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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
K.J. Ramsey
Silence is the arbiter of scarcity, the force of coercion and control that those who hold the most power wield to maintain the status quo. If power can be held only in the hands of a few, then pleasing them is what buys us belonging. So we learn to fold our hands and cross our legs and put a smile across our faces to hide our hearts’ frown, all the while absorbing the bad, bad news that God is actually a power who must be pleased and love is just a reality we receive when we are good enough.
Giving pain a name and a voice is a giant act of courage in a subculture that privileges positivity.
When we feel silenced spiritually, cut off from the song of the saints and confused about why church hurts so much, our wordlessness, doubts, and darkness are treated like a lack of resurrection faith. But before Christ was raised, he was cold and silent in a grave for a whole day. The Word who spoke the world into being went to the wordless place of death. He sank into silence. Courage doesn’t begin on the bright day the Spirit raised Christ from the grave. Courage is in the shadows of Saturday, where the Word became wordless for your sake.
When people are not encountered, they are exploited. Our belonging in the body of Christ becomes bound to our utility. Our place among our people becomes contingent on being compliant. Our security requires taking scissors to any part of ourselves that doesn’t fit the church’s idea of what is true and good and right.
It is from the shattered and the silenced, we whose words have been forged in the fierce night of wordlessness, that the whole church can hear that the heart of our faith is not doing anything for God; it is being with God. We who have been used know the truth: if we are not cultivating reverence for every human we encounter, every part of this world we touch, and every moment we meet God, we will reduce all that is sacred to a resource to use.
I fear we have been discipled to rise above the places where God most wants to meet us. We need security we’ll never get from a gun store. We need truth we can’t buy at Target on a flowy-font sign from the dollar bins. We need a Savior who went to the depths of fear itself so that even our most painful emotions are places where we can partake in his life. You don’t need to fight your fears. You need a Friend who draws near.
We cannot equate faith with never feeling fear, for fear is knit into our body’s wiring to respond to threats. We can, however, increasingly experience the stress of those threats differently because we have someone standing with us in them. Christ’s empathy is our empowerment.
Whenever our ordinary emotions and physicality are demonized or dismissed, some form of gnosticism is at work. When my pursuit of God excludes kindness toward my ordinary body, gnosticism is there, gnawing at my goodness. When my pursuit of peace in God sidesteps seeking peace in my physicality, gnosticism is slicing me in two. When my worship of God does not include welcoming my neighbors or sitting with the suffering, I am succumbing to a gnostic form of spiritual autonomy. When ordinary shepherding and ordinary sacraments don’t seem relevant enough to build a church or reach the world,
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Prescribing a strategy of hypervigilance and violence toward our fear is never going to produce the fruit of security. Only presence can take us there.
Courage is practicing integrity, embracing that beautiful wholeness that refuses to slice apart body and soul, physical and spiritual, ordinary and extraordinary—the wholeness embodied in the person of Christ, who brought heaven and earth together. Courage is resisting the hurried pace of modern life and embracing the slower rhythm our bodies need to regulate and rise. Courage is refusing to dichotomize that which Christ has dignified.
It was as though sitting with the pit in my chest transformed it into a well, and once I saw it, I could trust I already had all I needed. I was finishing a book about our union with Christ in suffering, and by acknowledging that Christ was holding me together and filling me when it seemed like everything had fallen apart, I grew more resilient and radiant with joy. Every day, I watched as God drew up words and peace and energy from deep within my soul.
If we want to feel connected to God and more courageous in our calling, we have to practice unburdening our bodies by shifting our autonomic state back to a place where we are able to hear we are loved. We can’t cut fear out of our faith, but we can allow our sensation of fear to awaken us to the reality of the stress underneath it. In this way, fear can fuel faith. We can look up to Christ who always wants to climb down to us at our lowest to lift us up and carry us home.
God is not a gaslighter. Christ extends an example of acknowledging distress, not dismissing it. Before his death, he took time to acknowledge the distress his friends would feel. And then he identified himself as the source of their peace, saying, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
Courage is what happens when we’ve made a thousand small, hard choices requiring our attention and effort, risking embarrassment and even failure, to honor the vulnerable within our care, including the vulnerability within our own souls. Courage is what comes out of you when you’ve practiced standing up to the giants of shame, lions of lies, and bears of brokenness so repeatedly that it becomes second nature. The truth is, David’s courage wasn’t just his audacity to believe God would save him that day; it was every choice he made to become the kind of person who would risk believing it.
When the object of fear threatens what we love, courage is our practice and choice to honor that love.
Prayer is not constant positivity. It is honesty held in our hands and hurled at the sky.
Honesty about our hurt empowers us to hope in the God who stretches out a staff to comfort us. Courage is a continuous choice to be honest about the reality of harm while reaching for hope, even when it is inconvenient and even when it bristles against cultural and religious expectations that equate goodness with niceness.
Bearing witness to the truth of our wounds welcomes us to see the larger truth that the Wounded One is with us. Just as Christ walked outside the gates of Jerusalem’s power to his cross, Jesus is always walking outside the places of expected power to meet us in the paradoxes of our pain. He pulls us into redemption right where life seems to be ripping us apart.
Grief does not cancel out goodness. Hurt does not silence all hope. Our wounds bring us to the intersection of grace, where hurt and hope are held in the scarred and tender hands of Christ. Jesus holds the paradoxes of your past, present, and future in indivisible love. Every paradox in your life is an invitation to be held, for it is in sensing Christ’s scars that we learn to rise with ours. Held in the center of his encompassing grace, you are being made capable of beholding the center of everything.
The dissonance that a metaphor creates in our minds stimulates our attention, asking us to draw near in order to follow the author or speaker. It’s only in being pulled into a sentence or paragraph that we become participants in the story being told.
Courage hinges on our willingness to shift—right here and now, in our ordinary, fractured lives—from being observers or gatekeepers of God’s story to active participants in it. Grace is seeking you, but will you let all the parts of yourself be found?
Parts are formed, often early in our lives, that respond to being inundated and overwhelmed by too many cues of danger. Our bodies are always seeking safety and survival, and we develop parts and often live bound to their roles, because we are doing our best to survive. When we seek out the pain that broke us into pieces, we can move into our lives more wholeness than before.
We treat the wounded, vulnerable parts of ourselves like enemies to vanquish. We’re often more comfortable being at odds with parts of ourselves than being friends with them. We end up exiling parts of ourselves far away from the table of our souls. Noticing and naming our parts and how they are attempting to keep us safe can help us find our way back to the table—where every part of us can feast in peace.
The shepherd continues to call, and when the sheep hears his voice, it will use up the last remaining bit of its energy to bleat again. It is the faint bleating of the sheep that allows the shepherd to locate it and bring it home. Remember, repentance both in Psalm 23 (shuv) and Luke 15 (metanoia) means to be brought back.8 Even your cries are part of repentance.9 Your fear, shame, and anger are cries of your soul asking to be sought. Repentance is not reprimanding yourself for getting lost; it is turning toward yourself as someone who is always worthy of being found.
Sometimes it seems that Christians like to put lipstick on lies instead of fighting to remove their stain from our souls and communities. It is easier to dismiss pain than deal with changing the circumstances that produce it.2 We forget that noticing and naming enmity is a prerequisite to knowing whom and what to love and protect. Neutrality is the nicest kind of evil. Not taking a side is taking a side. Neutrality shows victims that their health is worth less to you than avoiding awkwardness or not having to make relational changes. Neutrality tears open the wound of trust over and over
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Evil will always try to convince us to live numb and nameless. Evil will always curse us as too small, too young or too old, too wounded, or too unwanted.
This is what I know: the betrayal of another cannot take your belovedness away. Darkness cannot steal your inheritance. Evil cannot revoke your anointing. The kingdom of God is here. This is still your Father’s world. Beautiful and brutal things will happen to you and those you love. But do not be afraid. God never leaves us without a witness or a name.
It takes courage to practice believing yourself when others might meet you with suspicion. No one can give you the depth of belief and respect you desire, but you can give yourself the dignity of holding your story as something so sacred it deserves to be shared with care. The only way for us to learn how to do this was to try.
We hold an abundance that announces itself like ripe fruit. We are cups that can be continually filled with Christ’s courage. So filled, we will spill. Even our sorrow will stream into compassion. Even our sadness will become a container from which others can drink care. When we are bumped, it will be love that flows down the edges of our cups. Kindness will drip from our fingers like the plum juice in my hand. Gentleness will leave a residue of resilience on everything we touch. Empathy will be the water that turns to wine. Tears will tell the truth that in us, Love resides.
Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects that which is loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love. —Valarie Kaur
Having the courage to flee into the wilderness to escape abusive or controlling relationships and systems does not only involve leaving. It also means rooting ourselves in the story of how God sees us, while uprooting every weed of self-contempt and shame others might try to sow as we grow and go.
Courage is not something we can cultivate on our own. It is something we hold in common, a gift we confer on each other. It is the communion we offer with our faces, in safe spaces, with words that break the bondage of yesterday’s shame and harm, rooting us in the reality that Beloved is who we are. With words aptly spoken, we break the bonds of evil that try to keep us stuck in our shells and burst forth in the boldness of belonging—bound up in the care of the living God.
Christ restores our capacity to witness and welcome the life of God in the world, and the world wants to sing us into sensing that God’s goodness and love are restoring us to life.
This world is not a distraction that keeps us from God. It is the wonder that will delight us into the worship of God.
In all our rushing and running, we forget who we are. Most of us need to discover that we will not begin to live more wholly until we practice the courage to do less and prove less. When we have spent our whole lives hounded by Satan’s temptations to have more, hurt less, and rule faster, nothing is more difficult nor more necessary than to relinquish our reaching and just be still. Sometimes rest is the most courageous work of all. We often must be still in order to realize we are vessels God will always fill.
Jesus’ broken body still speaks through groans and scars that it is among the broken that God’s blessing resides. God chases us down with this blessing—whether in the doors of a church, on the couch of a therapist, or in the silent sobs we share alone or with friends—baptizing us into belovedness everywhere we go. He’s on our side. He loves us. He’s relentless—all the days of our lives.
Studies have shown that contemplative prayer like breath prayer can help us manage stress, perceive our stressors differently, and increase our spiritual awareness.23 Research has shown that, breath by breath, contemplative prayer builds a life with less worry, depression, anxiety, and stress.24 Breathing in and out, we learn the regulating rhythm of rising out of our self-protection and self-contempt. Research has even shown our capacity to cope with conflict improves as we practice breath prayer.
Breath prayer brings us back to the wordless place where we first learned to trust we could make our way in the world. Whether we pair our breath with simple words like the shortened version of the Jesus Prayer I use throughout the day, it is our breath that can bridge us back to remembrance of the God who is with us.
Your body isn’t a barrier to courage. It is the very place you can most hear God’s voice, because you are where God’s love resides.
Jesus is the promised descendant of David, and in his incarnation, our union with God was accomplished.1 When the moment comes that we think we must do something for God to honor or even protect God, we must sit like David in the strange mystery that God has already secured a home within us. It’s from the seated place that we can best see: God is already within me. There is nothing we can do and nowhere we can go where God’s love will be removed from us. Like David, this is how God gives us courage and becomes our courage.
Courage is not something we have to muster up or manufacture for God. Courage is choosing to commune with someone who has already chosen to be with us.
Courage is a communion in which the God who blessed, broke, and gave more than enough food for his scattered sheep will always keep doing a miracle in our midst among the people and in the places the powerful usually reject.
So much of the Christian life is realizing that God has been so generous with us that we truly can be generous with each other. You have been made one with God in Christ. There is a presence within us that we are only beginning to sense and share.
