Sparta pastor’s spiritual journey leads to Iraq and back

Sparta pastor’s spiritual journey leads to Iraq and back
By STACEY KALAS skalas@lacrossetribune.com Posted: Sunday, April 18, 2010
The Rev. Deris L. Rice looks at life differently since returning in February after spending 10 months and 18 days in Iraq as a U.S. Army Reserve chaplain.

“I think I’m a lot closer to my family,” said the 30-year-old pastor of Congregational United Church of Christ in Sparta. “Family is the No. 1 priority for me now. Maintaining my physical health is important. That was one of the things I worked on a lot during my deployment.”

He’s also grown as a listener and gained an appreciation for beauty and the simple pleasures in life, said his wife, the Rev. Kristin Schmor Rice, an ordained Presbyterian minister and a student of supervisory education at Gundersen Lutheran Medical Association of Clinical Pastoral Education at Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center.

“He’s always been a reflective person,” she said. “But now he seems to appreciate the opportunity to do more of that out loud. He’s also become more of a ‘systems thinker,’ paying careful attention to how systemic issues or events in our world impact different people, and he’s been more willing to engage some of these issues as an advocate.”

As chaplain of the 55th Medical Company combat stress control unit, made up of mental health professionals, Rice’s job was to “go along and support missions spiritually and religiously,” he said, regardless of his own political or social views.

“I’m not there to judge people based on what they believe. I’m there to provide for their needs,” said Rice, who described himself as being more on the “conservative, evangelical end” of the UCC spectrum, but open minded.

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Sparta pastor spiritual journey leads to Iraq and back