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

by K.J. Ramsey

The Lord, our Good Shepherd, began his public ministry on the banks of the Jordan River not by preaching a stunning sermon or performing a great sign but by getting into the river and letting his cousin, John the Baptist, dunk his body in a baptism of repentance. Jesus—God incarnate, fully human and fully perfect—chose to begin his entire ministry with an act of repentance that one would assume he didn’t need. Everything Jesus lived and did, he did to fully embody our humanness as an offering of trust and gratitude to the Father.

Most of us struggle to rise into our lives with courage and hear that we are beloved because we’ve all been baptized in different water—the stream of scarcity. Most of us learn early in life to stay by scarcity’s stream of striving and strength, where the only way we are given the name Beloved is if we earn it every single day.

Courage is standing in the mud of our ordinary lives and turning toward Christ, who still hears the words we most strain to hear on our own, who stands ready to help us hear Beloved in every mundane and even miserable moment we ever will encounter.

Everything about your existence is a participation in God’s energy of joy. You are energy. Your emotions are energy. Your breath is energy. Your sight is energy. And though your energy is limited—as you acutely realize when picking up a running habit or caring for an infant—you were made by one whose energy and power are limitless.

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.

So many Christians believe sharing Christ looks like emulating the star that heralded his birth, rather than the lowliness of being born as an infant. We think the larger and brighter we make our lights, the more people will come and believe.

One of the most painful and important realities to grasp about the Christian life is that our belovedness doesn’t guarantee our ease. Christ’s baptism as beloved didn’t wrap his life into a swaddle of security, and ours doesn’t either. The brutality and barriers in life do not cancel out the truth that we are beloved. They are the wilderness through which we must walk to trust that truth as ours no matter what.

Following Christ means following him into every place he regarded worthy of his hands, heart, and time—all the way to the cross. Following Christ means following him into places of hunger and thirst, to tend to the lepers of our day on the edges of town, to receive water from women labeled too promiscuous to belong, to cast out demons from those deemed too disordered or dirty to sit in our pews. Following Christ means choosing to speak words that will get you questioned and maligned by religious folks. Following Jesus means walking the wilderness way, trusting along with him that God is among us and will quench our thirst.

Like the people of God throughout the ages, we trade worship for ease. We spend the sacred currency of our attention and adoration on the screens, pastors, and politicians who give us the fastest route to feeling blessed and great again. But where we succumb again and again to temptation, Christ was faithful to worship God alone. Jesus rejected Satan’s proposal to trade his sacred attention for a faster route to reigning over the world. With Christ, we must reject Satan’s temptation to circumvent waiting as part of worship, as the well where God will fill us and this world with the blessing of wholeness.

Every temptation is about reaching for the benefits of regulation without the risk of relationship.

There is no lasting regulation without the vulnerability of relationships. Because Jesus, the Good Shepherd, relied on the reality of his relationship with God when tempted, as part of his flock, we can risk receiving this as ours: 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 life.

Scarcity lives in the shadows of our stories like an unacknowledged narrator, always manipulating the plot of our lives to keep us proving our worth, striving to rid ourselves of a constant sense of shame, never quite feeling like we belong.

Often, our bodies are speaking what our minds are afraid to say, stories most of us have never had space to tell. The tales our bodies tell through our sensations reveal our deepest wounds, truths, and hopes. So as we consider the embodied storyline of scarcity, I want you to listen to the syllables of your senses.

Sometimes our mouths say, “The Lord is my shepherd,” while our bodies hear only a limerick of lack. Your daily experience of feeling seen by God and secure with God has more to do with your body’s sense of scarcity around safety than any confession of faith you’ve made or prayer you’ve prayed. You were wired for safety—built through attentive relationship—to be the foundation of a faith where you know you are always wanted.

When our internal surveillance system picks up on more cues of danger than safety, we sink into states of stress.

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.

Scarcity sinks us into physiological states of stress that can keep us stuck living out stories of self-protection and striving instead of kindness and joy. Maybe if we had more possessions, we’d feel like we belong. Maybe if we had more power, we’d feel safe. Maybe if we could prove our worth, we’d finally be loved. 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 truth is that scarcity is a story that lives in your body. And if you don’t reckon with scarcity, it will rule you.

OUR CAPACITY TO SAY “I lack nothing” is formed by the presence of the shepherds with whom we have belonged. It’s the shepherds in your life—people in roles of caregiving, leadership, and authority—whose presence has primed your nervous system toward tightfisted fear or openhanded joy. Your past experiences of safety and connection with others—or the lack thereof—have shaped your nervous system’s capacity for connection and calm.

Perhaps one of the most vulnerable & dangerous areas today a person with disabilities finds themselves is in the care of the Canadian healthcare system. With the rise of short staffing due to lack of hiring, unpreparedness & lack of education, along with a ableism driven culture of euthanasia; the loss of trusting one’s health security is increasing stress while impacting wholistic healing. The feeling of “lack” in the disabled community’s healthcare is greatly increasing & therefore changing the societal narrative towards fear & abandonment. In early history, the church filled this gap of care for the disabled, orphaned, & abandoned. But in the modern era have left such actions for a gnostic (knowledge based) moralism teaching while depending on institutional governance to provide healthcare needs. So, when the governing healthcare sector fails, how might the marginalized & disabled re-ignite the soul of the church to begin care for the vulnerably disabled again? When will the “shepherds” hear the call of the Spirit to step down from the pulpit & enter the home of the “unclean” once again?!

Love isn’t just a verb; it’s the songwriter setting down the physiological chords and chorus in your nervous system of your whole life’s song.

Somehow, we’ve decided shepherding means expecting sheep to be self-sufficient. Somehow, we’ve erased “seeking” from the job description and replaced it with more preaching. And when preaching is the main form of pastoring we’ve encountered, it’s no wonder that “preach to yourself ” is the main way we know how to relate to our pain. Like sheep stuck in thick brush, our bodies were not made to preach our own way out of emotional pain. It’s no wonder that when stress is shouting in bodies, we end up sinking in pits of shame.

“Trauma is not what happens to us,” doctor and addiction expert Gabor Maté writes, “but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”9 Our past experiences of our stress being ignored, shamed, or silenced can build us into people who expect to be alone with our pain. Like rooms without windows, we carry that dark anticipation within our bodies in our sensations and the meaning we reflexively ascribe to them through emotion. Your past shapes your present and projects your future. But your present experience can change the way you sense the past and hold hope for the future.

Courage isn’t the opposite of fear. Courage is the practice of risking to trust that we have a Good Shepherd who is with us always—no matter what. And the beautiful thing about a practice is you do not have to do it perfectly. You can begin right where you are. In your fear. In your overwhelm. In your stress. You can stumble and struggle while building trust that you are being strengthened. You will become what you build, day by day rearranging the energy of your life into a home where Love resides. Emotion is energy that can build your life into a home where you always belong. Your stress can become a place to practice being settled down by the Shepherd. Practicing courage through intentional rhythms, rituals, and relationships can renovate your life.

With repetition over months and years and a lifetime, habits of choosing connection, love, and joy can become nearly automatic. Courage is choosing the communion you were made for, trusting that your innate need to travel this circle will always lead you into more life.

Our Good Shepherd doesn’t make us lie down, grounding us for getting lost or stuck in the first place. He settles us down. He makes space for our stress to be settled and soothed through compassion in action. God meets us within our stress—even through the compassion we offer ourselves (self-regulation) and receive from others (co-regulation)—suffering with and alongside us to soothe us into safety at the pace our bodies most need.

Our anxiety about doing great things for God ends up keeping us from seeing that God is for us and with us. When our attention is occupied by looking at the Good Shepherd, we don’t have to spend it on guarding our turf, enlarging our territory, controlling others, or constantly protecting ourselves from harm.

Courage is practicing listening to Christ even from within the stress in your own body—especially when your body is telling you something is wrong. And then stepping toward the true Good Shepherd based on what you hear, even if that means confronting and leaving the shepherds and systems you’ve always been taught deserve your loyalty.

Other shepherds may have squashed our spiritual imagination into the flatness of feeling special to be in some shiny person’s orbit, but our real Good Shepherd doesn’t stand apart on stages. Our true Good Shepherd holds dirty feet in his God-hands and asks us to let him love us down to the dirt under our toenails. Faith comes in letting God lead us lower than we expect or wish to wash us where we most need. Faith is finding that God delights in loving every part of me. Unless we let God wash every part of us, we have no part with him. Unless we let Jesus be a servant, we cannot experience being his friend.

Both the waters of baptism and the water composing the majority of our bodies remind us that we exist and thrive only in relationship to someone and something beyond us. Baptism is the birthplace of a belonging we cannot earn and must not hoard.

In systems of scarcity, we learn to leave the most discouraged and doubting parts of ourselves outside our churches’ and friendships’ front doors. We aren’t sure the Good Shepherd actually wants to be with us because we’ve barely experienced Christians in roles of authority welcoming any of our weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Many of us in the American church barely know what it feels like to drink deep beside quiet waters, because we’re too busy trying to keep up with our shepherds’ and society’s search for success. We’ve looked for love from people who prefer standing on stages to bending at basins. We so often hustle hard to “build the kingdom,” when we’re really just striving for a belonging that was already bestowed on us.

While religious people build barriers to belonging—demanding certainty where there is mystery and compliance where Scripture isn’t black and white—baptism brings the bar for belonging remarkably low. Our belonging is less contingent on certainty of beliefs or conformity to religious norms than on being brought forward and blessed with water we couldn’t obtain ourselves. Baptism brings us low, to waters that remind us we belong because we were born and we are loved because we exist.

Like Christ in his own baptism, death, and resurrection, we the baptized become people who bend low, because we have seen the miracle that nothing qualifies us to be loved and that it is sinking that makes a person rise. Baptism bathes us in humility and hope that even that which tries to drown us is but a motion in the movement of resurrection and that every time we dip into the darkness, there will be a Voice saying, You are my Beloved.8 You are mine.

We do not have—nor are we able—to jump from trauma to trust or from fear to faith. Rather, we have a Shepherd who finds us in our fear, breathes us back from breathlessness, and brings us back home. Faith isn’t jumping over our feelings and sensations. Faith is being found where we are sinking and choosing to climb with Christ back home.

The human need for relationship & interdependence is the very work of salvation in our daily community. We cannot experience release from our deepest struggles in physical & emotional trauma through increasing our segregation & alone time. We must seek communion with others in open empathetic & vulnerable connection. This brings restoration & healing.

This guy’s walking down a street and he falls in a hole. The hole is so deep he can’t get out. A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, “Hey you! Can you help me out?” The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole, and moves on. Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, “Father, I’m down in this hole, can you help me out?” The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole, and moves on. Then a friend walks by: “Hey, Joe, it’s me. Can you help me out?” And the friend jumps in the hole. And our guy says, “Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here!” And the friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.”

Repentance isn’t something we reach for. Repentance is first a practice of descending with the Good Shepherd to seek and find the stressed, scared, and scorned parts of our souls. Repentance begins in being found by Christ on the bottom of the ladder, in our darkest states of dysregulation, and it is his friendship that regulates us to rise. Day after day, descending with Jesus, we will begin to anticipate being able to climb. Redemption is God’s great gathering up of every distressed, dismissed, and despairing part of you to bring you safely home. So don’t be afraid to go low. We rise from the bottom.

When our belief in our own health or goodness—or the goodness of the community of which we are a part—is endangered by the evidence of something contrary, the discomfort often leads us to dismiss the evidence,9 defend the behavior, or dismantle our self-concept by shaming ourselves. We have a neural bias to rationalize bad behavior to reduce discomfort,10 which serves like an anesthetic against the pain of seeing ourselves or our communities as having less health than we believed. But like any narcotic, dampening pain does nothing to treat the disease causing it. We also feel the discomfort of cognitive dissonance when we try to hold two opposing truths at the same time. Often, our beliefs about God stand in opposition to each other. How can God be just and kind? Our drive to eliminate the discomfort of dissonance is strong. We end up spending the energy of our faith dismissing evidence that seems contrary to God’s goodness or defending the goodness of the one who needs no defense. Dodging dissonance keeps us from the hard and necessary task of becoming both tall and strong. Instead of sheltering ourselves from the storms of dissonance, we need to practice welcoming their fierce truth.

Let yourself be startled out of the narcotic narrative of having to do good things for God to be loved by God. Let the wind sweep away the story that you have to put up with hurt to be part of a community. There is a whisper in the Wind telling you that you are already loved and valuable and worthy of belonging just as you are. Do not silence the storm of sensing the wrongness of all the shepherds and systems that try to tell you otherwise.

God speaks in the storm of the internal signals of our souls that tell us something is off, unjust, and dissonant. God guides us in our anger. God leads us in our anguish. And sometimes God shatters our comfortable certainties with a storm to shake us out of being silenced and small. God is too kind to keep us from growing tall.

God guides us along the right paths for the glory of God’s name—not the glory of the name of a pastor, church, politician, or powerful person—God’s glory.

There is no reconciliation without repentance. There is no peace without justice. Christian leaders might like the word reconciliation, but few tend to own the work that it involves. It is an abomination that reconciliation has become a weapon in the hands of leaders who would rather guard an institution’s power than their most vulnerable people.

The cyclone of our needs for love and belonging and safety—when unmet—can create an emptiness at the center of our relationships that grasps the energy of everyone else’s goodness and insecurity to fill the void inside. When we live in the enemy mode of the sympathetic nervous system state, we make the lives around us a silent storm. The cyclone of our unsoothed cries to be loved can end up becoming a hurricane of hustling and then hiding any evidence that we’re part of a system that leaves destruction in our wake.6

Courage is choosing to let your life match your worth. And to God, your worth is infinite. Belovedness is your birthright. Wholeness is the aim of a person who is practicing the willingness to let every part of their body, story, and life align with the truth of how beloved they are.

The integrity gap between what we preach and project and what we do in private is the place where most of this world’s harm happens. It is the place where wholeness lies decaying and entombed.

Incongruence becomes the currency of our belonging. The better we are at burying our pain behind positivity or productivity, the more it seems we’re allowed to belong. If we want to please our parents or pastors or others in power, we often learn to shut down the internal sounds of anything that might make them frown.

When we compassionately pay attention to the parts of others and ourselves that have been silenced and shamed, we internalize a story of integrity. We learn to live like our whole lives and whole selves are being sought by a Shepherd who is determined to see us thrive.

When what is happening inside us doesn’t match what’s showing on the outside, we don’t move into the story of redemption with our whole selves. When the means we use to gain the end of giving God glory don’t match the means Jesus modeled, we miss experiencing the wonder of being God’s Beloved. When we don’t notice and name that we are living our lives in states of stress, we miss out on experiencing the Shepherd being there to soothe and strengthen us.

Directing your eyes to take in the panorama in front of you can turn off the switch in your brainstem that is flooding your body with too much vigilance and alertness. By directing our vision back to a wider view, we help our bodies remember where we are and who we are.

Looking up allows us to look out into a world where there is still one who remains so faithful to us that we don’t have to attempt to make ourselves or our communities safe by silencing our hard stories and sensations.

Sight paired with intentional movement and attention speaks a better story to your whole body, to move you into a life where goodness still grows.

When stress rises and anger or grief seem to block your way to hope, look up. Obey the beauty that beckons you to rise. Let your faith have feet. Let your lungs expand with air. The sky tells a more spacious story than stress. And your feet can walk a prayer.

Most of us don’t know the way through our dark valleys because we’ve been discipled to believe we are supposed to rise above them. In Sunday school and sermons, we’re taught to want faith like a kite, truth that liberates and lifts us above the weary world. We’re discipled to tie up our painful emotions with string to the kite of Christ’s resurrection, as though the string could sail us on the wind over this world’s weaknesses, rising high into a cloudless sky, until our problems are out of sight. Faith is not a kite. It is a long walk on a dark night.