The Lord Is My Courage

Stepping Through the Shadows of Fear Toward the Voice of Love

K.J. Ramsey

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780310124177
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Walking through Psalm 23 phrase by phrase, therapist and author K.J. Ramsey explores the landscape of our fear, trauma, and faith. When she stepped through her own wilderness of spiritual abuse and religious trauma, K.J. discovered that courage is not the absence of anxiety but the practice of trusting we will be held and loved no matter what.

How can we cultivate courage when fear overshadows our lives? How do we hear the Voice of Love when hate and harm shout loud? This book offers an honest path to finding that there is still a Good Shepherd who is always following you. Braiding contemplative storytelling, theological reflection, and practical neuroscience, Ramsey reveals a route into connection and joy that begins right where you are.

The Lord is My Courage is for the deconstructing and the dreamers, the afraid and the amazed, for those whose fear has not been fully shepherded but who can't seem to stop listening for their Good Shepherd's Voice.

BLESSED

To have courage for whatever comes in life—everything lies in that.

—Teresa of Avila

I believed that there was a God because I was told it by my grandmother and later by other adults. But when I found that I knew not only that there was a God but that I was a child of God, when I understood that, when I comprehended that, more than that, when I internalized that, ingested that, I became courageous.

—Maya Angelou

1. THE LORD

WE BEGIN WITH A BLESSING.

Before you built a family, before you earned a diploma, before you made a career, before any hope or heartbreak or heroism, you were loved into existence.

Before Jesus made water into wine, before he raised the dead or healed the beggar born blind, before the obedience that would become our sign, he was named Beloved.

The Lord, our Good Shepherd, began his public ministry on the banks of the Jordan River not by preaching a stunning sermon or performing a great sign but by getting into the river and letting his cousin, John the Baptist, dunk his body in a baptism of repentance. Jesus—God incarnate, fully human and fully perfect—chose to begin his entire ministry with an act of repentance that one would assume he didn’t need. Everything Jesus lived and did, he did to fully embody our humanness as an offering of trust and gratitude to the Father.

Jesus plunged backward in John’s hands into the cold water, letting his body fall in trust for that moment and the greater submersion of the years to come. And as his head rose out of the river, “the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.’ ”¹

On the muddy banks of the Jordan River, Jesus heard the words we so struggle to hear on our own: You are my Beloved. With you I am well pleased.

These are the words we all most long to hear. (And if the language of beloved doesn’t resonate with you, substitute it with this: You are seen and secure.)

Most of us struggle to rise into our lives with courage and hear that we are beloved because we’ve all been baptized in different water—the stream of scarcity. Most of us learn early in life to stay by scarcity’s stream of striving and strength, where the only way we are given the name Beloved is if we earn it every single day.

There’s only so much room in a stream, so we usually become bullies or beggars—either pushing our way to have a place by the water or hanging back in case someone else elbows us out of the way or says we don’t belong. So many of us live stuck in self-protection, pushing for a place at the stream, guarding it in case someone tries to shove us out of the way, hoarding whatever water we can get.

Most of us haven’t been shown the way to better waters, where God bends low and says—regardless of your striving, strength, or success—Beloved is the name you carry with you everywhere you go.

Courage is standing in the mud of our ordinary lives and turning toward Christ, who still hears the words we most strain to hear on our own, who stands ready to help us hear Beloved in every mundane and even miserable moment we ever will encounter.²

I was baptized at two weeks old on Christmas Eve in 1988. My parents stood at the front of the church in their finest—my construction-worker dad in the suit he wore only for funerals, weddings, and baptisms, and my mom in a long black velvet dress, complete with puffy sleeves. I imagine them beaming, holding their bundle of a baby girl in a tiny frilly white dress, the glow on their faces matched by the crimson poinsettias covering the chancel.

They claimed God’s promises as mine with the words “we do” and promised to bring me up to know it. The people gathered there promised too, because baptism is not a ceremony to watch; it is a story to share. Then my parents handed me to Pastor Bob, who dipped a hand into consecrated water and blessed me, body and soul, as baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Pastor Bob’s cheeks shined like jolly Saint Nick’s as he held me up before the congregation, all dressed in their Christmas clothes. And with my head nestled in his hand and my body held strong in his arms, Pastor Bob swayed and led the congregation in song. “He’s got the whole world in his hands. He’s got the whole world in his hands. He’s got itty-bitty Katie in his hands.³ He’s got the whole world in his hands.” I can imagine it just like this because I spent the next seventeen years singing it to every baptized baby in that church, with promises on my own lips.

I was born wearing the shackles of generational trauma, abuse, and the American Dream. But that day, I was also baptized into a story where the whole world was held in God’s hands. I was named into those hands.

That day, I was given a small wooden cross to hang in my room, inscribed “Matthew 19:14.” In that story, the crowds who were following Jesus brought their children to him to be blessed. The disciples pushed them away, perhaps thinking their leader was too important for kids. Religious folks often seem to think their leaders are too important for those at the bottom. But Jesus told them the words that are referenced on my cross: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

He brings the blessing down to the ones who cannot even ask for it themselves.

The day I was baptized, I was blessed into that story. I became one to whom the kingdom of God belongs.

I was held, cherished, and given the same name and affection given to Jesus when the light of the Spirit shined down on him in the Jordan. As the waters of baptism pass over us, we are washed into a world of love where the words spoken over Jesus resound as ours as well.⁴ Beloved.

Beloved is the name that brings a whole new world into existence.

Beloved is the story that unwrites every line of scarcity’s plot to push you down.

Beloved is your birthright.

That cross is sitting on my desk next to me as I write, and I know, the God who took the time to bless the children who couldn’t even ask for it themselves will always come to bless me.

But I didn’t believe my blessedness.

I spent the first nineteen years of my life trying to earn a name I had already been given. I stuffed a bank account full of the cash of compliance and certainty. I became the good daughter my parents needed. I found my place on the map of meritocracy and extended my borders through the constant pursuit of exceptionalism. I was lovable, I thought, because I was especially good and especially diligent.

Midway through my junior year of college, my body wouldn’t let me be good or work hard anymore. Instead, there was silence. No more dean’s lists to make. No more As at the top of papers. Just the silent screams of a body suddenly disabled by pain. The borders of my life became small. And I wondered, who was I without applause?

One day I sat in silence, slumped onto pillows propped against my cold dorm-room wall, and tried but failed to find comfort in the Word of God. Inflammation had all but mutated my hands into lobster claws. The cover of the Bible on my lap might as well have weighed one hundred pounds, because there was no way my claws could pinch it open. It sat there taunting me with its worn spine held together by teal duct tape, reinforcing just how stuck and tattered I was.

God spoke into the silence.

I love you—not for anything you can do for me but for existing.

God called me Beloved.

When I couldn’t come to God, God came to me.

In a body too sick to open a Bible, bankrupt of all my striving, I started to hear the words I would spend the rest of my life learning to receive as true.

You are my Beloved. With you I am well pleased.

Who is this Jesus whom the Father first called Beloved? Who is the Lord who calls himself our Good Shepherd?⁵

Look around you. Notice the pages of this book in your hands. Look at the coffee cup on your side table. See the sun streaming through your window. Jesus is the one by whom all of this was made.⁶

Everything you see is matter, spoken into existence by God in Christ. Let’s take a moment to let our eighth-grade science memories come together with our adult spirituality. All matter is made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons, bound together as atoms. And Jesus is the one who holds it all together.⁷ Matter is energy, held together by Christ.⁸ The one whom the Father called Beloved is holding together everything you see and every part of who you are. Love is the energy that holds the universe together.

But there is energy beyond what you can even see. One of the most surprising scientific discoveries of the twentieth century is that ordinary matter composes only 5 percent of the mass of the universe.⁹ Scientists believe the rest is made up of dark matter and dark energy, which have revealed that the universe is expanding rather than shrinking. Decades earlier, Albert Einstein theorized that a “cosmological constant” is what keeps the universe from collapsing in on itself. When his theory was debunked, he called it his biggest blunder, but scientists today see dark matter as the cosmological glue holding the universe up.¹⁰ While dark energy is expanding the universe, dark matter is holding it together. Invisible Love is sustaining the universe every moment of every day.

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.

Everything about your existence is a participation in God’s energy of joy. You are energy. Your emotions are energy. Your breath is ...