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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
K.J. Ramsey
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February 22 - March 1, 2023
When we cannot find the words to pray, we are not faithless. We are feeling the fact that we are both embodied and vulnerable.
To bless is to bridge. A blessing is a bridge to belonging, built right in the place we feel separated from hope. Words of blessing bring us back to the beautiful truth of being human: we belong to one another, and it is in the space between our souls that we become strong.
It’s hard to pray when we feel powerless because our bodies need the presence of someone else to soothe us and speak us back into safety. Fear and stress temporarily disconnect us from the language centers of the brain and the calming, regulating power of the prefrontal cortex, but the presence of another safe, empathetic person can bring our minds, bodies, and hearts back together.
A fourteenth-century definition of courage is “to speak one’s mind by telling all of one’s heart.”4 Courage is connecting one’s heart back to one’s mind, stitching together the separated parts of ourselves and one another. Courage is holding the heart when the mind can’t hope.
Courage is not the possession of the bravest or biggest but the choice to move toward the heart when the mind and body are separated by fear. Courage is the choice to move our fear into communion.
Courage isn’t the opposite of fear. Courage is the practice of trusting we have a Good Shepherd who always cares—even when vulnerability is shouting otherwise.5
When it is hard to pray and hard to hope, we do not have to try harder to pray ourselves from fear to faith. We can enter the rhythm of others’ prayers. We can let a form of prayer hold us as we journey back to strength.
Christ emptied himself and became as human as you and me so every part of our humanity could be lived in his presence. Emptiness precedes presence. And courage is the practice of coming to the empty space where heart and mind struggle to meet, expecting to encounter the Good Shepherd emptying himself and embracing us even still.
I pray you will choose to bless rather than curse your emptiness and approach your life with curiosity rather than control.
What is your only comfort to be courageous in life and in death? That everywhere I go, I belong —body and soul, in all my days, all my doubts, and even all my despair, and my coming death— to you, my Savior and my friend, Jesus Christ.
Every moment of my story is but a movement in your hands to make all things whole.
Lord Jesus, you are my courage, my comfort, and my irrevocable crown.
Build compassion within us that we might see your face in those who do not have a place to lay their heads and hearts in safety and that we might trust your peace can dwell with us in our own weary wandering.
Lead us to landscapes we would not choose to feed us with trust we cannot lose.
But to be fed we all first must be seen.
I shall not want except that I do. I want a Shepherd who comes through. I want my stress to be wrapped in God’s arms. I want my life to be healed from all harm. Perhaps it would be better to say I lack nothing because Love will stay.
Jesus, you who blessed faith as small as a seed: reveal the mystery of faith’s abundance in meekness not might, that in ourselves and those we meet we too would bless the bravery of starting off small.
As the artist pulls paint across canvas until color and light are wed in joyous sight, you were a thought so beautiful in God’s mind that you had to exist. You are the art God did not need and yet wanted so much that he knelt on the ground of his new world and painted the dirt with the brush of his breath until your heart and lungs and limbs were birthed from his.
You do not need to be hopeful or pleasant, stumbling severed from your story and the truth your body bears. You only need to let your hidden hurt come with you and reach your fingers toward the Love who stands with scars still on his hands. Your body brings your story everywhere you go.
If God keeps track of your tears and holds them safe in a bottle, then perhaps your pain is precious. Perhaps your tears tell truth. Perhaps you don’t have to stop the flow of what God wants to hold as a treasure. —crying is holy.
Your hope doesn’t lie in being strong enough to not be shattered. Your hope is that you will always be held in an Artist’s hands.
Faith is not mustering up courage to no longer be broken. Faith is practicing the courage to name even your broken pieces as beloved.
For your resurrection reminds us that suffering can shift us into a better story. Amen.
When your dream has withered, find your way to a river. Watch the way the water shimmers when touched by the sun, how she flows in one direction around boulders and over rocks.
Make your place among the boulders and the cottonwood trees. It is here that you’ll remember the order of things.
O Good Shepherd, You led by seeking the last, the least, and the lost and succeeded by dying upon a cross. Give us the nerve to name the cost of confusing righteousness with affluence and trading relationship for dominance.
what we call unruly and disruptive is often just a plant needing a bigger pot. You are allowed to outgrow the old pots of communities and certainties that once held you but now hinder you.
Lord Jesus Christ, In you is life that can never die. Bind your faith to our doubt so that even though shadows sometimes stretch across our trust and the twilight of life is sure, darkness will become a discovery of your love and our faith will rise with you. Amen.
the only way out of the country of our wounds is through, and Christ’s courage to let chaos nail him through can make these wounds the path back to our promised land.
God, remind us of the blessing that only the broken can hear. Show us that the storms raging within us are but small shadows of the storm of your fury to fight for our justice and vindication.
We would rather be shattered than silenced. We would rather be disturbed than dismissive. We would rather be heartbroken than hollow. We would rather be vulnerable than vacuous. We would rather be burdened than bullies. We would rather be maligned than mean. We would rather be aching than arrogant. We would rather be vilified than vain. We would rather be crushed than cruel. God, bind up all the broken pieces of me and your church. We would rather be in your hands than never at home. We would rather hurt now than never heal.
Only beauty can bring you back to believing God will give goodness tomorrow.
Christ, make us willing to witness our world as it is. Father, help us hear your voice guiding us through the fog. And, Lord, we pray: may this disorientation be a door. When we feel lost, may we risk being found.
Sanctification is like stitching the sinew to the soul. And grace is but a thread sewing mind and body whole. The body is not a barrier between the Bible and belief. It is the tissue where tenderness can speak the truth in relief: your body is already the beloved dwelling place of God.
O God who cried for relief in the garden, Your tears have shown me that faithfulness does not mean fearlessness. Help me see my fear as the seedbed of faith. Uncurl my fingers to sow my anxieties in the soil of your trustworthiness.
Open my eyes this day to see both the news and my needs as sacred ground. Together, we will plant gardens.
Can you stomach a Savior who felt fear and stress so acutely that sweat spilled like drops of blood from his skin? Does your theology include an incarnate God, whose anxiety was so great it ruptured his blood vessels? If we cannot trace God in the most human fear, we won’t get to see him drawing near. I will not allow myself to be less human than Christ. If we cannot be human, we cannot be upheld.
Jesus, You say the Father cares, but the sparrow still falls. Grant us the courage to suffer.
Courage starts with consenting to be present.
Trauma steals our tongues but courage is embodied. Shepherds like Christ bear witness to pain.
Trauma happens and harms us. But I often wonder if the worst trauma is the second wave— when your story is misbelieved, mistrusted, and maligned. May your story find safe harbor in the presence of people who will honor both your vulnerability and resilience.
courage is the art of protecting what we love.
Hover again over the blank spaces between our breaths where the pain of being a person punches our chests; that we might sense this void is blessed; that we might welcome the wind is still where you will make all things new.
Where the world overflows with hatred, let us hold hope. Where there is sorrow, let us savor the sacredness of every tear-stained face. Where there is doubt, let us spill over with grace.
Remember that fear is only the first moment of courage, for fear is always a place Christ has visited before you and waits with you.
God will never leave you without a witnes or a name. God anoints you not for what you’ve done but for who you will become.
