The Lord is my courage
This guest post is taken from The Lord is My Courage by KJ Ramsey and shared here with the author’s generous permission.
Honesty about our hurt empowers us to hope in God who stretches out a staff to comfort us. Courage is a continuous choice to be honest about the reality of harm while reaching for hope, even when it is inconvenient and even when it bristles against cultural and religious expectations that equate goodness with niceness.
Evil pits hurt and hope against each other on the balancing scales of scarcity. Evil welds our well-being to the balance of those scales, pressing the weight of dichotomies to pull us into discouragement, distraction, and despair.
When hurt and hope are pit against each other, evil holds the reins, yanking us right and left, as though hustling to have more, be more, and do more will finally bring us home to less hurt and more belonging.
If evil can convince us to stay stressed (by shaming, silencing, or sermonizing our stress!), it can keep us stuck in a neural state of self-protection. Some find safety in telling a story with the hard parts cast as footnotes. Others, who feel silenced by stories, might find safety in recasting suffering in the leading role. We both end up living out stories of searing solitude, feeling like the truth of our story as we see it isn’t being fully heard.
Evil plays in the poles of both our pain and positivity. It demands or defeats, miring us in the much of either over-functioning or under-engaging in our good lives. Evil sings in the chorus of cheer, demanding through smiles, happy-clappy out-of-context verses, and heavy-handed expectations that we throw away the weight of hurt to feel the comfort of hope, as though our willpower to worship is the only thing standing between us and joy. Yet evil also defeats us in dark caves, convincing us a speck of light is not worth seeking at all.
Bearing witness to the truth of our wounds welcomes us to see the larger truth that the Wounded One is with us. Just as Christ walked outside the gates of Jerusalem’s power to his cross, Jesus is always walking outside the places of expected power to meet us in the paradoxes of our pain. He pulls us into redemption right where life seems to be ripping us apart.
The paradox of having a shepherd whose rod and staff comfort us is that we live in a world where a rod and staff are needed. It is a painful thing to enfold our faith into the expectation that we live in a world where we will need to be rescued.
David might not have expected his king to be the person who would most threaten his life. I didn’t expect my church to be the place that would crush my sense of safety.
After we left, I wanted nothing more than the comfort of communion again. Church had been our safe place once before, and we wanted it to be that again. I wanted to wrap my wounds in worship. I wanted singing next to other saints to serve like salve on my scars. I wanted to taste assurance on my tongue. I wanted the bread and the wine to bind up my brokenness. I wanted to swallow solidarity with Christ and his body whole.
So we went back to church, even though it was church that had wounded us.
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—people who might approach me to ask awkward questions with answers they weren’t entitled to hear. I found myself cynical and critical, judging every announcement and song choice like I was sorting the substance of the church into boxes of “harmful” or “helpful” to determine whether I could be safe there. AS soon as the pastor stepped into the pulpit, I dropped into my own world, scratching out the start of a poem in my journal instead of listening to the sermon.
Halfway through the service, my spine suddenly screamed in pain. So I retreated to the back with the mothers rocking their wailing babies. I stood separate, shifting in the shadows of the sanctuary, where my pain couldn’t disturb the worshiping crowd. I rejoined Ryan for communion at the end and as soon as the last words of the benediction left the pastor’s mouth, I nudged Ryan to leave before anyone could make us have conversations I was not ready to have.
This went on for weeks. Finally, I decided to just leave before the sermon started and sit on the bench outside until it was time for communion. I gripped the armrests to slow the swaying sense that the world was a sea in which I was sinking. 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.
Spiritual abuse braces our bodies for harm where there should be help. It twists the sacred into a sword, leaving us subconsciously on alert in case Scripture or a sermon or a small group interaction suddenly becomes sinister.
Diane Langberg agrees: “Spiritual abuse involves using the sacred to harm to deceive the soul of another.” Spiritual abuse ruptures our bodies’ sense of trust that being in the Body won’t brutalize our souls.
Ignoring my body’s sense of things being off was what had put me in a position to be spiritually abused in the first place. I decided then and there that I would no longer silence the truth that my body was telling me. I knew I needed to hear and honor the honest truth that my body didn’t feel safe if I was ever going to cultivate hope to feel safe inside a church again.
So, for the first time in my life, I stopped going to church.
As a trauma-informed clinician, I knew that my body needed space to regain stability and a sense of safety before I’d be able to tolerate the stress of church and its corresponding triggers again. Ryan still felt like he wanted and was able to attend sometimes, but we agreed that for me a season away was best. We knew that my complex childhood trauma made my body more sensitive to stress than his, and we didn’t want our church trauma to exacerbate my autoimmune disease. I knew I needed space to learn how to feel safe with God and myself again before trying to feel safe with his people.
K.J. Ramsey is a trauma-informed licensed professional counselor and of This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers and The Lord is My Courage: Stepping Through the Shadows of Fear Toward the Voice of Love.
Taken from The Lord is My Courage by KJ Ramsey. Copyright © 2002 by HarperCollins Christian Publishing. Used by permission of Zondervan. www.harpercollinschristian.com
