Tribute to Rachel Held Evans

I am currently reading Searching for Sunday by Rachel Held Evans. She was a deep and witty writer. I am very much enjoying learning about her journey from absolute fundamentalist faith to accepting and trusting that it is okay to have doubts. God, she lets us know, is big enough to handle our tough questions.

I was deeply saddened to learn she died when she was 37 from an allergic reaction to a medication that caused her brain to swell and finally killed her. I was saddened because all of her talent would no longer be available.

The poet Mary Oliver says in blackwater woods:

“to live in this world you must be able to do three things to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go” ― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

And so I am grateful for Rachel Held Evans and though she no longer is writing and I must let her go, I will continue to appreciate and grow from her depth of expression and awareness.

In my novel, Naomi and Ruth: Loyalty Among Women, Naomi is an example of a woman who grows beyond the expectations for a woman of her day becoming not merely an obedient wife, but a woman who can and does succeed as a single mother in a foreign land.