Rachael Ward
Rachael // Gender Queer // They/Them
Rachael Ward grew up in a southern evangelical rural town in South Georgia. Without the language to accompany her questions around sexuality, she didn’t take a spiritual journey into sexuality until her mid-twenties. There she faced questions of existence, battled suicidal thoughts, substance abuse and wandered the wilderness for nine years.
After developing a strong sense of her person, she began utilizing her story to offer compassion over those navigating the difficult spaces and questions of personhood and their love for Christ.
Rachael believes in the true identity of the church, as the bride of Christ and intention in its creation to be a place of refuge, growth and wrestling questions with our creator.
by Rachael Ward
Collectively, I’ve spent my twenties brushing off abuse from family dynamics and religious institutions which formed my upbringing. Through these words, thoughts and actions of such abuse, I have carefully crafted a narrative to aim at my own being.
It is self-hatred. It is shame and it is deadly.
I am tired of living into the narrative someone else programmed me to believe into and asked of me to lift for my own. I am exhausted with living disconnected from my mind and body out of continued internalized homophobia and regret of my existence.
Who wouldn’t be tired of such a subconscious and conscious assault upon your person?
This is where my mind lives these days. Battling between the illuminated truth and the false narrative of disparage of who I am as a human.
But, there is a new shift here for me in this struggle. I have found the on switch to my body, the on switch to the origin and the on switch to being able to call this treatment abuse.