Hey, Fam!
If you haven’t seen it on social media by now, I have a surprise for you! My new book, She Hears, drops on June 29. Before it does, I thought it would be helpful to
dive into some content and explain the heart behind the study.
I’m excited to share with you a little bit of an intro as to what birthed this project.
You may be asking…..
What is She Hears?
What does that mean?
What can I expect if I choose to go through the Bible study?
In all honesty, this is a passion project that was birthed several years ago. I had been working in the local church and speaking around the country. I had written another book called Go, and I had been traveling and speaking to women.
One of the things that I found echoed in a lot of the conversations I was having was this general sense that women felt like their voices were not being heard. And for whatever reason, whether that was the theological perspective of the church they were serving in, their position (or lack of paid position) on staff, or even their own insecurities in their relationship with God, there were just a lot of reasons that all lead to this same feeling.
There was also this other sense of women wondering how they could truly know that they were hearing from God.
How could they know it wasn’t just their own voice, their own heart?
How could they tell the difference?
I started just taking notes, writing down questions I needed to spend some time answering because this was something that was echoed in my own life. On several occasions, I would have something to share that the Lord very clearly revealed to me, either through the Word or in my spirit. However, when I tried to share that word in certain circles, it was not always well received.
What I realized was that we needed to go back to the scripture to see what Jesus had to say about all of this, if I was ever going to be able to change the outcomes of those difficult moments. So, She Hears was birthed in my desire to know, really know, how God felt about women in a way that I wouldn’t question it anymore.
And at the very beginning of this process, I was sitting in a moment of worship, just really allowing the Lord to work in my heart over this angst I was feeling. I was burdened not just for me, but for other women that I knew were feeling the same thing. During that time of worship, I very clearly heard the Lord say, Rachael, you do hear me.
Those words were life-changing for me because God was validating the very thing I was struggling with. So my response to that moment was to investigate and pursue the things we saw in the Scriptures about Jesus and how He spoke to women.
I wanted to have something to fight back with when the enemy started whispering words of inadequacy and dismissiveness. Sometimes what we have to do is realize that the word of God is more powerful than what we feel. We have to rely on what we know, and we know is that God is good and God does good.
As I set out to study this content, God used it to heal the parts of my heart that I didn’t even know were still broken. Author John Bevere says about his books, “My name is on this book because I was just the first one who got to read it.” In all honesty, that is how I feel.
So as we embark on this journey through the book of John, there is something I would like you to keep in mind.
Read with a fresh perspective.
God’s word says that is living an active. And even though some of these biblical narrative stories are stories we have read and studied throughout our lives, they are being delivered to us in a fresh way, in a way that God can use to transform and heal some broken spaces in our lives. My hope is that you will read these stories with a fresh perspective. Some of the women that that are in this book are studied and over-studied and written about and over-written about to the point where you might look at this and say, I don’t need to study that one. My encouragement to you would be to throw out that way of thinking and to put on a fresh mind and a fresh perspective, because even though you may have read these stories or studied these women, God may be trying to reveal something you didn’t see before. Try to come at this study as if it was the first time you were learning about these women and examine what God is saying through their stories.
I can’t wait to go on this journey with you.
Be Blessed,
Rach