i have just finished reading this book for the second time.
sad to say, i had never heard of rachel held evans until she was dying. since my discovery, i have been devouring her books.
i have found her struggles to be my struggles; her voice, mine
both of us grew up in a fundamentalist church. both of us grew up in a warm and loving family. both of us grew up troubled by the harshness of biblical interpretation in the face of the loving jesus we had come to know
my mother loved jesus more than she loved my daddy, and she thought the sun rose and set with jerry.
I couldn't find the picture that hung in our kitchen for most of our life. it was not like this sunday school jesus that i also remember from so much baptist literature.
that jesus did not look saintly. he looked real and full of love
my first serious challenge to the christian life of my parents came with the civil rights movement. i could not reconcile the bitterness towards this movement by my parents... my father was the epitome of generosity... and my mother always saved her greatest concern for the poor.
how could i understand this woman who spoke so against rights for colored people with the woman who went to nicholtown, a black neighborhood in my town, to take cornbread and soup to her colored maid who had just had a baby? that was the most abject poverty i had ever seen. i couldn't believe it existed in my town.
my parents thought i was "brainwashed" because of my liberal views. only it was their influence that made me what i am. i guess i paid more attention to how they lived their lives than what they taught me about church.
so we come to rachel held evans
the problem with coming to the point where you reject the church is that it's hard not to reject the bible, too. after all, it has been used throughout the centuries to hurt people, to establish power, to make christians superior.
both of us kept trying.
both of us were disturbed by the violence and evil that seemed to be encouraged in the old testament.
today's fundamentalist interpretation of the bible has caused such suffering.
when you judge others for their sins, you encourage hate crimes. no one sees love in the bashing of gays and women who have abortions.
there is no compassion. there is judgment.
hate is the message sent
and there is no such thing as hating the sin and not the sinner. if you believed that, you would want to give them even more of the good things you want for yourself... and it wouldn't be i'm right and you're wrong. it wouldn't be that i am offended by your lifestyle.
it would be let me love you like jesus did.
jesus never spoke a harsh word to a sinner. he reserved all that for the ones who were sure they knew exactly the right answer in all situations... and twisted god's word to benefit them.
the comparison to today is overwhelming.
back to the year of living a biblical womanhood
rachel decided to spend a year following biblical commands in the bible about women.
the old testament and the letters of paul are pretty misogynist, no matter how you interpret it.
only jesus treated women as equals
each month she worked on something different - something her research into all references said a woman should do.
she picked all those stories in the old testament that i struggled with.
she picked all the references outside the gospels that bothered me.
but she didn't leave out jesus.
what rachel found was not all the answers.
what she found was a guide to being god's woman... a goal.
and i found it was my goal as well.
it's the same teaching that jesus preached in his three years of teaching.
love one another.
be kind to one another.
concentrate on living YOUR life as a disciple of christ.
what she found is that the bible can still speak to us today if we drown out all the voices that tell us god stopped speaking with revelations.
god speaks.
even in the bible.
