Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again

by Rachel Held Evans

think of the Bible not as one of those Magic Eye books, which, with enough squinting and studying, reveal a single hidden image, but rather as a song that can be covered and remixed by a variety of artists. “Find your cover artists,” she wrote. “Find the voices that help you hear the same songs differently.”1

When you stop trying to force the Bible to be something it’s not—static, perspicacious, certain, absolute—then you’re free to revel in what it is: living, breathing, confounding, surprising, and yes, perhaps even magic.

“Fairy tales are more than true—not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

Inspiration, on both the giving and receiving end, takes practice and patience.

The problem isn’t that liberal scholars are imposing novel interpretations on our sacred texts; the problem is that over time we’ve been conditioned to deny our instincts about what kinds of stories we’re reading when those stories are found in the Bible. We’ve been instructed to reject any trace of poetry, myth, hyperbole, or symbolism even when those literary forms are virtually shouting at us from the page via talking snakes and enchanted trees. That’s because there’s a curious but popular notion circulating around the church these days that says God would never stoop to using ancient genre categories to communicate. Speaking to ancient people using their own language, literary structures, and cosmological assumptions would be beneath God, it is said, for only our modern categories of science and history can convey the truth in any meaningful way.

Even when we falter and fall, this God is in it for the long haul. We will not be abandoned.

To love is to honor God and keep God’s commandments. Love is the law that liberates slave and slaveholder alike. Love is the ultimate deliverance story, for only love can sustain the sojourner out of Egypt, through the desert, up the mountain, and into the promised land.

For every battle a thousand tales could be told, yet we seldom hear more than one of them.

we’ve grown so accustomed to defending their presence we end up debating the length of their tails.

(Warning: Do not be lured by the promise of homemade chocolate chip cookies at a meeting to discuss “recent turns in your faith journey.” It’s a trap.)

Truest sentence I've read so far.

Wisdom is a way of life, a journey of humility and faithfulness we take together, one step at a time.

Wisdom, it seems, is situational. It isn’t just about knowing what to say; it’s about knowing when to say it. And it’s not just about knowing what is true; it’s about knowing when it’s true.

That American tendency toward triumphalism, of optimism rooted in success, money, and privilege, will infect and sap of substance any faith community that has lost its capacity for “holding space” for those in grief. As therapists and caregivers explain, to “hold space” for someone is to simply sit with them in their pain, without judgment or solutions, and remain present and attentive no matter the outcome.16 The Psalms are, in a sense, God’s way of holding space for us. They invite us to rejoice, wrestle, cry, complain, offer thanks, and shout obscenities before our Maker without self-consciousness and without fear. Life is full of the sort of joys and sorrows that don’t resolve neatly in a major key. God knows that.

when all hope was lost and the darkness overwhelmed, only poetry would do.