Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

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

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?

Are You a Catastrophizer?

messy ballOkay, time for a show of hands. When you start a sentence with “What if . . .” how many of you are picturing something wonderful happening? And how many of you are envisioning the bottom dropping out in a thousand different (but equally catastrophic) ways?

If you are in the first category, you are my hero. And also: we need to be friends. If you are in the second category, you are not alone. Here’s the truth: My “what ifs” are always worst-case scenarios.

What if Daniel isn’t home from his bike ride yet because he was swept up by a funnel cloud and then attacked by a bunch of thugs?

What if the pain in my side is appendicitis or, more likely, some unpronounceable kind of cancer?

What if gluten/GMOs/social-media-induced narcissism/the two-party political system will be the demise of us all?

What if I run out of time or money or energy or friends or grace?

What if I’m missing out on what God is calling me to do?

Yep, my worry gene is on constant overdrive.

But lately I’ve been wondering . . . what if my imaginings were best-case scenarios?

What if, instead of catastrophizing, I serendipitized instead?

What if my “what-ifs” were about all the amazing, incredible, wonderful, serendipitous things that God might just have in store?

I adore this poem by Mary Oliver:

I Worried

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.

I can relate to Oliver’s worries about things like which direction the rivers will flow and if the earth will turn the right way—things we humans have no business controlling, not to mention any power over. And I love her remedy, which at first seems like a bit of a non sequitur: go out into the morning and sing.

***

When I started riding my bike with Daniel, he shared this rule of cycling with me: Don’t look at what you’re trying to avoid; look at where you want to go. This sounded terrifying at first, because it means you have to loosen your perceived control over this thing you want to protect yourself from. But in reality, this letting go is freedom.

When you take your eyes off your object of worry, it loses its power over you. As counterintuitive as it sounds, you’re much more likely to crash into something when your eyes are fixed on it.

So just for today, in the face of worry, I want to sing. Every time a worry comes crashing into my brain and my heart, I want to fight back . . . not with striving or many words, but with a song.

Satisfy us each morning with your unfailing love, so we may sing for joy to the end of our lives.
Psalm 90:14

***

Are you a worrier? What do you tend to catastrophize about? What helps you combat worry?

Anxiety in High Gear

I have a rather embarrassing confession to make: when I was single, I had the subconscious notion that if I got married, all my anxieties would magically disappear. Ridiculous, I know. It turns out I’m the same Anxious Annie with a ring that I was without one. Now I just have another target to worry about.

One year ago, over Memorial Day weekend, my worrywart tendencies showed up in full force, and before it was all over, things got downright ugly.

My husband, Daniel, is an avid cyclist, and anytime he sees a long stretch of pavement without cars on it, he practically starts salivating. We went out of town for the weekend, and he got the notion to ride his bicycle home. All 67 miles. As if that weren’t cause enough for worry, he didn’t have a map, it was 98 degrees with the heat index, and he was going straight into a 20-mile-an-hour headwind.

Sixty-seven miles. Four and a half hours. That’s a long while to worry.

dwr bike

Then our next-door neighbor called and said our garage door was wide open. Had we closed it before we left? I thought so, but I couldn’t be sure. The likely scenario was that we’d inadvertently left it open, not that some conniving thief had wrangled his way in and left the door open as some kind of twisted signature. But who ever said worry is rational?

With my anxiety in high gear already, that was all it took to put me over the edge. As I drove the 67 miles home, I created multiple disaster scenarios in my head: Daniel was on an ambulance somewhere in Wisconsin, being pumped with liquids as they tried to save him from dehydration. Or maybe he’d gotten a flat tire and hitched a ride with the very same creepy guy who had broken into our house. Or most likely the thief was still camping out behind the couch in our living room, biding his time so he could jump me the moment I walked in the door.

Fortunately my husband is a patient man, and he let me cry it out over the phone while my incoherent fears came tumbling out.

When I finished blubbering, he said, “What time will you get home? I’ll call you back, and I’ll walk you in.”

When I hung up, I had a flash of realization: I’d just spent 40-some miles stewing and worrying and generally getting my panties in a bunch, but I hadn’t so much as whispered a prayer. How different would the trip home have been if I’d confessed my worry to God and asked him to stand guard over Daniel’s bicycle tires instead of going around and around on my gerbil wheel of worry?

Can all your worries add a single moment to your life? And if worry can’t accomplish a little thing like that, what’s the use of worrying over bigger things?

—Luke 12:25-26

True to his word, Daniel called and walked me in when I arrived home. It turned out there was no crime scene, no trace of a sneaky garage thief. And several hours later Daniel arrived home in one piece, requiring no detours to the hospital.

God has promised to hold our hand as we go through whatever scary doors before us. But first we have to open our hand and let go of the worries we’re clinging to so tightly.

Only then can he grab our hand in his and walk us in.

I hold you by your right hand—

I, the Lord your God.

And I say to you,

“Don’t be afraid. I am here to help you.”

—Isaiah 41:13

 ***

This year Daniel made the same trek over Memorial Day weekend—all 67 miles again—only this time instead of scorching heat, there were threatening rainclouds. I still have a long way to go in the worrywart department, but this time I pictured God beside me, hanging on to my right hand as I drove. (Don’t worry, I kept the other hand on the wheel, just in case.)

daniel and steph