Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

Eating with the Enemy

One of the stories my family likes to tell on me is the Crotchety Old Man on the Bike Path incident. You might hear various renditions and or embellishments depending on the source, but the basic version goes like this:

The five of us were taking a family bike ride along the Mississippi River, with our 70-pound dog in tow in the baby Burley. (I realize this is not normal.) About halfway into our ride, we approached a clearing that looked like the perfect spot to skip rocks and let the dog out for a swim. There were houses on one side of the bike path, which we steered clear of, but the land on the river-side of the path appeared to be common property.

That’s where we were dreadfully wrong.

As soon as we hopped off our bikes and headed toward the river, an older man came storming out of his house. “Git off my property!” he shouted. He laid into us, one by one, ranting about trespassers and threatening to call the police. Then he got right up in my face. “If I came over to your house and started walking on your lawn,” he shouted, “what would you do?”

I blinked and, without thinking, replied, “Well, we’d probably invite you over for dinner.”

I’m not sure who was more surprised—Mr. Crotchety Old Man or me. But all at once, the anger spewing out of him dissipated. On his way back to the house, he looked over his shoulder. “There’s a park thatta way,” he said, pointing.

One of the most surprising things about grace, I’m learning, is its reciprocal nature. When you’ve been graced yourself, that grace has a tendency to overflow onto someone else.

David had experienced truckloads of unwarranted favor from God over the course of his life. He started out as a nobody—a poor shepherd with no future to speak of. Yet he was the one God chose to anoint as king; his was the family God chose for the lineage of the Messiah.

For all his royalty and stardom, David never forgot where he came from. Here’s his response to the covenant promise the Lord made to him:

Who am I, O Sovereign Lord, and what is my family, that you have brought me this far? And now, Sovereign Lord, in addition to everything else, you speak of giving your servant a lasting dynasty!
—2 Samuel 7:18-19

It doesn’t seem coincidental that just a couple of chapters later we see David taking the grace that was poured out on him and sharing it with the one person everyone else thought should have received his wrath.

The former king, Saul, had spent much of his reign been trying to kill David, running him out of the country, and generally making his life miserable. Yet after Saul died, David went out of his way to find his enemy’s one living descendant—not to seek revenge, but to show him kindness for the sake of his friend Jonathan.

From that time on, Mephibosheth ate regularly at David’s table, like one of the king’s own sons.
—2 Samuel 9:11

David showed Saul’s grandson Mephibosheth the ultimate grace: he invited him to dinner.

May there always be room at our table for the grandsons of our enemies. And for crotchety old men.

So, is there someone you need to invite over for dinner today?

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.

Inconvenient Friends

Someone once told me there are three types of friends: Christmas Card Friends (the ones you’d like to see a photo of each year but that’s sufficient), 7-11 Friends (the ones who are convenient but you probably won’t call them at 2 a.m.), and Kidney Donor Friends (the ones you’d give one of your kidneys to, if need be).

The year I turned 25, I realized how much I needed those Kidney Donor Friends. Even though my kidneys were functioning just fine, thank you.

Within the span of a few months, my two best friends got married and so did my little brother, and my baby sister packed her bags and headed off to college. Making matters worse in my litany of first-world single-girl problems, one of the friends who had gotten hitched was my former roommate. Which meant I was living alone, for the first time in my life.

***

If anyone was in need of a faithful, kidney-level friend, it was David. He’d had his share of successes—killing a giant, notching some significant battle victories, and being anointed the future king. But now the current king, Saul, was trying to kill him, and he was forced to flee the very country he was supposed to rule someday.

Strangely, it was Saul’s son—the heir apparent—who showed David true friendship. On more than one occasion, and at great risk to himself, Jonathan saved his friend’s life, effectively handing over the crown that should have been his.

***

After a few weeks of general moping and ringing up astronomical electric bills trying to scare away would-be boogeymen, I decided something needed to change. And in my experience, change feels so much more novel if it comes in the form of a movement…or better yet, a campaign. So I dubbed my little program the ALC: the Anti-Loneliness Campaign.

The premise was simple: I knew that anytime I was feeling low, I would get a case of emotional amnesia, and I’d forget all the people who loved me. So I put a list on my refrigerator with names on it—people who agreed to let me call them anytime, night or day, in a crisis or for no reason at all. I even asked these people to sign my refrigerator covenant (yes, I have forebearing friends). That way whenever I heard the whispers that I was utterly alone, that no one loved me, those signatures could tell me otherwise.

Jonathan made David reaffirm his vow of friendship again, for Jonathan loved David as he loved himself.
—1 Samuel 20:17

If David had had a refrigerator, I have no doubt he would have posted his vow of friendship there.

***

One of the unexpected perks of the ALC, aside from discovering that I really did have Kidney Donor Friends, was the way their faithfulness reminded me of God’s faithfulness. The same seemed to be true for David. After he and Jonathan said their good-byes, David fled from Saul and hid in a cave. From there he wrote a heart-wrenching psalm about the enemies who had set a trap for him and how weary he was. But shortly thereafter his psalm turns a corner:

My heart is confident in you, O God;
my heart is confident.
No wonder I can sing your praises!
—Psalm 57:6-7

Scripture doesn’t specifically say this, but I have to wonder if it was Jonathan’s friendship, at least in part, that helped David believe God hadn’t left him after all.

I have since taken the ALC papers off the fridge, and I hope I never need to call in a kidney favor from one of my friends. But I’m grateful to know that I am never truly alone. Like David, my heart can be confident in my God.

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.

Home, Gracious Home

If ever a man had a right to feel homeless, it was Moses.

After being adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter as an infant, he spent most of his childhood separated from his family, his people, his culture. Then, as a young man, Moses was exiled out of Egypt and found himself setting up camp in yet another strange land. He was, without question, “a foreigner in a foreign land” (Exodus 2:22).

After God got Moses’ attention in the form of a spontaneously combusting bush, Moses headed back to Egypt. But this was no nostalgic journey back to the homeland. Instead, he was there to do a jailbreak of sorts for his fellow Israelites, who were living as slaves under the harsh rule of the Egyptians.

Once they’d made their break from Egypt, Moses again found himself homeless. But this time he wasn’t the only one without a forwarding address. He was in charge of several thousand people who quickly expressed their displeasure at their lack of four walls. For 40 years, they wandered through the wilderness, longing for a permanent place to call home.

Perhaps that’s why the opening lines of Psalm 90 hit me so powerfully, knowing they were penned by this reluctant vagrant:

Lord, through all the generations
you have been our home!
Before the mountains were born,
before you gave birth to the earth and the world,
from beginning to end, you are God.
—Psalm 90:1-2

When I was in my early 20s I bought a place of my own, and let’s just say it fell into the “has potential” category. When I arrived on the day of the closing, I was shocked to discover that the family who lived there hadn’t packed the majority of their things yet. I wasn’t even able to get into the house until five hours after the agreed-upon time. Complicating matters, I’d closed on my old place the same day, so everything needed to be unloaded that night.

At one moment, looking around at the filthy condo, still cluttered with the previous owners’ abandoned belongings, I despaired that this place would never feel like home. I took a breath and went from room to room, trying to size up what I was up against.

My despair melted into humility and gratitude at what I saw. When I peeked into the bathroom, I noticed my aunt, her sleeves rolled up, scrubbing the upstairs toilet. Two of my friends were in the guest room, unloading box after box of books (and never once complaining about the ridiculous book-to-person ratio). My mom’s head was deep in the oven, muscling off a decade of grime and grease. My dad was carrying my fold-out couch up the stairs—the one that was so heavy he’d previously sworn he’d never move it again. My uncle was removing garbage bags full of trash left by the old owners. Another friend was on her way to get dinner for the whole crew.

In that moment, I had a revelation. Home is not found in a place; it’s found in relationship. Even if I had nowhere to lay my head that night, I had home. It was written all over the faces of these people who loved me.

At the end of his life, Moses was instructed by God to climb Mount Nebo. From there God showed him the Promised Land—the home his people had been longing for so many years. The Israelites would be able to enter, but Moses would only get to see it from afar (Deuteronomy 32:48-52).

It seems heartbreaking to me, even a touch unfair, that this servant of God who had led the people so faithfully for decades wouldn’t be able to settle into this long-awaited homeland himself.

But Moses knew better. He’d already discovered his true home.

Eventually my condo did feel like home, thanks to the people who graced me on moving day and the ensuing days thereafter.

But I hope I never forget that home, real home, is more than a mailing address.

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.

A Soft Place to Land

For one hour every Tuesday, no matter how wildly the storms of life are howling around me, I have a soft patch of grass to land on. Every girl should be so lucky.

It all started rather bumblingly, to tell you the truth. My friend and I were both feeling the need for someone to pray with, but we didn’t quite know how to go about it. I mean, really, who wants to intentionally set themselves up to be vulnerable and self-conscious on a weekly basis? Besides which neither of us felt like particularly good pray-ers, and I for one knew I’d never be able to deliver organized “bullet-point” prayers. My requests, such as they are, tend to come more in the form of rambling emotional spew than neatly packaged prayer points.

But God was hounding us, and we couldn’t seem to escape the idea. So one Tuesday we started meeting during our lunch hour. We unceremoniously told God that our end of the deal would be to show up, and he would be responsible for the rest.

That first meeting was precisely two years ago, and we’ve been meeting every week since.

Over the past 100 or so Tuesdays, my prayers haven’t really gotten better. I’m still rambly, still unpolished, still haphazard (and un-bulleted) in my approach. But to my surprise, my friend accepts me, rambly prayers and all. Even better, I have found through this messy process that God isn’t necessarily looking for polish either. I don’t think he minds that we put our prayers out there in their rawest form, trusting that he’ll sort them out somewhere between here and his ear.

So wherever you are in your prayer journey, I encourage you to take a leap and find your own Tuesdays-at-noon buddy. I trust you’ll find the landing cushioned by grace.

The Art of Pruning

My husband and I joke that he only moved in three things when we got married: his bike collection, his guitar collection, and his plant collection. I benefit from all three, but I’m specifically loving the plants.

Daniel is a master green thumb, especially when it comes to violets (which I have a pretty storied history of killing myself). The trick, he says, is in the pruning. At first it struck me as unnecessarily brutal to take a pair of scissors to those innocent little leaves that don’t seem to be hurting a soul. But if his flowering pots are any indication, this method seems to be working.

Yesterday I had one of those pruning conversations myself. Someone I love gently held up the mirror to me on one of those habitual sins I wasn’t even aware I’d been guilty of. And for me, those deeply entrenched lifestyle sins are way more painful to prune away than the one-time doozies. It feels more like digging up a root than trimming an errant leaf.

As much as it hurts to feel the shears, though, it’s what I want. It’s only when I let someone close enough to show me who I really am that they can help trim away the places that are quite literally sucking the life out of me.

Grace, I am learning, sometimes comes in the form of pruning shears.

He cuts off every branch of mine that doesn’t produce fruit, and he prunes the branches that do bear fruit so they will produce even more.
—John 15:2