One of my favorite prayers is, “Forgive me, Father, for my unbelief.”

I think it started as a kid when I was asking my parents about who wrote Genesis. When I found out how long after Creation it had been written, I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

How could some dude who lived hundreds of years after the Creation of the earth have any accurate sense of how it had happened? It didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t care if he was inspired by God.

I have always believed deep down that science will confirm what the Bible says about how the earth was created, but when I was a kid, it was very important to evangelicals to believe in Young Earth Creationism instead of Evolution, and the two ideas were considered completely incompatible. Since then, discoveries like Mitochondrial Eve, established a much more recent beginning for humans (and confirmed we didn’t come from apes, which was one of the things I remember evangelicals being upset about).

A dear friend and a bit of a nemesis in high school confronted me with the conflicting accounts of different events in the Gospels. I bluffed my unconcern at the time, but I was horrified. If that was true, why hadn’t anyone told me?

Then a professor in college suggested that maybe God wasn’t a man.

Whew.

Now, enough time has passed for me to start to own my faith. I’ve found an understanding of God’s Word that allows me to live with its weirdness and contradictions. And the contradictions in the way Christians choose to follow it.

That’s what Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again, by Rachel Held Evans, is all about. Taking a messy collection of writings that we use as the guidebook for our faith, she explores its background, retells its stories, provides theological perspective for the ancient writings, and offers a cultural context.

Evans uses current events, scholars, religious leaders, and the Bible itself to take us on the journey with her to understand some ideas about the Word of God, what it is, and what it means.

An excellent but easy read, I finished this book in less than three days. While it was easy to read, it didn’t shy away from big ideas. I thoroughly enjoyed digesting Evans’ point of view and considering her perspective about the Gospel and the way the Bible was written.

Rachel Held Evans passed away in the beginning of May of this year at age 37. I’m guessing she did her work on earth and God was ready to take her back. I had never heard of her until I saw a post on Insta about her death from a blogger I follow. As soon as I read her bio, I knew we were a member of the same tribe. I’m so glad she was called to be an author so that her voice can continue to speak from beyond the grave. I felt like the book answered so many of the questions that people of my generation raised in Evangelical households wrestled with as individuals trying to understand and own our faith.

Earlier this spring, I started a similar book, Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women, and Queer Christians are Reclaiming Evangelicalism, by Deborah Jian Lee. I found it by accident when I was searching for another book in my library’s online catalog. While the idea of Jesus needing a rescue was a huge turn-off, I was curious to see what Lee had to say. I requested the book and started reading.

I finally quit about a third of the way in. Like Evans, Lee is a former Evangelical. Unlike Evans, Lee’s writer’s voice came across bitter and at times, petulant. She was more than happy to crack open the Evangelicals’ checkered history when it came to race. Then, instead of using it as a platform for dialogue, Lee just calls Evangelicals out for everything they’re Doing Wrong, her words dripping with the superiority the liberal-minded reserve especially for those unreasonable religious conservatives.

Rescuing Jesus didn’t challenge biblical interpretations or use theology to argue its points. Lee uses contemporary societal norms and argues for Evangelicals to adopt them as any reasonable group would, Lee’s tone implies.

Evans takes a more measured approach. It’s the essential difference between the two books, and what made Inspired an invitation to dialogue rather than an attack. Rachel Held Evans produced a thoughtful, interesting book that invites a curious mind to connect with Evan’s own journey to discover what God’s Word holds for her. Instead of using bitterness and accusation, or a clear bias against her subject, she speaks the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15), acknowledging the role Evangelicalism had in making her who she became. She shares from a theological perspective what caused her to believe differently than she was raised on some key issues.

Whether you are a former Evangelical, a current Evangelical, or a believer in Christ who has read a passage in the Bible that made you uncomfortable, this book is lovingly prepared food for thought.

After I finished writing this post, an older evangelical believer, author, and blogger who has earned my respect over time began publishing a series on Old Earth Biblical Creationism. Now, this is something I can get down with. If you’re curious, you can read the Intro, Part 1, and Part 2 on his blog. His book, The 10-Second Rule, also had a big impact on me (it’s  about taking WWJD – What Would Jesus Do? – and applying it to your life. I think I may just have made it seem really obnoxious, but it was super practical and to the point, which is how I like my instructive reading).