Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

Happy Birthday, Blog (Plus a Free Giveaway!)

birthdayWe are a people who mark occasions—not just on the day they happen but on subsequent years afterward. Birthdays. Death days. Anniversaries. Class reunions. Mother’s Day. Father’s Day. The commemoration of special events. The day a war started and the day it ended.

And why is that, I wonder? Why don’t we just celebrate or mourn on that day, as the occasion calls for?

There’s something significant about an anniversary, I think. It puts a stake in the ground and lets us see where we are now, and where we’ve been. And this isn’t just nostalgia; God commands us to remember:

Remember the days of long ago; think about the generations past. Ask your father, and he will inform you. Inquire of your elders, and they will tell you.
—Deuteronomy 32:7

So why do we need to remember?

I think we need cues to remember because we’re so forward-focused that we forget the milestones from last month, last year, last decade. We’re so busy forging ahead that we forget the things (the good ones and the hard ones) that made us who we are today. We need a reminder to slow down, to look in the rearview mirror, to thank God for where we are and where we’ve come from.

I think there’s another reason God instructs us to remember. It’s because the emotions of the thing we’re recalling are often too big to be absorbed in a single day. We can’t take in all the joy required when a person is born, so we spread it out and mark that day on each ensuing year. We can’t take in the enormity of a loss on the day we lose someone we love, so we come back and revisit it later. We can’t do justice to all that being a mother stands for on that one day of labor, so we set aside a day to commemorate motherhood every year.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of this website, StephanieRische.com, and it’s gotten me thinking about remembering in general and about staking the mile markers of God’s faithfulness.

I’ve been thinking about how we’re pretty good at remembering the big anniversaries, but we often overlook the less obvious but no less significant ones. I want to do a better a job remembering, savoring, taking note, saying thank you. I want to be aware of God is doing in the moment, and I want to be intentional about thanking him afterward.

I have a lot of remembering to do, but here’s a small start. This month marks five years since I’ve been praying with my Tuesday prayer buddy. Just a few weeks ago marks the day four years ago when the man of my dreams got down on one knee on the cold pavement and asked me to marry him. Last week marks the day my little niece was baptized and charmed the whole congregation with her big eyes and fluffy white gown. This February marks my college roommate’s birthday—the 18th one I’ve celebrated with her.

I don’t want to take these mini-celebrations for granted. I want to come to God in gratitude for all of them—for his faithfulness in the moment they happened and for all they mean to me now.

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What about you? What small celebrations do you want to commemorate? I’d love to hear about them.

In honor of my blog birthday, I’m giving away two gifts to two new subscribers! Type in your email address on the right to be eligible for a $10 Starbucks gift card or a $10 Barnes & Noble gift card. I’ll choose two randomly selected commenters on Wednesday.

In the Middle of a Miracle

miracle

As one year comes to a close and another one begins, I always try to rewind the year and play it back as a highlight reel. It never ceases to amaze me how many significant things happened that barely registered while I was going through them.

As I’m watching my mental video, I find myself thinking, Oh yeah, we made it through that big scary thing! Or Wow, God totally answered that prayer!

The thing about miracles is that God doesn’t always perform them all at once. Yes, sometimes he snaps his fingers and—poof! Instant miracle. But more often I’ve found that his miracles tend to unfold in stages. And when you’re in the middle of one of these slow-cooked miracles, sometimes it feels more like confusion or hard work . . . or even terror. You don’t even realize you’re in the midst of something amazing. It’s not until afterward that you can look back and see where God has taken you.

I wonder if that’s how the Israelites felt when they crossed the Red Sea. They were in the middle of one of the biggest miracles in history, but when they were halfway across, with the sea walls looming on either side and the Egyptian soldiers breathing down their necks, it must not have felt like a miracle. I’d wager they were more riddled with fear than wonder at that point.

But when they took that final step onto dry land and the sea closed behind them on the Egyptian army, that’s when they looked back. That’s when they saw the miracle. And their response? They sang and danced for joy.

When the people of Israel saw the mighty power that the Lord had unleashed against the Egyptians, they were filled with awe before him. . . . Moses and the people of Israel sang this song to the Lord. . . . Then Miriam the prophet, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine and led all the women as they played their tambourines and danced.
Exodus 14:31; 15:1, 20

As 2015 begins, I invite you to look back with me on the past year. What has God done in your life—in you—this past year? Look back and sing. Look back and dance.

And as a new year unfolds, look forward to the wonder. Look forward to the miracle.

Because what you’re facing now, even today—this could be your Red Sea. This could be your very own miracle. Don’t forget what he’s done in the past, and don’t doubt that he can do it again.

Why God Loves a Good Story

Oh great, here we go again… My little brother and I shot a glance at each other across Grandma and Grandpa’s extended dining room table. Dinner was long over, but we sensed that the aunts and uncles were gearing up for yet another nostalgic storytelling marathon.

We were antsy to be excused so we could play games or explore the basement with its endless hiding places. But we knew that once the stories started flowing, one tale would lead seamlessly into the next, and we’d be trapped at the table all evening.

My dad is one of 12 children in his family, all within an 18-year span. As kids, they pretty much had free reign of the outdoors, so there’s no shortage of wild tales. There’s the infamous account of the time they caught a rattlesnake and put it in the binocular case for safekeeping, the time they lowered my uncle Danny through the second-story window—in his underwear—during bridge club, and the time they launched off the swing into a trash can filled with water.

Then there were the countless trips to the ER—the time the tricycle ramp experiment went awry and Aunt Ruthie broke her arm, the time Uncle Paul ended up with stitches in his head after swimming in the off-limits city fountain. And of course there was the time they tried to cross the swollen Yakima River in an old playpen.

We grandkids heard the same stories over and over from the time we were old enough to sit at the table, and even the most dramatic of the tales had become commonplace. Nothing changed in the retelling, except perhaps for a few embellished details here and there, or my poor grandmother’s fresh horror at the things her children had kept from her until they figured they were no longer in danger of a spanking.

It wasn’t until recently, when we started adding in-laws to the family mix, that I started to appreciate our “family canon” of stories. With fresh ears to hear the antics of our fearless (if slightly masochistic) relatives, the post-dinner storytelling sessions became the highlight of our get-togethers. My siblings and I suddenly found ourselves itching to tell the stories too—begging our aunts and uncles to fill in the latest in-law about one event or another, and interjecting any details they might have left out.

Recently in my Bible reading I came across this passage in Psalm 78, which talks about a family canon of sorts:

I will teach you hidden lessons from our past—
stories we have heard and known,
stories our ancestors handed down to us.
We will not hide these truths from our children;
we will tell the next generation
about the glorious deeds of the Lord,
about his power and his mighty wonders.

It strikes me how important it was to the Israelites to pass on stories to the next generation. They wanted to leave their children and their children’s children with a spiritual legacy—the stories of God’s faithfulness and miracles in their lives. I imagine there were times when the kids rolled their eyes long after their lentil stew was gone, thinking, Oh great, here we go again… Those stories, nevertheless, became woven into the fabric of their souls. And I have to believe that as the younger generation grew older and as more place settings were added around the table, those stories started to take on an even richer meaning than before.

I wonder about my own spiritual canon of stories. Do I keep a record of the times God has come through for me and worked in powerful ways in my life? Am I sharing those stories with the next generation?

He commanded our ancestors
to teach them to their children,
so the next generation might know them—
even the children not yet born—
and they in turn will teach their own children.
So each generation should set its hope anew on God,
not forgetting his glorious miracles
and obeying his commands.

I guess that means I’d better be ready to share my “God stories” with my niece and nephew, my godson, my friends’ kids, the girls I mentor, and anyone else God may bring into my life. Chances are they’ll roll their eyes at some point and think, Oh great, here we go again… But I’ll just imagine that big dining room table at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. And I’ll tell the stories. Again.

What story in your spiritual canon do you need share 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.

{Note: A version of this story originally appeared on Today’s Christian Woman.}

Graceful Remembering

At a conference I attended recently, I heard a firsthand account of graceful remembering. An author named Margot Starbuck told the story of her childhood and her quest for the Father-love she never had from her earthly fathers.

Margot experienced the double whammy of abandonment early in her life, having been given up for adoption as a baby and then having her stepfather succumb to alcoholism and leave the family when she was a young girl. These abandonments from the very people who were meant to reflect the parental love of God sent her on a desperate search for the true nature of God’s love, which she chronicles in her memoir, The Girl in the Orange Dress.

What struck me most when I read Margot’s story wasn’t so much the tragic nature of her memories, but what she left out.

She never shies away from the truth or the pain of what she went through, and she doesn’t excuse her father and her stepfather for their absence. But the focus in her remembering is on the way she grew from her losses and the mysterious good God brought out of them. She offers both men the kind of forgiveness and grace they don’t deserve. But then again, that’s what grace, by its very definition, is all about.

I was equally amazed when I read the funeral song David wrote for his nemesis, King Saul. David had been nothing but faithful to Saul all his life, fighting for him, defending his honor, protecting him against assassination attempts. By way of thanks, Saul tried to kill and him and then drove him out of the country.

And yet this is how David remembered Saul after his death: 

How beloved and gracious were Saul and Jonathan!
They were together in life and in death. . . .
Oh, how the mighty heroes have fallen!
—2 Samuel 1:23, 25

I imagine David hadn’t forgotten all the evil Saul had inflicted on him when he was alive. But when it came to his final reckoning, David chose to remember with grace rather than bitterness.

Just as Margot did.

Surprisingly, Margot told us that her book has served as a reconciliation tool of sorts between her and her dad. Her father, the very one she wrote about abandoning her, now gives her book to just about everyone he meets.

How beloved and gracious, indeed.

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.