About

Welcome to the Becoming: Blog, the little corner of the web where I curl up and write Love Letters to you. Welcome to the place where I stumble through this untidy life…

Becoming: stronger, braver, kinder

Becoming: more of who I am meant to me

Becoming: more like the Love That First Loved Us.

Welcome to the where I show you my scars, tell my secrets, and give away my heart through my words, with the sacred hope a Love Letter will find you when you most need it.

Welcome to my story of Becoming:

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My memoir Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome: One Woman’s Desperate, Funny, Healing Journey To Explore 30 Religions is a story of Became. I was spiritually injured; I Became healed. I was chronically ill for a decade; I Became well. While there is great value and power in the telling of this story, Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome had a last page.

My life did not*.

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Through this I learned there is no Became.

There are things we fight and win.

There are ends and new beginnings.

There are personal resurrections. Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome is proof. I am proof.

But there is no final arrival, no finish line; there there is always an after.

After the end of the book, after the last chapter, after the final page, there is a continual beginning…

There is a continual Becoming.

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Even though it often feels unfair*, this is a gorgeous Truth:

Where Became leaves us stagnant like a still photograph, Becoming allows kinetic movement.

Where Became is a full stop, Becoming is a blinking cursor.

Where Became confines us to the past, Becoming gives us infinite room to grow into our future.

Where Became is a period, Becoming is a colon–a promise there is more to come.

This blog is my story of Becoming: because it is what I am. It is what you are. It is what we all are as we experience this twisty-straight, darkly-light, painfully-amazing life together.

This is a blog of Becoming: because our lives are not a story of Became.

Our lives are a story of  Becoming:

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  About Me

Reba Riley is the author of Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome:One Woman’s Desperate, Funny, Healing Journey To Explore 30 Religions, the memoir lauded as: “Hilarious, courageous, provocative, profound…Eat Pray Love’s gutsy, wise, funny little sister.” –Elizabeth Gilbert

“Brilliant, emotional, and audacious.” –Paul Young (The Shack)

“Filled with grace, wit, charm, and profound insight.” –Jen Lancaster (Bitter is the New Black, I Regret Nothing)

“Moving, funny, thoughtful book…enormously entertaining, immensely hopeful.” AJ Jacobs (The Year of Living Biblically)

A graduate of Ohio State University and former Fortune 500 sales manager, Reba Riley writes at The Huffington Post and Patheos.com, contributes regularly to television programming, and travels widely speaking about transformation, courage, health and healing. Reba is a survivor of a decade of chronic illness, clinical depression, an advocate for the undiagnosed patient, and a champion for the power of spiritual healing. But mostly she is just a woman with a Big Heart and Big Dream of changing hearts with her words. When she isn’t working or writing, Reba enjoys creating art, drinking wine, gardening, and dancing. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with her husband, Trent, and Welsh Terrier, Oxley.

*  The day after my hardback about spiritual healing hit shelves, I experienced total burnout. Five years of working on my beautiful Became book gave me a breakdown, and caused me to spend fourteen battling clinical depression, fighting to recover. (Oh, the irony.) I’m still recovering.Yes, I healed spiritually. Yes, I healed physically. But after that I threw myself into years of unsustainable work; I used up every internal resource and found myself sick again–this time, mentally. Winning one battle does not mean you don’t have to fight another. So we keep on Becoming:

Connect with Reba Facebook   Twitter  Instagram  www.RebaRiley.com

Read more about Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome.