Kj Ramsey Quotes

Often the pain that makes us feel most stuck is not our suffering; it is experiencing distress in the presence of people who expect us to get better faster than we can.

Living with long-term suffering in American culture feels like being off-key. Suffering quiets and slows, but our culture prefers a crescendo.

Grasping to find the purpose in your pain may be the very thing preventing you from experiencing comfort and even transformation in your suffering.

When pain of any kind makes us feel less ourselves and less capable of engaging in relationships, we experience it as suffering.

All pain triggers a reminder, deeper than thought, buzzing through blood and bone, that we are fragile and finite.

courage is not a possession but a practice. Courage is not the absence of anxiety but the practice of trusting we are held and loved no matter what.

The deepest anguish of suffering involves coming up against the divide in ourselves between believing God is loving and feeling it is true.

Shame is the stealthy, compelling energy evil is constantly using to distract us from living in the story where grace is here.

Shame wants us to believe the story that weakness is a private, avoidable problem we should overcome by ourselves.

Suffering whispers, shouts, and screams the story no one wants to remember: we are not in control, and we are all going to die.

Others might not be comfortable with our most honest, desperate cries, but the psalms make it exceedingly clear God is. This is the prayer book of God’s people, written in the language of desire that situates our pain next to praise. Not hiding pain underneath praise. Not whispering about it. The psalms display God’s people attuned to their pain and willing to express it in striking vulnerability,

So listen to this more closely than to those who taunt or judge, including yourself: “God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God has chosen what is insignificant and despised in the world.”3 The parts of your story that seem to be keeping you from strength and significance are what God calls chosen and valuable.

the greatest story ever told is of a God who so loved the world that he chose to suffer for it. We’ll see what we can’t see when we’re busy searching for the purpose in our pain or hustling hard to prove how valuable we are for God’s kingdom. Suffering has always been God’s means of rousing a sleeping world with his love.2

We do not have—nor are we able—to jump from trauma to trust or from fear to faith.

I reject the notion that I am an individual being, built by the bulk of my successes, suffering in the wake of my failures, a tree rooted in determination or withering in its lack.

Sin is any Christian’s response to pain, poverty, and weakness that assumes they are individual problems to solve rather than places to patiently embody the solidarity of Jesus.

Holiness can look only like Jesus. It will sound like crying, like groaning. It will speak with force, with fury. It will include peace and gentleness, but it will never be stoic.

all the faith you can muster won’t push your suffering over the edge of the cliff into your past,

And if what we hear from God’s people is largely the language of try hard and triumph, the sugar-lipped expectation that we’ll get better and move on, when our efforts are futile and triumph seems distant, we might just believe that the story of Jesus isn’t for us or isn’t even true. Prolonged pain becomes shame, a hidden hurt that we might not be loved by God after all.

Shame wants us to live divided, dishonest, disembodied lives, to treat our bodies and stories like failures to conceal, to let our lips say we believe God is good while our hearts stay discouraged in the dark. The most harrowing power of shame might be its stealth in convincing us that silencing our pain behind statements of God’s goodness is spiritual, when really it’s just a churchy form of self-sufficiency.

Jesus’ words to his disciples are just as true for us today. We will weep and mourn. We will have sorrow. And our sorrow will turn to joy. Today, in the tension of pain that persists, we are living the reality Jesus named. Here we find the descending, rising rhythm that creates our new life. As Henri Nouwen says, “It is the way in which pain can be embraced, not out of a desire to suffer, but in the knowledge that something new will be born in the pain.”4 In our longing for tension to be relieved, we cannot miss that Jesus said sorrow comes before joy. This is the church’s story: sorrow comes before the song.

The loneliness of realizing there’s a weakness inside us that no amount of effort or faith can eradicate makes us feel like exiles. Living with suffering that lingers can feel like being an unwanted refugee in a country blind to pain. You feel outside grace, outside light, out of reach of what you think makes life good. Your body holds a story quite different than the story your culture says is worth living. And you’re not sure you want to, or even can, move forward with this body in this story.

When the church amplifies stories of healing and overcoming without also elevating stories of sustaining grace, she is not adequately forming souls to hold on to hope. If the majority of stories we hear are tales of triumph, we will question the worth of our stories when healing doesn’t come. God, in his wisdom, in his hidden purposes, allows some of our suffering to linger, and the church unintentionally turns hearts away from the heart of God when she does not hold space for the sacred mystery that weakness reveals God’s strength.

Wind, the ruach of God, is what welcomed this world into existence. “If we wish to understand the Old Testament word ruach, we must forget the word ‘spirit’ which belongs to Western culture,” theologian Jürgen Moltmann writes. “If we talk in Hebrew about Yahweh’s ruach, we are saying: God is a tempest, a storm, a force in body and soul, humanity and nature.”11 The same Wind who was present at the precipice of creation is still blowing through the wilderness of our lives, shaking us into strength.

You don’t need another before and after story; you need grace for the middle of your story.

I’ve come to see that living with suffering that lingers can mean more fully receiving God’s presence that lasts.

This faith we possess is not a list of beliefs that remains effectual only when we can feel their truth.

We who mourn carry vision the world needs. Through the lenses of tears, we can truly see.24 Something is broken that God will make whole.

Something unspoken can't be known. It becomes a private asphyxiation, a see stuck in the throat of an individual body staining for the oxygen of God's love.

Sin is expecting ourselves and others to be miniature self-saviors who can rise above our broken bodies and broken stories and eliminate suffering by the power of our own determined truth-telling.

What if self-sufficiency was always a bankrupt lie, and suffering simply demonstrates its poverty? What if suffering isn’t ruining our selves but re-creating them? Suffering is an invitation to live and tell the story truer and more satisfying than pain-free ease. It is an invitation to know and be known by the God who entered the human story intent on transforming death into life. The presence of prolonged suffering begs us to remember our true story and its suffering Lord.

when bodies are prisons and the physical is suspect, how can we ever encounter pain as a meaningful experience or, shockingly, the place where God comes to find us, a physical experience he chose to go through himself to bind us to his life?

Our hope is not in being beamed up to heaven upon death with suddenly perfected bodies. Our hope is informed and colored by John’s vision in Revelation 21: the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven. Hope in suffering is never for a disembodied day when we can finally escape the bodies, relationships, and circumstances that have caused us so much pain. Biblical hope is expressed not in certainty but in curiosity, hearts that acknowledge and accept Jesus is already King, lives that look for the restoration of his rule right here, people propelled by a willingness to see Jesus turn every inch of creation from cursed to cured. The relationships that were broken will be made right; our relationship to our bodies, each other, the earth, and God will be fully and finally restored. The kingdom is already and not yet; living in its tension rather than panicking for release is the only way to be pulled into the trajectory of hope.

The seemingly impossible task of enduring suffering and rejoicing in it is born in the impossible reality that God became human. The implausibility of having joy in a body with an incurable disease is made possible by God in a body. The possibility of hope in your despair is alive, here, as close as your breath.

We need water that flows when we are fragile, grace that girds when we are weak, hope that holds us when our hands are empty, holiness that hears and shatters our pride, and a faith far deeper and more mysterious than a mere affirmation that God is good. We need to be pulled into God's goodness in embodied experiences reflecting who he is.

Love won't come easy and it often will feel like exposure. Love will look like weakness and sometimes feels like dying. A soul alive in Christ allows itself to be repositioned. The Sprit turns us towards the place old self would naturally resist and our consent will be the continual reversal that forms the love of Christ into our memories, our neural networks, our inner most being.

The Savior came and is coming again, but our healing is in his hands, not our own. If our Savior chose to enter the human story in a human body, then we should enter one another’s places of suffering remembering we carry and extend the presence of Christ. Sin is any Christian’s response to pain, poverty, and weakness that assumes they are individual problems to solve rather than places to patiently embody the solidarity of Jesus. When we reduce pain to an individual problem, we don’t know what to do with ourselves and our stories. In an increasingly individualistic society, where the space between self, tradition, and our embodied connection to each other feels wide, suffering can be a massive assault to our sense of self and our ability to hope. We become lost in a chasm of overspiritualized pain and undervalued physicality, not knowing where our lives fit alongside a Christianity glittering with the veneer of abundance. Already exhausted, we sink under the weight of existing as an aberration of the abundant life our Christian friends and families want us to project. Defeated and lonely, many of us subconsciously attempt to detach from the grief in our bodies, excising it from our minds to feel accepted in the community of the able and successful. We push pain away with effort, pretending to be okay among the shiny, smiling faces at church or work. For if we were honest about how sad or sick or hopeless we really feel, would we be accepted at all?

If every moment of the day is full of the sounds of cars, drive-through lines, and paper pushing, we won’t have to hear the echo chamber of our worst fears.

We’ve reduced the gospel to rescue, power to privilege, and hope to swift healing, reducing ourselves in the process. Western Christendom has long treated suffering like a problem to fix and a blight to hide. Eugene Peterson was right: “It is difficult to find anyone in our culture who will respect us when we suffer.”1 When our storylines do not match the arc of triumph we’ve come to expect and revere, we can feel stuck on the outside of both our communities and God’s grace.

is its true Author, writing your life into a larger story of a people pursued, oppression obliterated, death defeated, and a world reborn. The reign of God and your enjoyment of it is the reality that will last.

Any view or practice, however, that cannot accept an honest assessment of our pain alongside our hopeful confession of God’s goodness and presence goes contrary to the teaching and history of the church. Both can be true. Both are true!