The Lord Is My Courage: Stepping Through the Shadows of Fear Toward the Voice of Love

by K.J. Ramsey

Whether they meant to or not, shepherds cursed me and my family. And in the breaking, I came to see: There is a Good Shepherd who is always with me.

Courage is choosing to spend the rest of your life listening for and receiving these words as true: You are my Beloved. With you I am well pleased.

We have nothing to possess, for we already belong with and to God. We have nothing to protect, for we are already in Christ’s protection. We have nothing to prove, for he already proved we are worth the cost of his

If you want to experience that story as truer than anything scarcity says, it’s time to befriend your body, starting with getting to know your nervous system.

Cues of danger are signals of misattunement, apathy, judgment, or threat from others, as well as perceived hazards in your environment—like seeing a snake slither across the sidewalk ahead of you or cars slamming on their brakes in front of you. (Or seeing a doctor throw up his hands in resignation or not make eye contact with you.) Cues of safety are signals of kindness, resonance, or peacefulness from others as well as your environment—like the smile of a passerby, the sound of a babbling brook, or the smell of dinner coming from the kitchen.

You get stressed and afraid not because you are bad at remembering Romans 8:28 or don’t have enough faith over fear but because your body does not feel adequately safe. It is the neuroception of a scarcity of safety that keeps us sinking into states of stress to self-protect. All our “negative” emotions are really about a perceived lack of safety.

This is because, as Deb Dana says, “Story follows state.”9 The story you tell yourself about God, yourself, your life, and your relationships is always forming from the way your body is shifting between stressed and social autonomic states.

You can’t will your way out of the wounds of scarcity that speak into your story every day. You can’t preach your way to the peace you need. Scarcity will keep being a scary, self-fulfilling prophecy that can never be satisfied by reaching for possessions, power, and perfect faith—until we acknowledge its presence in our physiology, reach for its roots, and tend to its shoots.

The resurrection happened in a human body. It doesn’t cancel our humanness; it compels us to go with Christ into the depths of disconnection and death in our bodies, trusting the Spirit will always help us rise.