for something. No matter what we’re waiting for in this life, we’re ultimately waiting for something we long for more deeply than anything else: to be united with Christ. We aren’t alone in this—in fact, “all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”

We are waiting for a different world, a better world . . . a world where there’s no sorrow and no sin and no suffering. A world where we’ll be united with the one we’re waiting for.

What if I could wait for Jesus the same way I’m waiting for this baby? What if I could be ready at any moment, with my bags packed and my phone numbers ready, but at the same time living my life fully? What if I could watch for the signs of go-time with as much anticipation, knowing that although there will be pain, the joy will be so worth it in the end?

One thing I do know about both kinds of waiting: we’re one day closer than we were yesterday.

Hope can feel unbearable; when we passionately long for what we do not have and it is taking too long to come, we are restless as a farmer waiting for rain after an August without a drop. . . . Any hope, no matter how thin it gets, is better than no hope at all. . . . Still, even if having hope is one hundred percent better than not having it, living by hope can get awfully wearying.
Lewis Smedes