Embodied: a letter from K.J. Ramsey
Dear Friend,
I'm not sure what your week has held, but I think there's a good chance it's held a mountain of moments where you stumbled your way through, seeking to be faithful, seeking to love, maybe feeling like your body and capacity weren't quite meeting the reality of what life was asking from you.
This week I launched a podcast for you! This Too Shall Last, the podcast, is now up, available, and has already been downloaded by over a thousand people. (Which I think is just insane and amazing.) Ep. 1 was with Emily P. Freeman, and ep. 2 was with Rich Villodas, and we have a lot of great interviews coming! But in the busyness of launching something I love for people I love (you!), I struggled to care for the body God has called me first and foremost to love. We stretch and strain to honor what's before us, and weariness is a good reminder to honor what's within before we step any farther. I go with the God who goes with me when I acknowledge where I am, who I am, and how my body feels.
In that spirit, I pray this excerpt from chapter 4 of This Too Shall Last helps you find that the place where you are is the place God is, a place where you are being made whole.
with so much love,
-KJ
From Chapter 4 of This Too Shall Last,
The Cloud: Suffering is Transformational Space
The place where we feel abandoned is the place where we are transformed.
In suffering, God recapitulates and refines the stories of our lives, where our raiments of striving were first woven, bringing us to spaces of infant-like dependency that burn away our adult illusions of sufficiency. This is where we partner with God to “take off your former way of life, the old self that is corrupted by deceitful desires, to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, the one created according to God’s likeness in righteousness and purity of the truth.” (Eph. 4:22-24)
The cloud of suffering is not a storm. It’s a shelter. It’s a studio. It’s the mysterious place where we are made new.
God is here. He has not left. He is like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, patiently waiting for his son to return. God is not on the other side of our suffering. He is in it. The invisible God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.
We can’t inhabit and experience the place where God shelters and transforms us if we do not know where we are.
Faith is a response to the God who is more present than we feel, asking us to name the place we find ourselves in. Every day, God asks us to answer the question he asked Adam and Eve in Genesis 3: Where are you?We locate the place we find ourselves in by noticing our emotions, our bodies, and our inner dialogue.
Faith is a response that requires paying attention to ourselves. We are transformed not by thinking less about ourselves but by thinking differently about ourselves. *|TWITTER:TWEET [$text="We are transformed not by thinking less about ourselves but by thinking differently about ourselves. Faith is a response that requires paying attention to ourselves." @kjramseywrites #ThisTooShallLast]|*
Transformation happens in paying attention to our lives with kindness and compassion rooted in the care of a God who so loved us that he died for us. We are often taught holiness involves thinking less about ourselves and more about Jesus. We need Jesus—oh, how we need Jesus!—but we need him in the substance of our lives, in the emotional floods and deserts, in the places where we feel most abandoned, overwhelmed, and lifeless. Believing you need to think less about yourself may be leading you farther away from experiencing the presence of God refashioning you into the likeness of Christ.
By judging our lives instead of inhabiting them, we miss dwelling in the place where God silently clothes us in his redeeming love. To dwell there, we first need to gain awareness that something is off. This may seem so obvious it hurts, but I think most of us spend a great deal of our mental energy suppressing awareness of how we feel. Where are you?
Life will continue to bring up situations that evoke distress. Noticing our distress rather than dismissing or ignoring it is the first way we can respond to God’s invitation into the canyon of wholeness.
Suffering is a place we occupy. If we are not aware of the place we find ourselves in, we will be occupied by it instead. Counterintuitively, when we practice turning toward the place we fear, by naming our emotions and breathing deep in their presence, our minds calm down. We start to feel more like ourselves.
Cross the threshold into the place of your pain. Recognize the ground. Embrace the mystery of the place you find yourself. The cloud of suffering is a place we cannot understand, yet it is for our good. God never takes us there to torture us. And the cloud never stretches on forever, even though it feels like it might.
In suffering’s clouded place of mystery and worship, we are changed.
In the place of mystery, pain becomes a passage.
Our suffering is the dying of an old world and the emergence of a new one. Out of chaos and cloud, God forms the stunning shape of our new hope and new world, our union with him. When we find ourselves in the fog, we stand where ordinary time and space become occupied by the coming King whose reign will never end.
When we cross the threshold into the fog, we step into the thin space where this world—and our selves—are being healed by the coming of God’s love.
Walk into the barren, empty places of your pain, because this is where God will fill you with himself. This liminal space is where we hate to go but where God is always leading us.
Don’t run from what does not make sense or try to explain it away. Dissonance is the birthplace of all abiding Christian hope. Embrace mystery as the place God dwells. Embrace your suffering as the paradoxical place where you will be made whole. *|TWITTER:TWEET [$text="Dissonance is the birthplace of all abiding Christian hope. Embrace mystery as the place God dwells. Embrace your suffering as the paradoxical place where you will be made whole." @kjramseywrites #ThisTooShallLast]|*
I'd love for you to listen to the new podcast! You can listen to This Too Shall Last on the Apple Podcasts app, Spotify, and my website. And we're adding Google Podcasts soon! I also have full transcripts for every episode available on my website.
Let me know what you think! And add a review on iTunes if you enjoy it!