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by
K.J. Ramsey
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October 12 - October 30, 2022
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.
People say we’re tearing down the church. I think we’re tearing down the stages.
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.
Have more. Hurt less. Rule faster. These are the temptations of every shepherd and every soul.
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. When tempted, the Good Shepherd chose relationship every time.
Habits of the household
Every temptation is about reaching for the benefits of regulation without the risk of relationship.
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.
Often, our bodies are speaking what our minds are afraid to say, stories most of us have never had space to tell.
Cues of danger are signals of misattunement, apathy, judgment, or threat from others, as well as perceived hazards in your environment—
Cues of safety are signals of kindness, resonance, or peacefulness from others as well as your environment—
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.
When we are in states of stress, our nervous systems become disintegrated and disconnected, unable to activate the grounding resources of the parts of the brain that help you feel like you, the social engagement system and prefrontal cortex. This experience is called dysregulation.
This is called co-regulation, and it lays the foundation for a lifetime of being able to regulate with resilience. Regulation is the process of returning our bodies to a state of connection and calm.2 We first absorb the rhythm of regulation wrapped in our parents’ arms, found and fed and held no matter how many times we cry. 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.
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.
I thought I was waiting to be rescued. God was waiting for me to see that he was already with me.
Many people think our emotions are our reactions to the world around us. But emotions are more like constantly renovated edifices, built by our brains from the construction site of context. As neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett writes, “An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world.”8
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.
She saw the one part of myself it had seemed that everyone—including myself—had labeled as too broken. And she blessed it instead.
Two things bring us back home from the bottom of stress: breath and the attuned, compassionate presence of someone else.
White Reformed folks aren’t exactly comfortable moving the bodies God gave them. That’s all I’m saying.
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.
When popular Christian teachers call things like empathy “an enticing sin,” we learn to approach our emotions like enemies to conquer.4 Dismissing empathy sure is a convenient cover for never having to be affected by another’s person’s pain enough to change.
Joe Rigney on Desiring God
Being in a system where Scripture and Christian-sounding narratives have been used to justify maintaining a relational atmosphere of dominance, performance, and control is trust shattering. We knew we needed to leave, but spirituality was used against us to demean our maturity and discernment.
Now free from the heavy weight of pretending everything was fine, every tap of my finger against the unfollow button was like a prayer, a resetting of the boundaries around my life as a place where the truth of my experience deserves to be believed.
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.
Faith without feet that follow Jesus’ steps into the dark valleys of suffering is no faith at all. It’s spiritual bypassing, a term coined in the 1980s by a psychologist named John Welwood. Welwood defined spiritual bypassing as our “tendency to try to avoid or prematurely transcend basic human needs, feelings, and developmental tasks.”6
Giving pain a name and a voice is a giant act of courage in a subculture that privileges positivity. I can’t tell you how many clients I have seen who struggle to name how people they love hurt them, especially parents or others in authority. Naming harm can feel like a betrayal of love. And when the source of our pain is someone who stands as a symbol of our Good Shepherd, naming hurt and harm can feel like a threat to our connection to God.
Pastor David Johnson and counselor Jeff VanVonderen define spiritual abuse as “the mistreatment of a person who is in need of help, support or greater spiritual empowerment, with the result of weakening, undermining or decreasing that person’s spiritual empowerment.”
We cannot be people of the resurrection when we’re silencing anyone who says, “Your behavior is bullying me to death.”
The power of the phrase “do not fear” is found in participating in the story where the presence of God goes with and before us everywhere we go, all the days of our lives.
I cannot help but wonder if a reason this phrase features so prominently in Scripture is that God knows that we will feel fear until the day we die. Fear is a facet of being human. Fear emerges from a physiological state of stress that God made to protect you from danger and bring you to safety. At its core, fear is not a lack of faith. It is a lack of perceived safety.
Your tight shoulders, pounding heartbeats, and even your panic attacks are all prompts to treat yourself like someone who is truly worthy of safety, love, and belonging. Fear is a physiological prompt to seek safety in the presence of Christ and remember your place in his heart.
I didn’t know it then, but deep sadness, despair, and feeling entirely stuck are often symptoms of sinking into a dorsal vagal nervous system state of shutdown because the flood of fear has simply become too exhausting for our bodies.
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. I will not allow myself to be less human than Christ. I will not cut myself off from receiving empathy in the very place Christ stands ready to meet me.
Trauma is about the suspension of time and the separation of the self inside, wherein our bodies struggle to differentiate between past and present. Small reminders or rising states of stress can make us feel lost in space and time. Even though we might be technically safe and heard right now, inside we feel silenced and stuck, trapped in the place where we were harmed. As Walter Brueggemann says, “the taproot of violence is surely silence,”4 of our voices being so shut up and shut down that our bodies carry fear that we no longer have any say in the future of our stories. Psychologist
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One of the chief challenges in being courageous is how our bodies become stuck in states of stress from months and years of loss, chronic pressure, and trauma. Many of us struggle to feel connected to God not because we lack faith but because we are carrying a heavy burden in our bodies.
The cumulative burden of chronic stress is called allostatic load, and it’s likely part of what is making you feel inadequate to cope with your life or step into your calling.5 When our nervous systems have sensed more cues of danger than safety for extended periods of time, we experience allostatic overload.
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.
The difference between fleeing and fighting is the choice we make to protect what we love.
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.
Even though it was a different church community, as soon as we sat down that first time, I instinctively scanned the room, looking for people from our previous church. Enemy mode was activated (but I didn’t have language for that quite yet). I couldn’t sink into my seat until I had cleared the room of potential threats—
I was sorting the substance of church into boxes of “harmful” or “helpful” to determine whether I could be safe there.
And in the quiet, I realized: every week for a month my disease symptoms had suddenly started to flare up fifteen minutes into the church service. As a therapist who sees so many clients with trauma, it was undeniable. My mind wanted to be at church again, but my body didn’t feel safe there.
Diane Langberg agrees: “Spiritual abuse involves using the sacred to harm or deceive the soul of another.”
Theologian Kenneth Bailey shows us that in this ancient society, to “prepare a table” would have meant “to prepare a meal,” since people did not eat from individual plates and with utensils but from common dishes with flatbread and their own hands.9 Bailey also notes that while the Hebrew verb “you prepare” is masculine in this text, we are clearly shown a male engaging in activities which, in that culture, only a female would do.10
When life has brought you too low to even cry for help, silent and inert as a coin, stuck day after day in a dorsal vagal state of despair, you are not beyond the reach of God’s hands or the reality of repentance as defined by Jesus. Even in your lifelessness, God is seeking you.
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.
The only antidote to enemy mode is empathy.
