“She’s mine.”
These words changed everything for Stephanie Fast. Who spoke them? What language?
Lee Strobel tells us the amazing story that answers these questions in Chapter Two of his book, The Case for Grace. His answers also remind us that those words have been spoken over us in our own mother tongue.
Chapter Two is devoted to Stephanie Fast. Each chapter deals with a mini biography of an individual who has experienced God’s amazing grace in some way. Chapter Two is probably the most dramatic of all in the book. It tells the story of a street orphan in Korea after the Korean War when mixed-race orphans were especially rejected. They were usually the byproduct of an illicit relationship between a Korean girl and a U. S. soldier.
Stephanie knew rejection and was called by the derogatory term “toogee,” which means “garbage, dust, bastard, and alien devil” all rolled into one, probably worse than the “n” word. She was a half-breed, child of two bloods, who couldn’t remember her real, original name because she was abandoned so young. She once survived – are you ready for this? – by eating a raw field mouse, tail and all. It was gutted with nails, flattened on train rails.
At last she was found almost dead from cholera by a compassionate World Vision nurse who had been instructed to rescue only the abandoned babies. (Stephanie was probably about seven by this time.) The nurse, Iris Eriksson, was about to obey her orders and leave Stephanie for dead when she heard an audible voice that told this reserved Lutheran, “She’s mine” in her native Swedish tongue. Stephanie says about Eriksson, “she was my savior before Jesus.” (p. 31)
After being nursed back to health, Stephanie was placed in an orphanage. Her job was to care for the babies. Occasionally one of them was sent to America, a good thing. She didn’t yet understand the concept of adoption.
One day a huge American man came to the orphanage looking for a baby boy to adopt. Stephanie got all the boys ready and presentable. He tenderly picked up the baby boys, placed them on his shoulder against his cheek. He kissed them and shed tears for them. She envied the attention he was giving them. She inched closer. He began to notice her from the corner of his eyes. Eventually he bent over and caressed her face with its lazy eye. At first, she just froze and enjoyed the touch, but then she became uncomfortable and spit in his face twice before running to hide in a closet.
Lee Strobel makes the parallel between her reaction and the terrible way we have treated God’s grace to us in our rebellious stage. God made overtures to us and reached out to us, but we withstood his goodness. Hymns have been written about how we withstood Him and His grace. Even Charles Wesley admits that he long withstood him to his face. (“And Can It Be”) See also “At Calvary.”
Eventually Stephanie was adopted by the big American but thought the couple must just want her to work for them. Someone had to tell her that she was their daughter. Then, she repeated to herself, “I’m their daughter, I’m their daughter, I’m their daughter! Oh, that’s why I’ve been treated this way. That’s why no one’s beating me. That’s why nobody’s calling me a toogee. I’m their daughter!” They had intended to name a baby boy Stephen, but instead they named her Stephanie.
Stephanie finally opened her heart to the Lord and found Jesus as her own personal Savior. (p. 39)
FINAL THOUGHTS ON ADOPTION: Strobel closes with some thoughts on adoption, quoting J. I. Packer, “To be right with God the judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the father is greater.” (p. 42)
“It is like a fairy story. The reigning monarch adopts waifs and strays to make princes of them…grounded on the bedrock of free and sovereign grace. This…is what adoption means. No wonder that John cries, ‘Behold, what manner of love…!’ When you understand adoption, your heart will cry the same.”
Strobel closes with these triumphant words: “I’m his son, I’m his son. I’m his son! Oh, that’s why I’ve been treated this way. I’m his son!” Stephanie helped Strobel understand that rejection by his own father put him in the Bible’s elite category of the “fatherless” with its golden promises.
We can know this same assurance!
From Lee Strobel’s book, The Case for Grace, A Journalist Explores the Evidence of Transformed Lives. Zondervan: Grand Rapids, MI, 2015.