Rachel Held Evans, thank you.

Today, Rachel Held Evans, author, blogger, speaker, died. I never met her (closest I came to it was the occasional interaction on Twitter), but I followed her closely online and I read and led studies on two of her books, Searching for Sunday and Inspired.

Like many others, I'm in disbelief over her death, and I don't know what to say about it because there just are no words. But I wanted to share a little bit about what her work means to me, some of the reasons I think she's so special.

Searching for Sunday was unlike anything I'd ever read. She wrote poetically, with humor, and honesty about her doubts and questions and love for the church. She put into words thoughts that I had, and gave me ways to understand the church in a new, beautiful way. My favorite chapter is called "Breath." I like it so much, I memorized the page number (161) so I could easily go back to it. I've referenced it often in studies and meetings and art classes and all kinds of times. In it, she talks of the Holy Spirit. "The Spirit is like breath, as close as the lungs..." Like fire, like a seal, like wind, like a womb. My favorite is Fire. "The Spirit is like fire, deceptively polite in its dance atop the wax and wick of our church candles, but wild and mercurial a storm when unleashed."

On her blog, she wrote about motherhood. Our sons are close in age. They were born in anxious times, and her blog post 2016 and the Risk of Birth helped give me hope and made be feel not alone. She wrote: "For me, the dissonance of this strange year is compounded by the fact that motherhood turned my bleeding heart into a hemorrhage.  It’s as though I’ve become porous, my skin absorbing the pain of others, particularly other mamas and babies." It's what I felt. I understood completely.

Her most recent book, Inspired, was released in June of last year, and I was one of a lucky several hundred selected to be on the Launch team, which means I got an advanced e-book copy to read and help spread the word about it. Tomorrow, I'm giving a brief explanation to my church congregation of recent artwork I made for the sanctuary. They are a pair of paper cut banners for Eastertide. Rachel's influence is there in my work. This is what I wrote about it in a draft: 

...imagery in the banners comes from the text for the 3rd Sunday of Easter, John 21:1-19. This story first caught my imagination when I read about it in the Fish Stories chapter of writer Rachel Held Evans’ book on the Bible, Inspired. Rachel became interested in knowing people’s favorite stories from the Bible. She writes that she asked a group of strangers what their favorite story was, and one young mother replied, “The one where Jesus meets his disciples on the beach.” Rachel had been studying rabbinic numerology--the significance of particular numbers in the text, and in reply she launched into a theory about what was meant by the number of fish they caught, etc. The woman said to Rachel with a smile, “Oh, I wasn’t thinking about all that. I just like the idea of God frying up fish for breakfast.”

I realized that I, too, like the idea of God frying up fish for breakfast. This story is represented by the fishing net in the background, the fire on the beach, and the boat in the water.

Rachel, thank you for all that you've said and written and done for the church, those in and out of it. <3