Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

A Recipe for Laughing More

The theme I selected for this year (or perhaps the theme that chose me) was “Laugh More.” When I landed on the theme, I had no idea how timely it would be, because as it turns out, I now have a live-in tutor in laughter.

My tutor is just over a year old, and although he only learned how to laugh a few months ago, he is already something of an expert. Graham doesn’t know to be cynical. He hasn’t learned sarcasm. He doesn’t require a lot of nuance in his humor. He just laughs, straight from his belly.

Through the eyes of toddler, life is full of laughter: the springy sound of a doorstop, the unpredictable bounce of a balloon, the sandpapery tongue of a dog, a well-placed tickle.

There’s something profound about how straightforward his humor is: he sees something that strikes him as funny, and he laughs.

I still have a lot to learn when it comes to laughing, but more than halfway through the year, here are a few things I’ve learned so far:

1. Be present in the moment.

There is nothing like regret over the past or worry about the future to squeeze the laughter right out of a person. When you’re one, you aren’t worried about your to-do list and you’re not stewing over something you said yesterday. That frees you up to embrace the funny moments in the right-now.

I am trying to take lessons from Graham, as well as from the wise woman in Proverbs, and let go of worry so there’s more space in my heart for laughter.

She is clothed with strength and dignity, and she laughs without fear of the future.
Proverbs 31:25

2. Don’t take yourself too seriously.

In the past several months, I’ve discovered that there is one source of humor that is ever-present: myself. I can’t tell you how many times this year I made it halfway through my day at work before realizing I had spit-up on my shirt. There was the time I got halfway to dinner with friends before realizing I was almost at work instead. And then there was the day I congratulated myself on getting dinner in the Crockpot by 8 a.m., only to realize when I got home that I hadn’t turned it on.

In the past, these might have been prime opportunities for me to feel frustrated or annoyed. But I’m trying to change my default setting to laughter. If I can embrace the humor inherent in being a flawed and foible-prone human being, I will have an ever-regenerating, built-in source of laughter.

We can best take ourselves seriously if we are free to laugh at ourselves, and to enjoy the laughter of God and his angels.
Madeleine L’Engle

3. Create space for laughter.

It seems to me that there is a direct correlation between the margin in my life and my ability to laugh. Laughter flourishes best in an environment where it has some elbow room—it doesn’t want to be shoehorned into a few orchestrated moments here are there. So I’m actively trying to carve out some margin to let laughter grow.

4. Be generous with your laughter.

As I’ve watched Graham explore the world and discover what tickles his funny bone, I’ve marveled at how funny ordinary things can be. He has taught me this important lesson: Don’t be stingy with your laughs.

And so we’ve been recording the things that have cracked us up this year—not just the big laughs but the little giggles too. We’ve been writing them down and putting them in a laugh jar—partly so we are more aware of them, and partly so we can pull them out again at the end of the year and laugh about them all over again.

I know not all that may be coming,
but be what it will,
I’ll go to it laughing.
Herman Melville

5. Gain perspective

Perhaps the best way to grow our laugh muscles is to get perspective on who we are and who God is. When we rest in the truth that God is holding us (and that he has a sense of humor himself), we are able to laugh alongside him.

It is the heart that is not yet sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in His presence.
George MacDonald

***

I’d love to hear from you. What helps you to be more open to laughter? What has made you laugh recently?

Laugh More!

For the past 14 years, I have chosen a word as my theme for the year. (Trust me, this is much better than a list of resolutions. For starters, there’s a much greater chance I’ll actually remember my goal for the year come March. And for a recovering perfectionist like me, this leaves a lot more room for grace. You can’t really fail a word, right?)

At any rate, my word is typically something with some meat to it—something I can study and read about and really dig into in the coming year. As 2017 came to a close, my husband cracked a joke and I quipped, “Maybe my goal for next year should be to laugh more.” Daniel looked at me, eyebrows raised, and it struck me that maybe this wasn’t just a joke.

What if my theme for the year really was to laugh more? At first glance, it sounded too easy, like I would be getting away with something. But as I thought about it more, it occurred to me that this isn’t as easy as it sounds. If I wanted to embrace a year of more laughter, it wasn’t going to happen automatically. I would have to be intentional about it.

I don’t know about you, but I find that so many reactions bubble to the surface before laughter. When something comes my way during any given typical day, I might worry, plan, stew, get a snack, or talk it over with a friend. But how often do I laugh?

Not long ago I went back to work after maternity leave, and I have found that this life stage leaves me with a lot of balls to juggle and plenty of opportunities to drop them. Only maybe balls isn’t the right metaphor, because the stakes feel a lot higher than that. Juggling torches, perhaps? At any rate, I feel like I have become pretty efficient and productive in this season of life—stashing meals in the freezer, working like a madwoman during naptime, squeezing the most out of every spare moment.

This is good . . . to some degree. But there’s a dark side to donning my super-efficiency cape, and that’s that I can become a version of myself that I don’t really like. I can check off all the things from my list but become a not-very-fun person in the process. Here’s the thing: I have been given so many beautiful, gracious gifts, and I don’t want to be so busy and productive that I don’t have time to enjoy them.

I want to be interruptible.
I want to have margin to waste time with the people I love.
I want have space to breathe, to savor, to be.
I want to laugh more.

For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. . . . A time to cry and a time to laugh.
Ecclesiastes 3:1, 4

Are you in a season of laughter right now, or are you in a season of tears? And I wonder . . . is it possible for those seasons to coexist? What if we could laugh in the midst of a crying season, and cry in the midst of a laughing season?

In The Return of the King, the hobbit Sam has this lovely exchange with Gandalf, and it brings a lump to my throat every time:

“Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?”

“A great Shadow has departed,” said Gandalf, and then he laughed and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count.

If you haven’t heard the sound of pure merriment for days upon days without count, I would love for you to join me in this quest toward more laughter—toward holy laughter.

***

I can tell you already, I’m not going to be able to do this alone, so I would love your help. What has made you laugh recently? Are there books that make you laugh? Certain movies or shows that crack you up? Favorite jokes? If so, please share them!

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?

 

God’s Parenting Philosophy

It’s not that I’ve been entirely oblivious to the so-called Mommy Wars in recent years, but as someone with no kids of my own, I never realized just how many smaller skirmishes exist within the larger battle.

I was blown away recently when a friend was filling me in on some of the various (and often heated) parenting philosophies out there—attachment parenting, continuum parenting, distraction parenting. I may be naive, but I guess I figured that when my mom threw me on her hip while she was making dinner, she did it without knowing there was a label for it. And when she pulled me away from the light socket and handed me a toy instead, she did it out of practicality, not because it was all the rage in the latest parenting book.

My friend told me she and her husband had decided to subscribe to distraction parenting—the concept of replacing a child’s negative or dangerous behavior with something positive. I’d never thought about it in such explicit terms, but I suppose it makes sense—not only for toddlers, but for grown-ups, too. I know from experience that if I’m trying to weed out a bad habit, I can’t simply stop doing it. I need to replace it with something better, or else I’ll go right back to filling that hole with the same old pattern (or a worse one).

When I started reading the book of Ephesians, I was surprised to note that maybe God is into distraction parenting himself (although I somehow doubt he’d get into a Mommy War over it). He doesn’t just tell us to stop doing something bad; he encourages us to replace that sin with something positive instead.

  • If we are ingrained in the habit of lying, we’re not just to stop; we’re to start speaking the truth to each other (Ephesians 4:25).
  • If we have a problem with stealing, we’re to replace that with the habit of generous giving (Ephesians 4:28).
  • If we have a tendency to let abusive words slip off our tongues, we need to replace them with good words, helpful words, encouraging words (Ephesians 4:29).
  • If we are enslaved by our anger, we need to change course, treating people with tenderness and forgiveness instead (Ephesians 4:31-32).

As I look ahead to a new year, maybe I need to give some thought not only to what needs to get weeded out of my life, but also what needs to fill that spot instead.

In other words: What good distractions do I need in my life right now?

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