This is my second annual “Best Of” series of year-end posts. Some, I assume, will be brief. Some longer. All, varying degrees of serious. I’ll try my best not to use the words or phrases “unprecedented,” “new normal,” or “unpresidented”, but I can’t make any promises.

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In the spring I began moderating a Sunday School group at UBC that was going through Rachel Held Evans’ book “Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again.” Like many of us, the pandemic caused a lot of chaos in the early weeks. So much that, for me, I couldn’t scrape up the energy to finish up the group via Zoom. (Which, in retrospect, considering all our “Virtual Fatigue”” during those days, was probably a good thing.)

But I was asked to resume the class, starting over and via virtual, in the fall. I was excited, but a little hesitant, not knowing how leading such a group online would go.

Both experiences, the partial in-person group during the spring, and the full-study online in the fall, were refreshing and, well, inspiring times. The book is RHE’s best, published not long before she passed away in May, 2019. She clearly, all on her own, went through the equivalent of years of seminary training, condensed it into an engaging and accessible book, and nudged a lot of people who had grown weary or tired of the Bible, toward being excited about it again.

In addition to this, getting to walk alongside UBC’ers (and, in the fall, former UBC’ers and others from around the country), in the study reminded me what I love most about my community of faith– It is full of raw, honest people willing to take risks, be wrong, vulnerable, and curious in their hunt for divine treasure.