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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
K.J. Ramsey
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May 13 - May 23, 2025
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.
Jim Wilder describes hesed as attachment love.4 Like God’s tov rising out of chaos, hesed is given throughout Scripture in the context of human weakness and need—the chaos we carry from the fall of sin.
Scarcity sings a siren song. It is always alarming our attention, turning us in on ourselves to self-protect and other-reject. Sin is the siren stance of scarcity, bent in on ourselves with our hands over our ears or rushing past others as though our lives are the emergency and no one else’s matters.
The striated shades of the rising and setting sun speak through our eyes to tell our bodies how to live well. As Andrew Huberman has found, taking just ten to fifteen minutes to view a sunrise or sunset teaches your body—on a cellular level—to tell the time in order to thrive.
Your whole life is not about finding God. It is about being found.
“To confess,” poet David Whyte writes, “is to declare oneself ready for a more courageous road, one in which a previously defended identity might not only be shorn away, but be seen to be irrelevant, a distraction, a working delusion that kept us busy over the years and held us unaccountable to the real question.”
Week by week, chapter by chapter, I have come to see that resting is not quitting. It’s remembering and rooting ourselves in the story where we do not have to strive to be sought. Every time I put my work away for at least a whole day, I am learning to trust in the tender compassion of a God who doesn’t bless based on effort or withhold based on weariness. It’s common courage—the courage of communion.
Radaph. The Shepherd is hounding us, hunting us, harassing us with kindness, grace, and love. No matter what we do or don’t do, God pursues us. In rituals and rest, we can live from a place of realizing we are already being followed by the love we thought we had to earn.
AT EUGENE PETERSON’S FUNERAL, his son Leif shared in a poem that even though his dad wrote dozens of books, he truly just had one message his whole life, words Eugene would whisper over him as he slept safe in bed at night: “God loves you. God is on your side. God is coming after you. He’s relentless.”
Episcopal priest, author, and chef Robert Farrar Capon says, “The real secret of fasting is not that it is a simple way to keep one’s weight down, but that it is a mysterious way of lifting creation into the Supper of the Lamb. It is . . . a major entrance into the fasting, the agony, the passion by which the Incarnate Word restores all things to the goodness God finds in them.”4 He goes on to say that one way or another God will give us back feasts for all that we have fasted.
Breath is our entrance into story-making—it is a promise. It is a constant ritual we all share.”2 Our first breaths are the moment we receive the birthright of the rhythm of regulation as ours.
What God said to Ezekiel, I say to you. God will bend down to your dead bones and breathe you back to life.11 To all that has been slain in you, let there come Breath. To all that has been dried out by the darkness of what seems bright, let there be life.
The ritual of breath can be your rhythm of resilience. Like Thomas Merton once prayed, “My God, I pray better to you by breathing. I pray better to you by walking than talking.”
Studies have shown that contemplative prayer like breath prayer can help us manage stress, perceive our stressors differently, and increase our spiritual awareness.
How often do we dream up dazzling things to do for God, when God is wanting to do something within us?
The most regulating thing for our nervous systems at any point of any day is co-regulation. Experiencing the presence of someone else with us who is kind emboldens us to face our fears with trust. This is what we have in Christ. There is never a moment that God is not in us and with us, carrying our fears and hopes into a future kingdom of love.
Just as Psalm 23 and the passage in Mark are ring compositions, courage is a circle of communion. It is a place we return to, season after season, and a practice we choose again and again. And fed with our daily bread, the circle grows in meaning, scope, and strength.
In the presence of the Giving God, we can’t help but give. Grief where there was greed. Dignity where there was doubt. The small offering of empathy, time, resources, and kindness that we have. The kingdom of God is too present to keep self-protecting. The miracle is too good to stay tightfisted. The feast is too fantastic to withhold.
