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

by K.J. Ramsey

Later, she encountered the writing of Brennan Manning and saw her own rugged faith reflected in his words, learning a different translation of the phrase “I shall not want” as “I lack nothing.” The difference pierced her with possibility. Brandi says, “This subtle difference is night and day to a self-punishing person.”2

We were made because of the overflowing energy of Divine Love in the Trinity. We were made not because God needed us but because God wanted us. Invisible Love wants your company and delights in the fact that you exist.

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. We shine so brightly it hurts our eyes.

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.

Whether you have been made vulnerable by disease, discrimination, or hard things you aren’t even ready to call trauma or abuse yet, your experience of lacking protection places you in the center of Christ’s story. You are not on the outside here. In Christ’s Spirit-driven walk into the wilderness, our experience of defenselessness can become part of the story of courage overcoming the world.

Satan’s three temptations of Christ are ours too, taunting us to turn away from the pain and possibility of relationality: Have more. Hurt less. Rule faster. These are the temptations of every shepherd and every soul.

Evil is always tempting us to reach for a faster way to bypass the potential pain of feeling rejected. But relationality is the foundation of what it means to be both a sheep in God’s fold and a shepherd of others in God’s care.

With each temptation, Jesus didn’t respond with the anxiety of needing to prove who he already was—beloved by the Father. Instead, he resisted Satan by placing himself inside the slow story of God’s covenant love toward Israel. W...

In the wilderness, God humbles us by reminding us of our need for nourishment. And then God feeds us personally. Placed in the story of God’s people along with Christ, our hunger can become a prompt to see God provide in strange and stunning ways with bread we could never bake ourselves.

We forget that the places touched by death are the places Christ chose to go. We forget that Jesus said that whoever wants to be his disciple must deny themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow him.10 The answer to our question is that Christ has already chosen to go to the places where we feel abandoned, angry, and afraid.

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.

The joy and well-being we long for are found only in relationships that shift our nervous systems toward connection—a process called regulation. Every temptation is about reaching for the benefits of regulation without the risk of relationship.

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.

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.

Psychiatrist Curt Thompson says that we’re all born “looking for someone looking for us.”1 From the moment we can open our tiny eyes, we are looking for eyes looking back at us with love.

Our search for significance and safety is innate and sacred. Even God felt the need for this gaze. The God of the universe chose to be born into this world as an infant just like you and like me. The one whose death and resurrection save us first was a baby who looked up at his mother in total dependence, looking for love, needing to see that he was safe and that she was responsive.

Life in a broken world leaves us singing a song of scarcity. I have never encountered a pair of eyes that have been met with as much love as they needed. I have never met a person whose nervous system hasn’t been shaped by some scarcity of connection. None of us receives all the love we need. And we carry that lack of love as distress in our nervous systems. Lack of co-regulation early in life forms neural pathways that sink into stress and shutdown easily and often.

For many of us, our vagal pathways have been paved into paths of condemnation by a scarcity of co-regulating love. In times we’ve been mired by stress, instead of being shepherded, we’ve been scolded and shamed. Instead of support, we’re given a sermon. In many Christian churches, families, and friendships, it’s as though we believe the resurrection of Jesus Christ means we should just be able to look at the cross and instantaneously rise out of any stress, discouragement, or depression. We’ve cut both our physiology and relationality out of participating in Christ’s love.

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.

You were never meant to crawl your way out of the pit of stress and shame alone. We were created to walk the path of regulation together to guide our bodies back home from stress and shutdown to feeling safe and social again.

We experience lack. It’s a fact of life. It’s how we respond to our lack—ours and each other’s—that leads us into lives where we’ll be able to say with authenticity: In Christ, I lack nothing.

I was being led through one of the darkest valleys of my life, facing more suffering than I imagined I could endure. I thought I was waiting to be rescued. God was waiting for me to see that he was already with me. Hearing my cries. Moved by my pain. Ready to meet me with mercy for the season ahead.

“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.

The circular literary structure of Psalm 23 reinforces the reality that we must return again and again to the same rocky ground where our trust in the Shepherd was first forged. Psalm 23 gently corrects our one-and-done expectations for faith, showing us that the practice of presence is the only way the provision expressed in Psalm 23 becomes our felt reality.

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.

Neurotheologian Jim Wilder describes this dynamic as living in “enemy mode,” which is simply another way to describe what our bodies experience and enact to survive when we are stuck in states of stress.6 Naming the reality of enemy mode in our bodies can help us see and shift out of living like we must shove or be shoved around.

When we go into simple enemy mode, our social engagement system (or as Wilder calls it, our relational circuits) is shut down. We want to flee from people and our problems. We struggle to listen, become argumentative, and quick to criticize and judge.

There is no imperfection in you that can keep you from being included in Christ’s flock. There is no brokenness in your story that can revoke your belonging. There is no bruise on your body that is not seen by our Shepherd. Because he chose to be rejected, you always belong. No one can steal your belovedness as a sheep bought by Christ’s own blood. No fear can take away your place. No one can shove you out of the Good Shepherd’s sight. Only in the light of his face can you see the grace of your place. This green ground is where you already belong.

It seems a perennial part of being human is simultaneously feeling like too much and not enough.

The more I stopped shaming myself for being different, the more I experienced my sensitivity as a special kind of sight. I could pick up on subtle shifts in others’ emotions. I could make connections between conversations and the systems that shaped them. I realized there is a spring of empathy inside me that can quench others’ thirst—if I am willing to treat it as a well instead of a pit.

The Shepherd leads those who listen, and if we are not listening carefully to the inner world of our sensations and emotions, we will be vulnerable to being led to the slaughter by both religious and political false shepherds whose aim is their own utility and adoration rather than our common good.

We just got home today from a vacation where we walked miles upon miles, and I just sank into the couch to put up my tired feet. Right now, I can almost feel my feet arching in remembrance of what it feels like to be held in a story where I am one for whom God bends down to the ground.

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.

If sheep are thirsty and are not led to clean, still water, they will “end up drinking from the polluted pot holes where they pick up such internal parasites as nematodes, liver flukes, or other disease germs.”7 Like sheep, our spiritual and emotional thirst for love and safety leads us to drink from water from wherever we can get it.

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.

Your anxiety and anger, fear and frustrations, and doubt and despair are signals to look to your Shepherd to quench your thirst. We don’t have to drown our distress in spiritualized shame. Transformation into a person who experiences the Shepherd as near and kind happens by practicing a different posture toward the darkest parts of your self and story. Every anxious thought arises from a physiological need for safety. Every sorrow is a spot to be soothed.

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.

The top of the autonomic ladder roughly corresponds with the top of your body, where you are able to access the parts of you that make you most feel like yourself. When you are at the top of your autonomic ladder, you are able to access the regulating powers of your prefrontal cortex and are able to connect with yourself, others, and God through the capacity of your social engagement system.14 This nervous system state is called the ventral vagal state, and with my clients and myself, I like to call this place home.

The Shepherd doesn’t expect you to suddenly not be a sheep. The Shepherd isn’t asking you to pole-vault over your painful feelings so you can praise him faster. The same Shepherd who knit you together in your mother’s womb and breathed the first human into being knows what your body needs to rise.

When we relinquish a dualistic reading of Psalm 23:3, we begin to realize that the psalmist intuited what neuroscientists and therapists have been finding millennia later. 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.

When we descend to the dark regions of fear and despair in our nervous systems, we are descending to a place Christ has already gone. He comes all the way down to the bottom with us because he has already been down there and he knows how to rise.

My experience is that when it comes to our souls, we often don’t realize we are on the wrong path. We too often live anesthetized to the inner anguish that is trying to tell us we are stuck in states and systems of stress.

Perceived scarcity serves like the rungs of a different ladder where we have to keep climbing over others to get to the top. We attempt to self-regulate by striving and subjugating anyone and anything that gets in our way on the path to the top.

This is how evil gets us. Our sense of scarcity is spoken to and enlisted in the battle for a better life. Our discouragement gets deployed in the service of evil’s schemes to keep humanity defeated. Our longings and loves get exploited in an army that annexes someone else’s power and prestige. We keep believing that supporting this pastor or that politician or buying another product will finally give us the life of freedom and joy they all promised, but it never happens.