SAD NEWS came out yesterday. Rachel Held Evans died early Saturday morning, May 4, 2019. She was 37 years old,  happily married to husband Dan with whom she had two young sons. A gifted writer, she was a New York Times best-selling author, a sought after speaker, popular blogger, and a voice of faith and reason. In her books Faith Unravelled (2010) and Searching for Sunday (2015) Evans recounts her experience of growing up in a fundamentalist church, and the deconstruction and reconstruction of a vital and viable faith in these postmodern times. She was a bright, shining star combining faith, reason, wit, and wisdom. She was a mentor and guide for many, especially to millennials, young women, and persons raised in fundamentalist and evangelical churches who want to self-identify as Christians but eschew the form Christianity took in their parent’s generation.

After being hospitalized a few weeks ago to treat an infection, Evans began to present troubling symptoms including seizures. She was put into a medically induced coma to buy time to figure out the cause of the seizures. Eventually, they needed to wean her off the medicines used for the induced coma while still treating the seizures. On Thursday, May 2, she took a turn for the worse, experiencing extensive brain swelling. After an intensive effort for more than 24 hours by the medical staff to improve her condition, the damage from the swelling was so severe that it was not survivable.

Today’s Life-Line is:

⊕ Millennials aren’t looking for a hipper Christianity. We’re looking for a truer Christianity, a more authentic Christianity. Like every generation before ours and every generation after, we’re looking for Jesus — the same Jesus who can be found in the strange places he’s always been found: in bread, in wine, in baptism, in the Word, in suffering, in community, and among the least of these.

⊕ What makes the Gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out, but who it lets in.

~ Rachel Held Evans

For more on Rachel Held Evan’s, visit her website here.

Rachel Held Evans (1981-2019) R.I.P.