This weekend there was an incredible outpouring on social media over the unexpected death of writer Rachel Held Evans. Much of that outpouring focused on Held Evans’s bravery in speaking out in graciousness and kindness for those struggling to stick with a church that fails to be the grace-filled and kind body of Christ to its members, particularly those on the margins. What’s perhaps more remarkable are those tributes from people who say they disagreed with her on what they saw as essential issues but were nevertheless treated by her with warmth and friendship.

While only a casual reader of Held Evans’s blog, and this about five or more years ago, I was always struck by a key quality of her discourse: She didn’t answer every critic’s response to what she wrote. This was in the days (for me) before Twitter, the days when the comment section of a blog post was the main mode of online debate that I encountered. Here’s a post, excerpting her book A Year of Biblical Womanhood, that received a relatively modest number of comments in response. Held Evans responded to some of the encouraging comments and to one critical comment. She didn’t respond to all of the critical comments.

You may be saying, “Of course she didn’t. She had better things to do.” True enough. What I’m reminded of, reading over the wave of tweets grateful for Held Evans’s presence, and mourning her absence, is how a writer’s relationship with her reading audience is cultivated over time. I tell my writing students that “one poem is not every poem,” or “one essay is not every essay.” In other words, you don’t have to fit everything—every answer, every angle—into each thing you write. The body of work, the result of an ongoing, faithful practice of making stuff, will speak more thoroughly and, one hopes, more powerfully than any one book, blog post, or comment on a comment thread can.

That Held Evans’s life seems to have been inseparable from the stuff that she made is testified to again and again puts me in mind of a passage from Christian Wiman’s essay “God’s Truth is Life,” which itself begins by quoting the poem “The Choice,” by William Butler Yeats: “The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work, / And if it take the second must refuse / A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.” Wiman remarks,

Lord, how much time—how much life—have I wasted on the rack of Yeats’s utterly false distinction. It is not that imperfections in the life somehow taint or invalidate perfections of the work. It is, rather, that these things—art and life, or thought and life—are utterly, fatally, and sometimes savingly entwined, and we can know no man’s work until we know how, whom, and to what end he did or did not love.

That entwinement is a fact, whether we like it or not. How we express ourselves to others comes out of the imperfect lives we lead. Held Evans lead a life that, aside from her writing and speaking, included devotion to her husband and children. I cannot imagine what they are going through. May they be comforted in their grief, a comfort encouraged by the love Rachel Held Evans so freely showed to those who read her words.