Wholehearted Faith

Introduction

How can I help?

That’s how I first encountered Rachel Held Evans.

A few months before my book came out, my publisher received an email from her. She was already ascending from Christian-blogger famous to Christian famous. I was a full-time journalist in New York City. After some years away from the church, I had recently, hesitantly joined one. I didn’t read Christian blogs—or any blogs, really. I hadn’t heard of her books. I had no idea who she was. But a friend told me that Rachel had been on The View and that she was a Big Deal.

How can I help?

Who would say that to a total stranger?

Rachel would.

She ended up inviting me to guest-post on her blog, and in the subsequent years, she popped into my life again and again, by email or by text—always encouraging, always offering a snarky observation, always speaking a word of hope. We began meeting up whenever we were attending the same conference or event. When I was traveling through Tennessee, she and Dan welcomed me into their home and drove me through the gorgeous countryside, where we stopped at a farm to buy some apples. Agritourism! Rachel said. With her quirky humor and the love emanating from her enormous heart, she bossed her way into my life and stayed there.

In 2015, when she and Nadia Bolz-Weber started a conference called Why Christian? she invited me to do a breakout session—and then the following year she asked me to tell my story on the main stage. I am not a natural speaker; my legs still tremble each time I’m at a lectern or in a pulpit. I’d much rather be sharing with you as I am now, in writing. But Rachel, one of the most stubborn people in my life, cajoled my instinctive no into a reluctant yes. When she and Sarah Bessey launched Evolving Faith in 2018, she did it again, and a few months after that inaugural conference, she called and asked if I would become a partner in that gathering.

The trajectory of our relationship is not unique. I am just one of an enormous—and enormously diverse—group of people who can testify to Rachel’s generosity with her time, her energy, her contacts, her platform. She had a particular desire to boost those of us who had typically found ourselves on the outskirts of the church, whether it was because of racism, homophobia, misogyny, ableism, transphobia, or some other unjust bias against an aspect of our identity. If someone tried to silence us or tell us to settle down, Rachel would use every resource at her disposal to amplify our voices and to give us a way to rise up.

Rachel was so many things: One of my best teachers. One of my favorite correspondents. One of my examples as a writer. One of my models as a voice that was both pastoral and prophetic. One of my most faithful advocates. One of the world’s most relentless embodiments of Christlike love and wicked humor. But above all, she was my friend—a person who dispensed wise advice and listened so well and dried my tears and teased me fearlessly and texted me while she was breastfeeding to let me know that I was on her mind and that she hoped this wasn’t some weird situation in which the Holy Spirit was telling her that I might be dead.

I lost count of the number of times Rachel reminded me: Thick skin, tender heart. She meant that I needed to learn to let baseless critiques roll off me—There will always be critics, she said—as I took the risk of opening myself to goodness and love. I would sometimes respond half jokingly that I was actually pretty good at the tender heart part, especially if by tender you mean prickly or oversensitive or hypercritical. (Even as I type these words, I can hear Rachel admonishing me: Jeff Chu!) But another part of my hesitation was that opening yourself up to goodness and love also exposes you to the possibility of loss and pain.

Early one morning in May 2019, I was at a coffee shop in Princeton, scrambling to finish the last papers of my final semester of seminary. My cell phone started to buzz, and a name flashed on the screen: Dan. Shortly after Why Christian? Rachel had fallen ill. She was eventually placed into an induced coma in the hopes that her body might heal, and she’d been transferred from their hometown hospital to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.

Hey, Dan, I said tentatively. I tried to steady my voice, but my heart was thumping in my ears.

Hey, buddy, he said.

The crack in his voice and the silence that followed told me most of what I needed to know.

If you want to say goodbye, you should get here as soon as you can, he said.

By nightfall, I was at her hospital bedside. Though Dan had tried to cozy up the space with photos and mementos, the room, humming clinically with its life-prolonging machinery, felt as cold as Rachel had been the epitome of warmth. I will not tell you what exactly I whispered into her ear as I held her hand—some things ought to remain between friends. But I will tell you that my tears were tears of both tremendous sorrow and boundless thanksgiving, some of the deepest grief I’ve ever known mixing with some of the most profound gratitude.

Later that night, a few of us, a motley collection of friends and family, diverse in life experience and theology but united in our love for this beloved child of God, gathered around her. We prayed the Nunc Dimittis, and some of us sang It Is Well with My Soul. I say some of us because it was not well with my soul, not at all. And I couldn’t even pretend enough to sing a single word.

How can I help?

Some months after we said goodbye to Rachel, when Dan called to ask if I would finish the book that Rachel had begun, of course I wanted to say no. I’m not Rachel. I am the furthest thing from a straight, white, Southern, Baptist-turned-Episcopalian woman. I am not a parent. I have not read as widely as Rachel. I cannot multitask like she could. I will never tweet with the brave abandon that she did. I’m not sure I can even watch an entire football game anymore, let alone abide the Crimson Tide. Nor can I be for you what Rachel was for so many of us. But I had to say yes, if only because I couldn’t bear the thought of possibly seeing her again someday—as Rachel said, on the days when I believe . . .—and having her chide me for not stepping up.

Indulge me one more brief memory: The day before her funeral, I went to Rachel’s house and descended the stairs to the basement, to her desk. I sat in her chair, but only for a moment, until it felt wrong and even sacrilegious. I stood, and I looked at the corkboard above that desk, where she had pinned encouragements to herself, things that she wanted to remember as she wrote to you and for you. The words that stood out to me most: Tell the truth.

So let me tell the truth: This is not the book that Rachel would have written. Yet it is still her book, through and through. As you read these pages, I hope you will hear her shining and incomparable voice—wise and witty, curious and courageous, faithful and gracious. I hope you will feel her incomparable presence—her great hope, her warm embrace, her sense of tremendous possibility. And especially if you have been hurt by the church, I hope you will sense her true solidarity.

At the time of her death, Rachel had finished a significant portion of the book, which was tentatively titled Wholehearted Faith. The bulk of what you will read in the following pages came from that incomplete manuscript, which I bolstered with my own research. I did my best to follow in her formidable footsteps, tracing the crumbs she left behind. Dan gave me access to her hard drive, too, a repository of fragments and snippets, suggestions and musings, notes on books she had read and imaginings about the God in whom she placed her trust. You might occasionally hear an echo of a familiar story; some of what you’ll read in these pages originated in talks Rachel gave, tweets she tweeted, and sermons she preached. All of it is infused with her thought, her theology (we definitely didn’t agree on everything!), her heart.

One of the challenges was that Rachel wrote differently depending on the medium. Sharp and pithy in her tweets, she gave herself more space to muse in her talks. And in her books, she was her geekiest, most winsome, and most eloquent self, roaming widely, daring to wax poetic, and drawing from sources both ancient and modern. I suppose this much was true of all her work: She always grounded herself in her own life experience, believing that the truest work was the most personal. Everything was testimony—faithful witness to the God she tried to believe would never leave her or forsake her, holy confession of the One on whom she risked her credibility and staked her claim. So several chapters in this book also draw on her archive of blog posts as well as our correspondence.

Where there were gaps in the storytelling, I asked those closest to her—including her father, Peter; her sister, Amanda; and most of all, her beloved Dan—to help me fill them. To these dear people, I offer my deep gratitude. Where there was space left to be filled with further thought and reflection, I prayed that the Spirit might meet me to do the work for which I felt so ill-equipped, providing sentences and paragraphs when I felt broken beyond words and lacking in wisdom.

As you read these words, I hope you will not just hear but also feel Rachel walking alongside you, probing with her characteristic curiosity and listening for the questions that dog you on your own journey. My wish is that through this book you might experience the Rachel that I did: a faithful friend, a steadfast companion, and a wholehearted sojourner who asked over and over, How can I help?

—Jeff Chu

Prologue

Because They Said Yes

When you’ve been married for twelve years, you know exactly what kind of humor your partner will appreciate as she’s actively pushing a baby out of her body, and Dan, sensing it would make me feel confident and safe, had the entire delivery room in stitches that night.

I don’t remember much of what he said, but I do remember my obstetrician laughing so hard that I worried she might drop the scissors as she passed them to Dan to cut our newborn son’s umbilical cord. And I remember being the happiest I’ve ever been when that little boy’s body was placed upon my chest, all startled and slimy and mine.

The days and nights that followed were, as everyone always says, a blur. One can never prepare for the physical and emotional demands of caring for a newborn for the first time, and I was lucky to have a relatively smooth delivery and postpartum experience. Our lives were utterly consumed with nursing, burping, and maintaining the spreadsheet we meticulously updated with details of our baby’s diaper contents to report to the pediatrician, because we were completely, unabashedly those parents.

Parenthood demands the best of you, and then some. It demands more from you than you ever knew you had, and it’s empowering to rise to that occasion, to learn something new about yourself, including how you can keep going, riding the waves of laughter and tears—your child’s as well as your own—on remarkably little sleep.

Eventually, days became days again, and nights, for the most part, nights. (We still get the occasional 3 a.m. wake-up call.) The more mobile our little guy got, the more we saw of his personality: athletic, intrepid, clever, and curious, with a sophisticated sense of humor and a penchant for bluegrass.

I knew I would love this little boy, of course, but I had no idea I would like him this much. And I’m just so glad I said yes to it all.

* * *

Don’t misunderstand: my yes can be complicated. Some days and some nights, I am too tired, too discouraged, and too overwhelmed by all the beauty and all the evil of this world. I am too overcome by the thought that I am willingly subjecting a child to such wonder and such horror, and I don’t want to think any more about it.

On those days and nights, my most honest answer to the question Why are you a Christian? is just I don’t know. Why not? That might seem like a paltry and pale version of Yes, but it is a yes nonetheless.

For better or for worse, there are seasons when we hold our faith, and then there are seasons when our faith holds us. In those latter instances, I am more thankful than ever for all the saints, past and present, who said yes and whose faith sustains mine. They believe for me when I’m not sure I believe. They hold on to hope for me when I’ve run out of hope. They are the old lady next to me in the pew and the little kid behind me who recite the entirety of the Apostles’ Creed on my behalf on those Sundays when I cannot bring myself to say all those ancient words wholeheartedly—Is this what I really believe? They pray for me when the only words I have to say to God are words that I refuse to allow to be printed on this page, because they would make even my most foulmouthed friend blush.

I’ve come to believe that wholehearted faith isn’t just about coming to terms with the heart that beats inside me. It’s also about understanding how God has knit together my heart with the hearts of that old lady and that little kid. Wholeheartedness is about seeing and comprehending my place in a bigger family of faith, just as parenthood has transformed my understanding of my role in a biological and social unit. It is about risking hurt and confusion for the sake of the thing that so many of us seek: belonging.

Perhaps it is because I am neck-deep in a season of motherhood and caretaking that I am more aware than ever of the startling and profound reality that I am a Christian not because of anything I’ve done but because a teenage girl living in occupied Palestine at one of the most dangerous moments in history said yes—yes to God, yes to a wholehearted call she could not possibly understand, yes to vulnerability in the face of societal judgment, yes to the considerable risk of pregnancy and childbirth, yes to clogged milk ducts and spit-up in her hair and hundreds of middle-of-the-night feedings, yes to scary fevers and learning as you go and all the first-century equivalents of bad advice from WebMD, yes to a vision for herself and her little boy of a