The short answer? No.

Although my previous post was excruciatingly honest about last years state of affairs, I am still very much a Christian. I mean, this is the Millennial Christian Woman blog afterall… 😉

All jokes aside, after some questions I was asked in the wake of my public word vomit I thought I should clear some things up. The truth is I love God. My love has certainly been tested and put through the fire, but it continues. I have no plans to stop loving my Creator anytime soon. In fact, my love has actually deepened and evolved into something radically different than it ever was. Despair drove me to ask the hard questions; to fully bare my soul with Him and figure out for myself why I choose to keep loving. No, I mean seriously: Why do I love Him? Many who don’t believe in God do not understand my choice to keep believing. While others who do believe have many rehearsed and obligatory reasons they could list off to answer why they love God. But when push comes to shove and your world is literally imploding that’s when you get to see #1) if you really do love Him, and #2) why the heck you do. There were days, sometimes weeks, when I wasn’t so sure I did. But now that the dust has settled I can say unequivocally that, while the reasons I love Him feel much different than before, I still most definitely do. Perhaps I’ll divulge some of my reasons in future musings…

But this time it feels like deep-real-no-more-masks-kind of love. There’s no room for fuzzy, frilly feel good words to make being a Christian sound perfect and precious. Nah, that’s fake. Give it to me straight up, no chaser. No more immaturity, naïvety or rose colored glasses about the whole thing. It really is hard. It really comes at a super high price (if you’re serious about it). And most will never understand me or it. But as a lovely commenter reminded me, “though weeping may endure for a night (or like 600 nights), joy most definitely comes in the morning (or the eventual progression of the years ahead)”. I’m a believer willing myself to keep hoping all the more after the fire…a jewel in love…totally understood by Him and evermore sure that He really is worth it all.

Take my word for it. Or don’t.

Cue awkward segue….

We can all agree my last year sucked. The year before that sucked. And the latter half of 2013 sucked pretty bad as well. Meh. We’ve covered this. I don’t know how people get through this life without hope in Jesus, but Christian or not, life is tough on everyone. What I’ve come to realize post-carnage is that it’s up to me to decide how things are going to go moving forward. Of course there is a ton coming my way that I have no control over, but I choose to believe. To believe in the goodness of people, even when I haven’t always seen it. To believe the best is yet to come, as much as the negative voices in my head would love to argue the contrary. To believe that I am much stronger than I give myself credit for. And to believe that, although almost none of it makes sense yet, what God has allowed these last few years is only building the awesome story that is my life and and the woman I’m becoming. It’s time to let myself fully trust my Author again. I hope you’ll start believing something similar.

Lastly, I just wanted to shout out a special thank you to everyone who emailed, called, texted, and social media’d the heck out of me following “the post“. First off, I could feel the love of Jesus all over the kindness and support of each person who took the time to contact me. [Additional shout out to Jesus.] And second, there were countless others who reached out publicly and privately and shared their intimate hurts and struggles of 2015. Each of you were so brave and so encouraging and helped me realize how valuable writing from the heart really is to healing. Making my struggles public healed parts of me I can’t explain, but hearing how many others were impacted and could connect to my saga and line of questioning was the part that meant the most. Each and every one of the over 1,000 people who read that post (on every continent in.the.world…whaaaat) YOU are the reasons I write. You are my inspiration and my fire fuelers.

So, thank you.

I hope each of you, in your own way, will follow my journey. Heck, what I really hope is that we’ll journey together. There are too many disconnected and surface level relationships in this world. I’m over that. To whatever degree we can walk through life together through the various communicative outlets afforded us in the 21st century I want to do that. If you’ll have the boldness to keep the conversation going I’ll continue to respond. Promise. Let’s keep going.

Sincere love,

Rachel

….thankful that we have each other. Thankful for a God who loves me despite myself. And thankful for the song above. Give it a listen and keep rising. xoxoxoxoxo