Lawyer’s Heart Surgery Leads Him on ‘Different Path’ to Serve Persecuted Christians

The photographs of Stephen Rasche in a new exhibit highlight the horrors suffered in Iraq and Nigeria.

In June 2014, Islamic State militants took over the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, and within days, half a million people had fled the city, including more than 150,000 Iraqi Christians.

By August, ISIS fighters had fanned out across the Nineveh Plains and forced Christians to flee the villages inhabited by their ancestors since the first-century AD.

At the same time, some 5,500 miles away in Maine, Stephen Rasche, an international transactions lawyer, was recuperating from open-heart surgery — and doing some serious soul-searching.

“I had a long time after that to really think about what is it that I was doing. And, most importantly, where was I in my faith?” he said last week. “It became pretty clear to me that in the productive time that I had left on this Earth that I needed to change my ways and go down a different path.”

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