Rachel Held Evans passed away on May 4, 2019, before this manuscript was finished. Her husband, Dan, asked their friend, journalist Jeff Chu, if he could look at her work and her notes and bring it to completion.

Rachel Held Evans went through years of spiritual doubt, when she struggled with what she’d been taught about God. Many Christians go through a spiritual crisis, and some never resolve it. Rachel journeyed back to faith, and wanted to help others embrace a love of Christ.

I discovered Rachel’s blog a few years before her passing. It’s still up–you can check it out. When I heard that she’d died, I was heartbroken. I read her book Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church, because I was going through a time of disillusionment myself.

Then my bible study group decided to read through Wholehearted Faith together.

This book is about a lot of things, especially about love. In the prologue, Rachel writes, “Inherent in the Incarnation is that God came to embody relationship, to remind us that love is personal-and interpersonal.” In Chapter 1, “On the Days When I Believe,” she writes about God’s all-encompassing unconditional love and comments, “Because true love can never be coerced or controlled, God does all of this without the guarantee of reciprocation.” He loves so much, even if we love back so little.

In Chapter 2, “My Wicked Little Heart,” Rachel writes about her teenage “all-in-ness” with her Evangelical faith, and yet she struggled with aspects of doctrine. After reading Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, she “prayed for weeks afterward that God might somehow work a posthumous miracle and pluck her from the eternal fire in which I was sure she was being unfairly tormented. I couldn’t accept that a good, loving, and gracious God would burn Anne Frank forever.” Years later, when she asked her college theology professor how it could be justice for Nazis with “faith” to have a better shot at salvation than the Jews they murdered, he dismissed her question with “God’s ways are higher than our ways. We dare not question the Almighty.”

Rachel credits her parents for the fact that she remained a Christian. “. . . my parents created an environment in which wholehearted faith was never at odds with questioning or with uncertainty. Wholeheartedness means that we can be doubtful and still find rest in the tender embrace of a God who isn’t threatened by human inconsistency. . . Wholeheartedness means we can approach the throne of grace in the confidence of the God who made us, the God who redeemed us, and the God who accompanies us.”

Chapter 3, “Where Stone Becomes Flesh,” is about vulnerability. We’re taught to interpret the Bible in a specific way, and to be certain of its truth. If we’re not certain, we’re accused of not having faith. Rachel reminds us that in Ezekiel 36:26 God promises to remove our heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh, that is, “a heart that is aware and attentive, to its Creator and to the rest of creation.” In other words, a heart that observes and wonders.

I have oversimplified these first three chapters; be assured that they go into much greater detail than my brief summaries. I won’t even try to summarize the rest.

Here are the rest of the chapter titles:

• The Liberation of the Know-It-All
• Thick Skin, Tender Heart
• Jonathan Edwards Is Not My Homeboy
• Beginning Again with Love
• From Death to Life
• The Steady Work of Living Water
• Many Voices, Many Masks
• Wilderness
• God Has Made a Home with Us
• Loving Our Enemies
• Dwelling in the Sabbath

I hope you can see that Rachel was not trying to get readers to discard Christianity. Instead, she appeals to those of us who have doubts, asking us to examine what is troubling us, lay those doubts at the foot of God’s throne and love Him anyway-wholeheartedly.