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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
K.J. Ramsey
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May 13 - May 23, 2025
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.
What we call unruly and disruptive is often just a plant looking to be healthy, needing a bigger pot.
It takes outrageous courage to face outrageous loss. This is precisely what we are being called to do. Any loss, whether deeply personal or one of those that swirl around us in the wider world, calls us to full-heartedness, for that is the meaning of courage. —Francis Weller
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.
In a world where we are told from almost the moment we can walk to be big girls and boys and stop crying when we fall, we learn to speak the language of emotional dishonesty to be accepted and belong. With chiding words and a lack of responsiveness from our caregivers, we learn to silence the sounds of our distress. And often without ever knowing it is happening, we internalize a script of success by shaming—complete with lines and blocking—that tells our bodies we have to shove all of our sadness, fear, and anger offstage if we’re going to be protagonists in this story at all.
Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann underscores the danger of loyalty: “Our belonging, our loyalty to anything in ‘this world’—be it state, nation, family, culture, or any other ‘value’—is valid only inasmuch as it does not contradict or mutilate our primary loyalty and ‘syntaxes’ to the Kingdom of Christ. In the light of that Kingdom no other loyalty is absolute, none can claim our unconditional obedience, none is the ‘lord’ of our life.”2
When church crushes you, Christians expect you to call it human error. When you try to lament your pain, Christians want caveats. It’s like we’re allergic to honesty, so anxious to keep our precious institutions powerful that we can’t stomach hearing the truth that sometimes religion ruptures our society and souls.
Saying “the church doesn’t hurt people; people do” is false comfort that keeps us all from facing our complicity in allowing and enabling the body of Christ to be a body that punches, crushes, and kills.
The eyes tell the body how vigilant or vulnerable we should allow ourselves to be. Your sight can speak the kindest sermon, reminding your whole body that even though other shepherds and storms have shaken your sense of safety, in the presence of your Good Shepherd you are now safe and held. 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.
“God’s absence is always a call to His presence,” poet Christian Wiman observes. “Abundance and destitution are two facets of the one face of God, and to be spiritually alive in the fullest sense is to recall one when standing squarely in the midst of the other.”
The way to the water the sheep most need is through the dangerous, dark valley. Psalm 23 shows us that our dark nights of the soul are not punishments or problems but places to walk closely with the Shepherd while all other comforts fall away. Here we are shown the daring path named Through. The only way to a life without lack is through the darkest valley.
Romans 8:28 isn’t a pill to pop like aspirin to make the headache of your hurt pass in thirty minutes or less. Like too much sugar destroys kids’ teeth, a faith of spiritual bypassing rots our souls.
We cannot heal what we will not feel. Remember, the only way back home to the top of the autonomic ladder is by climbing each rung. We might want to jump from distress or doubt to delight in God, but unless we tend to our emotions and sensations, we’ll just be pretending at praise. We cannot grow if we will not go—through the dark valley—with Jesus, walking the same well-trod path he walked before us, that thousands upon thousands of saints before us have walked as well.
When we cry from the crosses where we were crushed or betrayed, we’re often treated with extreme awkwardness or even flat-out spiritualized shaming, as though Christ’s resurrection means that nothing hurts now. 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
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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.
Fear is like a carbon monoxide detector ringing in the house of your body. It’s one of your body’s ways of telling you it is picking up on excessive levels of danger and not enough safety. Feigning that fear isn’t happening or only telling yourself, Don’t fear! Just trust God! is like turning off your carbon-monoxide detector and throwing it in the dumpster. It’s not exactly the smartest way to stay alive.
Jesus kneeled on the ground of that garden, allowing himself to feel the utter depths of fear itself—anxiety so severe it made his sweat ducts bleed—so that there can be no depth of darkness we experience that is outside the reach of his empathy. Can you stomach a Savior who felt fear and stress so intensely he sweat drops of blood? Do your theology and anthropology include an incarnate God who felt anxiety so intense it ruptured his blood vessels?
In the presence of Christ, the symptoms and scars of our stress dignify us rather than disqualify us. The only prerequisite to receiving Christ’s presence of love is being a person who needs it.
The protest of my body in the months before had made me adamant about one thing: I would not write unless I knew God went with me. I was unwilling to write good news for others unless I could keep receiving it as good news for me first. I knew the only way I could make it through the marathon of each day, the only way I could emerge with both an intact manuscript and an intact psyche—while wading through problems that couldn’t get solved quickly—was to anchor myself in a peace that passed all possible understanding.
I started by reading a prayer by Peter Traben Haas, one I still pray almost every day: “Living Life and Sustaining Love, help me feel your attracting grace in the universe, which keeps everything from coming apart. May the Word of Christ hold me together with wisdom and love. I give thanks for your Word and consent to being held by it, so as to remain at center with you.”
Held. Held. Held. That sacred word was, and still is, my anchor, returning my whole self to a story where I can remain grounded with God because God has made a home in me.
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams gives language to what was happening in me. “Christians pray because they have to, because the Spirit is surging up inside them.”3 Further, he writes that the life of being baptized as beloved “is characterized by a prayerfulness that courageously keeps going, even when things are difficult and unpromising and unrewarding, simply because you cannot stop the urge to pray. Something keeps coming alive in you; never mind the results.”4
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.
Porges teaches that lowering auditory stimulation helps the nervous system develop trust. When it comes to developing trust, less is more. Less noise. Fewer words. Less effort. As Porges has said, “ ‘Less’ enables the nervous system to catch up.”7
Fear is just courage’s preamble. When we practice remembering that the Spirit of Christ is our companion, fear simply becomes one more prompt to pay attention to the voice and presence of Love. Fear doesn’t have to be an enemy to conquer. It can be a place to be companioned by Love.
This God continues to speak the words that false shepherds of scarcity would most like to stop, because if we know God is with us, we won’t need a powerful person or institution’s approval to feel secure. People who befriend their fear cannot be so easily manipulated and controlled.
Theologian N. T. Wright has written that virtue is what happens when courageous choices have been practiced so repeatedly they become our instinct.
Courage is the practice of wanting to protect what is good and true and beautiful more than we want to avoid being wounded. Courage is not the absence of anxiety but the practice of trusting that we will be held and loved no matter what happens.
Prayer is not constant positivity. It is honesty held in our hands and hurled at the sky. Strangely, honesty about our hopelessness is what revives our hope.
When hurt and hope are pit against each other, evil holds the reins, yanking us right and then left, as though hustling to have more, be more, and do more will finally bring us home to less hurt and more belonging.
I often remind my clients that two things can be true at the same time. 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.
PARADOX IS THE ONLY TABLE LARGE ENOUGH TO HOLD TRUTH.
The lack of specificity in Jesus’ description of the coin begs us to notice our own lostness. Whether we have been crushed by control or are the ones doing the crushing, Jesus is saying: You are lost. You are valuable. You are worth being found.
God is like the shepherd, and God is like the woman. God leaves behind the ninety-nine pretty and perfect-seeming parts of you to find and restore the one part of you that feels too broken and lost. There is no part of you that the Good Shepherd will not seek and follow to extend goodness and love.
God rejoices over recovering the most weak and wounded parts of you more than anything else about you. God is preparing a table to celebrate your return, where every part of you has a spot, every story has space to be told, and every guest has more food than they could possibly eat. Count on it. God is determined to never leave the most broken and hurting parts of you behind.
God speaks peace over every part of you that clashes and clings for control. Your greatest joy, deepest belonging, and eternal safety no longer need to be safeguarded by striving or shutting down. Your worth is welded to Christ’s finished work on the cross.
Repentance is not reprimanding yourself for getting lost; it is turning toward yourself as someone who is always worthy of being found.
The only wonder greater than your worth is that you have been hidden with Christ in God.12 Your truest self is seated with Christ at the head of the table of your soul. You have been united to Christ.13 Your truest, wisest self—your ventral vagal self, who can access all the courageous, regulating strengths of your social engagement system and prefrontal cortex—is presently united to Christ and seated with him at the right hand of the Father, ready to search for and rescue every lost part of your soul. Your Shepherd stands with love in his hands, and he wants to bring your whole self home.
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 again.
Jim Wilder asserts that we can learn to trust and extend lovingkindness, the hesed love of God, only in groups that practice love with us.
Cognitive neuroscientist Thomas Fuchs writes that as we reenact the Lord’s Supper together, the church’s collective body memory of receiving Christ’s presence renews our participation in Christ’s life.
We need rituals to remember our true name, to hear past our shame, to, like David, relish the memory and scent of anointing oil on our skin in a way that strengthens us to stand stronger than all pain.
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.
Your anointing is a gift given not for what you have done but out of God’s love. Divine love ensures who you will become.
Spiritual abuse and religious trauma, or what many give the politely dismissive name “church hurt,” is often judged as cynicism. Often without ill intent, pastors make themselves into judge and jury instead of shepherd and surgeon, separating themselves from the anxious possibility that you might be a source of criticism to them in the near future too. The sharing of a painful story should always be a moment to suture and soothe rather than size up or sermonize.
I’ve seen folks on Instagram call the start of a new week the Sunday Scaries. We can feel the hurried hands of Monday reaching for us with each passing hour of the weekend, pulling us back into hustling to have what we need. Wouldn’t it be beautiful to resist that narrative with a liturgy of abundance, to give ourselves room to remember there are Hands that will hold us all week?
The cup is then filled with wine as a symbol of sanctifying joy. Rabbi Julian Sinclair teaches that “there is a common custom to fill the havdalah cup with wine all the way to the brim . . . so that a little spills and overflows when you pick up the cup. The symbolism of the custom is that we wish for a week with an overflowing abundance of blessing.”
Later, after they had feasted, Jesus turned to face his coming doom. He walked to the garden of Gethsemane, where his grief grew like a womb. He cried aloud to the star-flung sky. Take this cup from me. I don’t want to die. God incarnate howled in fear, yet he held the cup and let the Spirit steer. He swallowed death whole and drank every last drop of sin and shame and abuse. Full stop. The cup he swallowed is what has brought us near. For that is the riddle, the paradox, and the art of God’s kingdom coming true—drinking the cup of grief is what makes us new.
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.
