It's hard to believe now, but at one time I had a small but significant social media presence and there are people - such as Rachel - who are very linked to that time both in terms of my memory and in my twitter feed which was pretty much frozen in time in early 2014 after three or four years of active use. During that time, I read Rachel's first book and we followed each other on Twitter. She helped me to see that other people were on the same journey that I was on - leaving behind a particular way of understanding the Christian faith, but trying to hold on and not lose everything in the process.
I've been reading back over my tweets to/about her over the years. I contributed to conversations about young Earth creationism and the competition to guess the topic of her second book. I followed along with her adventures with a robot baby while they were considering starting their own family.
Of course, she became a properly famous person (in certain circles at least) and continued to tweet at an impressive rate, whereas I happily settled back into obscurity. I met many of my twitter acquaintances over the years, but I never met Rachel in person.
I have continued to see her tweets whenever I opened my feed. Three weeks ago I saw that she had been admitted to hospital - she was sad that she was going to miss Game of Thrones. She never went home. It's extraordinarily sad. I suppose things like this happen every day and a family's lives are changed forever.
In honor of Rachel and our brief internet acquaintance, I offer the closest thing to a conversation we had (on Twitter in June 2011):
RHE: The bird who lives in our carport is on her 2nd round of babies for the season; 4th in the past 2 yrs. Her name's Pip. Must be Catholic.
me: @rachelheldevans that reads even better with the British meaning of bird = young woman!
RHE: @the_exile lol!
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