Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God. The former has the potential to destroy faith; that latter has the power to enrich and refine it. The former is a vice; the latter a virtue.
Rachel Held EvansAnd so, at least symbolically, the blood of Eve courses through each one of her daughters' veins. We are each associated with life; each subject to the impossible expectations and cruel projections of men; each fallen, blamed, and misunderstood; and each stubbornly vital to the process of bringing something new--perhaps something better--into this world...We are each an Eve.
Rachel Held EvansWe all long for someone to tell us who we are. The great struggle of the Christian life is to take God's name for us, to believe we are beloved and to believe that is enough.
Rachel Held EvansMy interpretation can only be as inerrant as I am, and that's good to keep in mind.
Rachel Held EvansWhen we refer to 'the biblical approach to economics' or the biblical response to politics' or 'biblical womanhood,' we're using the Bible as a weapon disguised as an adjective.
Rachel Held EvansIsaiah 55 provides an entirely different framework for thinking about God's justice, because it suggests that we have it backward - the mystery lies not in God's unfathomable wrath but in his unfathomable mercy. God's ways are higher than our ways because his capacity to love is infinitely greater than our own. Despite all that we do to alienate ourselves from God, all that we do to insult and disobey, God abundantly pardons again and again.
Rachel Held EvansIt wasn't shared social status or ethnicity that brought Jesus' followers together either, nor was it total agreement on exactly who this Jesus character was - a prophet? The Messiah? The Son of God? No, there is one thing that connected all these dissimilar people together it was a shared sense of need: a hunger, a thirst, a longing. It was the certainty that, when Jesus said He came for the sick, this meant Jesus came for me.
Rachel Held Evans