Remembering Rachael Wrue
by Pete Wrue

This article appeared in the 2025 Summer issue of Fulfilled! Magazine

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On Friday, March 28^th, 2025, the world lost a beautiful soul, and I lost my beautiful wife, my soulmate, and best friend. Rachael and I first met on February 5, 2012, at a mutual friend's house to “watch” the Super Bowl. Their real motive, however, was to set us up. And I’m glad they did, because later that year (by the grace of God) we started dating, and my life has never been the same. Since then, I have had the privilege and honor of knowing, loving, and caring for my sweetie pie (for about 13 years). In that time, I have never known such an amazing girl. She was beautiful, smart, kind, loving, generous, fun, and passionate. In this tribute, I would like to give insight into some of Rachael’s challenges, her life as a Christian, and our journey together through the world of eschatology (end times).

Rachael was born on May 5, 1981. From the very beginning of her life, she encountered many health challenges. In fact, I was told that she didn’t leave the hospital until five months after she was born due to complications with her intestine. Later, at a very young age, she was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease (you’re born with) that causes respiratory and digestive problems. When I met Rachael many years later, still more illnesses started to arise. In our 2023 interview with Michael Miano, she shared some of her more recent health challenges, stating, “I basically suffer with a lot of chronic pain, and I’m severely disabled at this point . . . I have nerve issues with my pelvic region. I have trouble sitting, standing, walking. I have hand and feet pain. I’ve lost almost all use of my hands, so I can’t type or even write.” These were just some of her everyday challenges, yet she pressed on, and at the time of that interview, it didn’t stop her from continuing to work on our latest book, End Times Explained. Rachael was always a fighter and the strongest person I have ever known. She found ways to overcome her disabilities and keep her quality of life. She never let her ailments get in the way of her passions, and her passion was her faith and eschatology.

Rachael was led to the Lord through her stepfather’s co-worker/family friend. He had been witnessing to her stepdad at work and later started coming to her parents’ house to share the gospel. Rachael was open to it. In our 2023 interview with Zach Davis, she said, “I always believed in an afterlife, but I didn’t actually become a Christian…until someone really shared the gospel clearly with me.” So, in 2007, at the age of 26, she accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior, got baptized, and started to go to church. In our 2023 Miano interview, she said of her salvation experience: “At the time, I was really excited about this and was like, this is it. This is what I have been waiting for my whole life. And I remember when I got saved, and was like, ‘Take me now, God. I’m ready to die now.’ . . . Obviously no, that’s not how it works. God still has work for you after you get saved. So, I know that now.” And God had work for Rachael to do. She would go on to write four books and various articles, teach Bible studies, do interviews, and much more!

In 2011, Rachael started attending a Calvary Chapel Church, where she first started learning about the Rapture and dispensationalism. This sparked her interest in the end times and would kick off her journey of intense study. It wasn’t long before she started questioning what she was being taught, and in a 2022 Burros of Berea podcast, she stated, “I believed it because they were telling me it, but things about it weren’t making sense. I wasn’t seeing it in the Scripture, and I was like, where are they getting this? How are they coming up with this?” In her search for the truth, Rachael started to question the dispensational timeline.

So, when we started seriously dating in late 2012, Rachael led the way in our eschatological journey by questioning the pretrib Rapture teaching. She dug in and studied the Bible for herself and saw only one Second Coming in Scripture, not two comings (a pretribulational Rapture and then a Second Coming). Later, she stumbled upon a YouTube video that taught a posttribulational Rapture view. This answered a lot of her questions, and Rachael was convinced that the post-trib Rapture made more sense, and after much resistance, I followed suit. In 2014, to document this part of her journey, Rachael wrote her first book called, Will the Church Go Through the Coming Tribulation? It was never published, but it was well written, and it’s a great resource. So, by the time we got married (October 26, 2013-the happiest day of my life!), neither one of us believed in the pretrib Rapture anymore.

In 2014/2015, after studying the Rapture, Rachael dug deeper and started looking at the Millennium. In our 2023 interview with Open Bible Fellowship, she shared how it started: “I was challenged one day when I was reading Revelation chapter 20, which describes this thousand-year period, and it didn’t make sense to me . . . The things that happened at the end of this thousand years are the same things I read about in the rest of the Bible that are supposed to happen when Christ returns. So, I'm like, how does Christ return and then all this stuff happens 1,000 years later? It’s supposed to happen when He returns.” Rachael had a problem with the premillennial teaching, which states that the second coming and the Great White Throne judgment are two separate events separated by a thousand years. She saw them as one event. Rachael realized that, just like with the Rapture, there were different views on the Millennium as well. So, we ordered more books, and after reading The Momentous Event by W.J. Grier (which she read in one day), she was convinced of Amillennialism, and again, I followed suit. And in 2018, to document this part of her journey, she wrote her second book called Amillennialism. This was also never published, but it is a great book and resource. Also, it was our first book together; she wrote the whole book while I edited and did the illustrations.

Now an Amillennialist, Rachael started joining Facebook groups (Steve Gregg, Amillennialism, etc.), and it was in the Amillennialism FB group that she heard about preterism (partial). In our 2023 Zach Davis interview, she said, “I was taught a futurist view of Matthew 24, and a lot of people were saying, ‘No, Matthew 24 is done already. The Great Tribulation was the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.’ I had no idea what they were talking about. But it kept coming up a lot, and I couldn’t ignore it after a while…I said, ‘I’m going to have to study this…I want to look at all the views.’” Rachael had never heard or learned about AD 70 in church, so she studied more and started to look into it. She would then wrestle with Matthew 24 and be confronted with time statements and audience relevance. Rachael also saw that partial preterism was very inconsistent. In a 2023 interview, she stated, “When I learned partial preterism, I couldn’t accept that either. I said, ‘You can’t split it up; you’re saying there are two different comings, and I only see one in the New Testament.’” In 2018, she came across a few resources that really helped her see the truth: the 2013 debate between Steve Gregg (Amill) and Don Preston (Full Preterist), Brian Martin’s video “You’ve Gotta Be Kidding, Right?” and book Behind the Veil of Moses, and Matthew 24 Fulfilled by John Bray. So, by the end of 2018, Rachael was a full preterist, and about two years later, I joined her.

On October 26, 2021 (our 8th wedding anniversary), we decided to write a full preterist book, The Return of Christ: Why Are We Still Waiting? It was released in 2022 with great reviews, and it opened many doors for us. Then in 2023, we released our second book, End Times Explained: Understanding the Different Views (Foreword by Kirk Cameron), to educate the Church and to bridge the gap between futurism and preterism. In both books, because Rachael was such a great writer, she did most of the writing, but, by this time, she couldn’t use her hands. So, she would speak, and I would type. I share this to show how amazing and strong she was and how she didn’t let anything stop her from getting the truth out to the world.

In our 2023 interview with Zach Davis, Zach asked, “What’s your mission here in eschatology? . . . Is it more of a love for full preterism or a disdain for dispensationalism? Rachael answered, “It’s a love for truth and trying to get people out of deception.” For the 13 years I knew her, Rachael always studied her Bible to find the truth, and she knew it better than anyone, pastors included. She was always questioning, learning, and growing. She did the work and was a great example of how we need to do our part for the Kingdom, even when there are challenges and it’s difficult. In her short 43 years, she made such a huge impact and left such a big legacy that we will never know how many people she touched and continues to touch.

When Rachael passed, our good friend Bob Cruickshank Jr. posted, “Heaven gained a beautiful angel, and earth lost a beautiful soul.” How true. While I am still brokenhearted that I don’t see my angel every day, I am comforted that she is with the Lord and not suffering anymore.

I love you, Rachael! Well done, good and faithful servant. ♰

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