Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

Friday Favorites for July

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Happy Friday, everyone! Here are a few of my recent favorites, from boss lady friends to Sharpie art to the power of love. Enjoy!

For anyone aspiring to write a book (even if it’s just in your head) . . .

If you wrote a book about your life, who should record the audio version? Take this quiz to find out. Who Should Voice Your Bio’s Audiobook

For anyone who is facing a big decision . . .

Emily Freeman tells you how to find (and become) a good sounding board: “If you’ve ever felt stuck with a big decision you have to make, it helps to have people in your life to help you process that stuff. You need a boss lady friend.” How to Find a Boss Lady Friend

For anyone who loves to doodle . . .

This video shows you how to make perfect serif fonts with a simple Sharpie. 1 Sharpie, 26 Letters

For anyone who wonders if love can last when things are hard . . .

Alia Joy writes beautifully about the hospitality of love: “We’ve made a life here, and love doesn’t get easier but it gets closer.” Loving Like It’s New

For anyone who wonders where God is in the midst of suffering and waiting . . .

This post by Tessa Afshar is a lovely reflection on the heartache and beauty of waiting: “The suffering of the human soul is grave and brutal enough to break even the hardest stone.” How Words Have the Power to Transform Our Histories

 

Your Very Worst Day

gardenWe don’t like to go there, even in the realm of the hypothetical. But would you sit with me for a while in this brave, sacred space?

What’s your very worst day?

Maybe it’s already happened . . . a day permanently earmarked on the calendar of your heart. Every day of your life is now divided into before and after.

Or maybe it’s a day looming in the future . . . the day when the thing you dread most becomes reality.

On a week like this one, two thousand years ago, Jesus faced the worst possible 24 hours a human being could ever face.

He was stabbed in the back by someone close to him.
One of his best friends saved his own skin instead of sticking up for him.
Then, in his darkest hour, the rest of his friends deserted him.
His body was ravaged, and he was left to die.
He was rejected, despised, forsaken, betrayed. And utterly alone.

On that Holy Thursday, as he ate supper with his followers, he knew all of this lay ahead of him. He could see ahead to the horror of his very worst day. Yet as he headed to the Garden with his friends, he sang a hymn with them (Mark 14:26). It’s such a small line in the narrative, it’s easy to miss.

In the midst of all that had happened and all that was to come, he sang.

According to Jewish tradition, the Hallel was chanted during Passover, a collection of songs taken from Psalms 113-118. This means it’s likely that some of the last words on Jesus’ lips before he was arrested included these lines:

This is the Lord’s doing,
and it is wonderful to see.
This is the day the Lord has made.
We will rejoice and be glad in it.
—Psalm 118:23-24

As we sit with Jesus the Garden, it’s hard to escape the dichotomy. How could he find a way to praise amid the pain? How could he see the wonder in the anguish? How could he rejoice amid the drops of blood? How could he cling to the belief that on his very worst day, the Lord was doing something wonderful—something not just to endure but to be glad in?

And I wonder: Could I have sung that hymn on my very worst day? Or would I have choked on the words?

But Jesus sang, and that changes everything. Jesus’ worst day became the best day of all. And now we call it, without irony, Good Friday.

May the same be true for us. On our worst day, may we be found in the Garden singing, “This is the day the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.”

 

Gospel Story: A Story of Hope

marinoTwo of my great passions in life are helping other people share their stories and seeing God’s extraordinary grace at work through ordinary people. So when I was given the opportunity to be part of the Gospel Stories project at my church, it felt like a beautiful collision of those passions.

Today I’d like to share Ken and Sally’s remarkable story with you.

 Have you ever felt like life had you around the neck and then started squeezing? You want to cling to hope; you want to believe that God has good plans for you, but all your circumstances seem to indicate otherwise.

Ken and Sally Marino know what it’s like to be hit with one blow after the other. But it has been precisely in the midst of some of those challenges that they’ve experienced the depths of God’s faithfulness in keeping his promises.

If you are in need of a breath of hope today, we invite you to watch the Marinos’ story. It’s a story of God’s goodness in hard times, a story of laughter and joy where you might expect tears. And ultimately, it’s a story of hope.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. —Jeremiah 29:11

To watch their story in their own words, see the video here.

 

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.

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.

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.