Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

Pantry-less Grace

I might as well be up front with you from the beginning: I have a pantry problem. And a freezer problem too, for that matter.

I guess you could blame it on the fact that I come from an ancestral line of farming women who knew how to can and pickle and pantrify and store up for winter with the best of them. Even today, if you went to my grandma’s house, you’d find a stuffed freezer upstairs, plus another full freezer and a huge deep freeze in the basement—all of them stocked with goodies.

I missed the farming and canning gene, but I sure got the freezer gene.

If my husband and I don’t have a backup of everything in the pantry, and if our freezer door can close without heroic efforts, I start getting vaguely antsy. I do realize I live in the era of Costco and Super Walmart, not Little House on the Prairie, but I can’t seem to help myself.

That’s probably, I’ve been realizing lately, because there’s a spiritual component to my neurosis. The stocked pantry and freezer give me a false sense of security…like if I can control what’s on the shelves, I somehow have more control over my life.

I wonder if that’s why God implemented the manna diet for the Israelites when they were wandering in the desert. At first glance, this story in Exodus seems to one of straightforward provision: the Israelites are hungry; God gives them food. But on closer reflection, I find it interesting to note his process. He doesn’t give them a yearly or monthly or even weekly supply of food to store up on. No, he gives them what they needed for today.

They try to hoard it, of course, and put in their pantries. But here’s what happens:

Moses told them, “Do not keep any of it until morning.” But some of them didn’t listen and kept some of it until morning. But by then it was full of maggots and had a terrible smell.
—Exodus 16:19-20

Every morning when the people woke up to find manna scattered on the ground, it was a reminder that they weren’t in control, that they could stock their pantry all they wanted to, but ultimately they were dependent on their Provider.

And so it is with grace. I want to hoard it, stockpile it, stash backup supplies in my pantry. But God says, “No, my child. I know you, and I know that if you stored it away, you would forget the one who gave it to you in the first place. I will give you the grace you need. Just enough for 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.

Cinematic Grace

Before we started watching The Tree of Life, our friend warned the group, “This isn’t your typical movie. It’s more like a poem in visual form.” We looked at him rather skeptically—even more so when he mentioned the twenty-minute segment with no words. Okaaay…this was clearly not going to be your traditional Hollywood “boy meets girl” flick or your “bad guy tries to blow up the world” movie.

I was surprised to see that the opening quote came from the book of Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (38:4). The story traces a boy’s growing-up years as he wrestles with the tension between grace and nature. His mother, the personification of grace, swirls him around in the backyard, playfully squirts him with the garden hose, and showers his life with laughter. His father is nature—embodying the idea that you get what you earn in life, that if you work hard enough, you’ll end up on top.

The movie poses this unspoken question: What happens when life isn’t fair, when you get what you don’t deserve? Is it possible to keeping clinging to grace, despite all seeming evidence to the contrary?

This is, when it comes down to it, the underlying question posed in the book of Job as well. Yes, Job’s technical question is Why? But there seems to be a deeper layer to his queries. The truth is, no answer would have satisfied him. There is no reason, no explanation that from Job’s human perspective would have justified the devastating losses, the crushing defeats, the deaths of the people he loved.

So God, in his mercy, responds to a different question.

He reminds Job of his credentials—essentially that he holds nature, in all its mystery and splendor, in the palm of his hand—but also that he treats his children with compassion and gentleness (Job 38-39).

For all those chapters of back-and-forth between Job and God, the book pretty much boils down to one simple exchange.

Job asks God, “Why?”

And to Job’s amazement, God responds with another question altogether: “Who?”

Who determined the earth’s dimensions?
Who kept the sea inside its boundaries?
Who created a channel for the torrents of rain?
Who laid out the path for the lightning?
Who sends rain to satisfy the parched ground?
Who gives intuition to the heart and instinct to the mind?
Who is wise enough to count all the clouds?
Who provides food for the ravens?
—from Job 38

In my quest for grace, it just may that I’m sometimes asking the wrong question. Maybe when God seems silent, it’s not that he’s not answering. It’s that he’s answering a different question.

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.

The Grace of the Middle Man

If you met my dad under normal circumstances, he’d prefer to have you assume he’s a plumber. He doesn’t fit any of the stereotypes that go with his profession, and as a matter of fact, he does have a knack for fixing leaky faucets.

But if one of his kids is in trouble, he doesn’t hesitate to pull out the tricks of his trade. In my early twenties as I was venturing out on my own, if he felt someone was trying to take advantage of me—whether it was an insurance company, an employer, or some shady individual—he was there for backup.

“You tell them your dad will call them,” he told me. “And if that doesn’t work, tell them your lawyer will call them.” Lucky for me, I had two for the price of one.

Job lived in an era when there were foreshadowings of grace—little whispers leading up to the coming of the Redeemer—but the fulfillment was still fuzzy. As he cried out in the aftermath of his string of personal tragedies, he found himself desperate for a middle man, a lawyer, a mediator—someone to stand between him and God and plead his case.

If only there were a mediator between us,
someone who could bring us together. . . .
Then I could speak to [God] without fear,
but I cannot do that in my own strength.
—Job 9:33, 35

I suspect Job had no idea how prophetic his words were. In Christ, we have just that—a mediator to graciously plead our case before a holy God.

So the next time our sin plagues us, we can say with confidence, “Talk to my Dad.” And if that doesn’t work: “Talk to my Lawyer.”

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.

The Grace of True Love

“There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved. It is the finger of God on a man’s shoulder.”
—Charles Morgan

As much as I denied it at the time—especially to myself—I’m pretty sure I started falling in love with Daniel by date #2.

From the very beginning, I knew he was different from other men I’d dated—men who were quickly looking more like boys in comparison. For starters, I was awed by all the planning and detail he put into our time together. After just one date’s worth of research, he’d noted my affinity for Thai food and our mutual love of peanut butter, and he lost no time making those things happen.

After picking me up for our second date—an auspicious beginning already—he took me to a cute little Thai place and surprised me later with peanut butter cookies that he’d made himself. (He also brought an envelope full of embarrassing childhood photos, sparked by something of a bet we’d made on date #1, but that’s a topic for another post.)

For the first time in my life I felt truly pursued…in awe that such a quality man would put himself out there for me and go through metaphorical fires on my behalf. I felt chosen, singled out, desired…which was all the more spine-tingling coming from someone like Daniel.

*  *  *

I’ve believed in God for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I’d lie in bed looking at the glow-in-the-dark cross on my dresser, believing with all my childlike heart that God was watching over me as my heavenly Father. In junior high, I clung to the belief that he was the Friend who would never fail me, even when my earthly friends were fickle at best. When I got my first real job and moved out on my own, I started seeing God as my Provider. Over the years, I’ve come to see God as my Lord, my Redeemer, my Rock.

But never as my Pursuer.

It wasn’t until true love snuck up on me that God unveiled his pursuing, grace-filled side in a whole new way. To have someone see inside me and love me anyway—for him to get to know the real me, ugly parts and all, and still accept me—has given me a window into the even more mind-boggling grace of God.

Wherever you find yourself today—whether you’re longing to be loved by someone or whether your heart is so full it could burst—know that you are loved. You are chosen. You are being pursued. And the One who pursues you is just waiting for you to say yes to date #2.

Surely your goodness and unfailing love will pursue me
all the days of my life.
—Psalm 23:6

From the Hand of God

Newsflash from my chronological reading: apparently Job comes after Genesis! Who knew?

I opened up my Bible all ready to turn the page to Exodus, but to my surprise, Job supposedly dates to approximately the time of Abraham and the patriarchs.

I have to admit I gulped a bit when this revelation struck. I mean, it’s one thing to trace the thread of grace through some of those classic Old Testament stories, but honestly, where’s the grace in this account? Almost the entire book feels like a series of one-two punches for our poor buddy Job.

Here’s the scene: God starts bragging on Job to Satan, and what happens? Job promptly loses his livelihood, his possessions, and his children, all in the course of 24 hours. Then he loses the one thing he has left: his health. Where’s the mercy in a story like that? Doesn’t Job, at the very least, deserve some kind of extreme circumstances caveat? Three KOs in one day, and you’re permitted to have a breakdown—or least do some serious bellyaching?

But to my surprise, here’s how Job responds in the wake of his tragedies: “Should we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?” (Job 2:10).

Youch.

I like to think of grace as the hug after the bike spill, not the tumble itself…the rainbow, not the preceding storm…the spoonful of sugar, not the medicine.

In light of Job’s story, I wonder if there’s something a little off about my definition of grace. Am I able to take what comes from the hand of God, even when it falls outside of what I consider gracious?

I’m not quite there yet. But when it comes down to it, I guess I’d rather have what comes from the hand of God, whatever it is, than to walk away from him, empty-handed.

All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou mightiest seek it in My arms.
—The Hound of Heaven

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 Grace of Forgetfulness

I’m currently reading a memoir by a woman named Jill Price, who has an unusual condition called hyperthymestic syndrome. Which is the technical way of saying she can’t forget. Anything. If you asked her about any given day in 1970, she’d be able to tell you what day of the week it was—and precisely what she had for breakfast.

As much as I want to pull out my hair when I leave my lunch on the kitchen counter or when I completely whiff on someone’s birthday, I realize there is grace in being able to forget. On a merely practical level, it’s a mercy that some of those details (like decades-old breakfast menus) can exit quietly and unceremoniously out the mental back door. Otherwise our brains would be so cluttered with nonessentials that we’d never be able to stay focused on weightier matters.

On a spiritual level, I think God works in a similar way. He takes those wounds and painful memories from times we’ve been hurt and, through the process of time, his Spirit, and godly people in our lives, enables those painful incidents to fade into the background.

Joseph, the Old Testament hero, had plenty of wounds that hounded his memory. His own brothers had sold him into slavery, and he ended up a captive in a faraway country, where he was falsely accused and thrown into prison. There should have been plenty of bitter juice to go around. But it’s interesting to note what he named his firstborn son once his life started looking up again: Manasseh, which means “God has made me forget all my troubles and everyone in my father’s family” (Genesis 41:51).

I have to wonder, though: if Joseph had truly moved on, would he really need to name his son “I have forgotten”? In a sense, every time he called to his son was a reminder of the family he’d allegedly left in the rearview mirror.

So what do we do when we can’t forget?

In those cases, it just may be that God has something redemptive up his sleeve. God wasn’t finished with Joseph when it came to those brothers he claimed to have forgotten. When he met up with them years later, there were no vengeful daytime talk show moments. Instead, there was a teary, grace-filled reunion—and a reconciliation that was more beautiful than amnesia ever could be.

If there is a wound in your life right now that is burned into your consciousness, go ahead and ask God for the grace of forgetfulness. But if it’s slow in coming, don’t get discouraged. Because it just may be that God is going to so bring something out of this you’ll never want to forget.

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.

The Grace of the Scar

Two years ago I sat on a lumpy ceramic chair, utterly helpless as I watched my active mom lying in pain on a hospital bed.

She’d just had her bum hip replaced, and everyone assumed it would be a textbook case. After all, Mom was in shape and otherwise healthy. But from day one post-op, we seemed to encounter one fiasco after the next. First there was the morphine, which sent Mom’s body into convulsive, hallucinatory panics every thirty minutes. Then, almost immediately after surgery, Mom sensed that something was wrong with her leg—not her hip, but her leg. She asked the doctors and nurses about it, but they all assured her this was normal pain.

A couple of days later, though, once the morphine had finally worn off, she had my dad and me take a look at the leg that was bothering her. To our horror, we saw what amounted to a partial tourniquet on her thigh. The compression socks—intended to prevent blood clots—had been put on wrong. Instead of being smooth all the way up her leg, they had gotten bunched tightly around her skin. And now, wrapping all the way around her thigh, was a gaping wound…like the worst rope burn you’ve ever seen.

Suddenly there was a flurry of activity around Mom’s hospital bed, and with it multiple rounds of blame transfer. In addition to the problem of the wound itself, the doctors were concerned about the possibility of infection. If this cut became infected, it would go directly to that susceptible new incision…and she’d be back to square one, needing to have the hip replaced all over again.

I stayed at home with Mom the week after her surgery to help her with basic tasks like putting on her shoes, going up the stairs, and getting into bed. Oh, and putting antibiotic ointment on that laceration. One day as I was doing wound duty, Mom asked me how it looked. I went through the checklist given to me by the medical team: the skin was turning a healthy pink, it was no longer oozing, and it didn’t smell necrotic. Check, check, check.

Mom let out the oxygen she’d been holding in. Things were starting to look up, I thought. Then she said, “No one’s talking about this, but there’s going to be a huge scar, isn’t there.” I inspected the ugly red mark winding its way around her left thigh. I swallowed. My mom, the synchronized swimmer with the fantastic legs, even as a grandma. “Yes,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

On my last day with Mom before I headed home, she looked up from the hospital papers she was paging through. I was startled to see her eyes brimming over with tears. “Every time I see this scar from now on…” Her throat constricted. What will she say once she finds her voice again? I wondered. Would the scar remind her of the negligence of the nurse who put on the compression socks incorrectly? Or the doctor who failed to listen when she voiced her concerns? Or would it trigger the awful days in the hospital under the influence of the body- and mind-ravaging drugs?

I was floored when these words came out of her mouth instead: “Every time I see this scar, it will remind me of the way God took care of me.”

Not so different from Jacob, I guess, who had some hip surgery of his own. After wrestling with God (Genesis 32:22-32), Jacob’s hip was wrenched, and he walked with a permanent limp from that day forward. No doubt his tweaked hip was a tangible reminder of his encounter with a God who doesn’t usually show up so palpably.

So, Mom, I want what you have. Not a new hip, per se. (I’m hoping this condition isn’t genetic, as the surgeon implied.) But I do want your perspective on scars. That it’s not so much about what happened in the first place or who inflicted the wound. It’s really about who healed it.

Until the day there is no more crying or pain, may my scars and remind me of the one who was there with me when I got hurt in the first place, the one who is still with me now.

He’s also the God who knows what it feels like. After all, on the palms of his hands, he has two jagged scars of his own.

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.

The Mountain of Obedience

The story of God calling Abraham to sacrifice his long-awaited son, Isaac, is one of the toughest accounts in the whole Bible for me to grapple with. Why would a good God ask his faithful follower to do something that seems so contrary to his nature…so downright cruel? Yes, there’s a graceful finish to the story, but Abraham didn’t know that when he and his beloved son started their hike up the mountain.

Recently, though, I read something in Tim Keller’s book Counterfeit Gods that shed new light onto this story. According to Keller, in the cultural and religious backdrop of Abraham’s day, it was a given that every firstborn son belonged to God. Although these sons were to be bought back through sacrifice (Exodus 22:29; 34:20), they were still viewed as belonging to God—something of a down payment for the family’s sins. So in reality, Keller contends, God wasn’t asking Abraham to commit murder; he was asking him to lay down what was rightfully his.

Still, Abraham was left in a quandary. He believed God was holy, so he must hand over his son. Yet he also believed God was gracious and would keep his promises. How could both be true?

As I think about Abraham and Isaac making their way up the mountain on their sacrificial journey, I marvel at Abraham’s obedience. How was he able to put one foot in front of the other knowing what awaited him at the top? Keller captures Abraham’s faithfulness this way: “If he had not believed that he was in debt to a holy God, he would have been too angry to go. But if he had not also believed that God was a God of grace, he would have been too crushed and hopeless to go” (p. 11).

Keller goes on to point out that the biblical account offers a beautiful foreshadowing of grace: “He told his servants that ‘we will come back to you’ (Genesis 22:5). It is unlikely he had any specific idea of what God would do.” But he clung to the hope that God would somehow stay true to his character.

And he did just that. He provided a substitute—a ram in place of Abraham’s son.

This is, in the end, a beautiful account of eleventh-hour grace. Even so, it pales next to the ultimate story of sacrifice and grace: God’s own Son, laid on the altar by his Father. The substitute for our sin. Once and for all.

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.

 

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