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Today is the one year anniversary of when my friend Rachel Held Evans left this world and joined the great cloud of witnesses. Today’s episode, previously aired on the Son Of A Preacher Man Podcast, is from February of last year when I went to see her and Dan and the kids at their home in Dayton, TN just before I moved from Nashville to OKC; and spent the most magical day there.

Rachel did the same thing for me that she did for so many of us: created space. People who were not a people, became a people. I like to say it is like all these disparate characters written into some southern gothic novel, and she actually did “write us in”—into the gospel story her very life embodied. And that circle is ever widening, ever expanding, even now. We found that we didn’t need to leave The Story, just to reclaim it from the forces who said we had no place in it. Rachel wrestled for that reclaiming…for all of us. She wouldn’t let anybody take Jesus from her, take her Bible from her. She didn’t run away from the angry religious mob, nor from difficult texts. She was willing to fight for her faith; she was willing to fight for all of us.

And I am so grateful. I literally see her legacy playing out every single day in my own community, in the lives of people who decided to keep the faith—and in some cases decided not to take their lives—because of Rachel Held Evans. She did all of this without institutional support, without some pre-existent platform, using only the tools of impossible curiosity, fierceness, empathy, and a blue collar commitment to the craft of writing we creatives often lack. And with these, she literally created a space that actually did not exist before. -Jonathan Martin

*Producers Note-

We offer these episodes with a sense of tentative reverence. Tentative because they are so special, close, and tender. This is a glimpse into Jonathan and Rachel’s relationship, which is so much more than “content.” Reverence because these conversations feel just as vital, poignant, and brimming with the hope that Rachel exuded as the day they were recorded. This was a sacred moment, and we desire to treat it as such. As we listen together, we pray it meets you where you are, and helps you along the journey-as Rachel always did