MN Landscape Arboretum
Lilies July 21, 2023

We Christians fall into camps, claiming our truth as the only truth. There is a tendency to look down on those who do not share our particular understanding of faith, be it progressive, conservative or somewhere in-between.  Which is why I was intrigued by a blog post written by the late Rachel Held Evans.

On May 21, 2016, Evans rewrote the commencement address she had given in 2003, to her classmates at  Bryan College, in Tennessee.  She shared what she had learned about her faith in the years since graduating.     “I thought I was called to challenge the atheists, but the atheists ended up challenging me. I thought God wanted to use me to show gay people how to be straight. Instead God used gay people to show me how to be Christian. I thought the world needed my answers, but as it turns out, I needed the world’s questions. I needed to learn how to doubt well, listen better, and be humbled by how little I know. I needed to discover that evangelicalism is just one table in Christ’s banquet hall, the Great Cloud of Witnesses far more sprawling and diverse than I’d ever imagined. . . .”

From the earliest times, Christianity has had it divisions. A look through the writings of the Apostle Paul and the Book of Acts, quickly dispels any sense that everyone, always got along. The problem of course, being that any and every church, synagogue, mosque or temple is filled with human beings, with  their own opinions, wants and needs. All of whom are certain they are right.

Rachel Held Evans died too young and too soon, from complications of the flu, leaving behind her husband and two small children.  She was working on a book before her death, which was published posthumously as Wholehearted Faith, in November of 2021, with Jeff Chu as coauthor.

Evans was on a quest for truth, in all of its forms,  she wrote,     “When I was a Bible-thumping, churchgoing, know-it-all Republican, God used bleeding-heart, politically correct, question-everything liberals to teach me a little bit more about how to be human and to toy with my concretized notions of who my enemies were. And now that I’m a bleeding-heart, politically correct, question-everything liberal, God still insists on using Bible-thumping, churchgoing, know-it-all Republicans to teach me a little bit more about how to be human and to toy with my concretized notions of who my enemies are.”   Wholehearted Faith 2021 Rachel Held Evans with Jeff Chu pg 115

Spending time with those who see  the world through a different lens, can both test and deepen  our faith . . .  as we  encounter in the other,  a Jesus who loves us all and  wants us to continue  to grow our humanity.  One who prays that we all might be one.

“Whoever says, ‘I am in the light’, while hating a brother or sister, is still in the darkness. Whoever loves a brother or sister lives in the light, and in such a person there is no cause for stumbling.” I John 2:9-10