What is faith when you can no longer fight?
I came of age after planes crashed into towers and presidents declared war on terrorism in the name of truth. I chose faith after a teen in Colorado looked down the barrel of a gun and said yes to believing in God. I learned faith was being on fire, lifting my arms alongside my youth group from the nosebleed seats in a stadium like smoke to the sky as we sang our hearts out with Michael W. Smith on the stage below. I believed this was my time, this was my dance, this was my test, and I’d leave nothing to chance.
The context of my Christianity was a common enemy.
Faith was a fight for what was “right.” Belief was a battle against atheism, terrorism, tolerance, the loss of ultimate truth, and my own “worldly flesh.” To be spiritual was to be a soldier, marching into the madness of this postmodern world with the Word as my weapon and the Spirit as my shield.
I marched
until
I collapsed.
At twenty years old, debilitating chronic pain brought me low. And down on the ground, too tired to try harder and in too much pain to fight my fears with faith, I could see past the lies to a riven side. Holes in hands spoke peace to mine.
I could no longer hold the weight of weapons. I could no longer bear the burden of being battle-ready. My body was waving a white flag, shaking through symptoms that shouted I had been fighting far too hard for far too long. I felt naked and bruised, stripped of my armor of old suppositions about my purpose and God’s plans.
Who are you when you can’t work? What is pain for, if not to be used for some grand purpose? And what is faith when you can no longer fight?
The best thing that ever happened to my belief was its bruising.
The ache asked me to attune to my own body as worthy of care whether I could work or not. Pain required pausing in a way the world had never given me permission to do. The throbbing in my joints told me the truth that I was never meant to be a puppet in a cosmic play of God’s grand purposes but a person who bears God’s divine image just as much in my disability as in my diligence.
Pain became a portal into fuller personhood. When my body said no to the script of only being a soldier, my ears began to hear the heartbeat of a God who embraced embodiment as the portal into peace.
The context of my Christianity became the courage I hold in common with Christ.
Jesus’ yes to his embodied life and death suffuse me with courage to say yes to mine.
In the echo of Christ’s groans and tears, every part of my existence and yours is embraced and graced as sacred space.
Resurrected Lord,
you who let them
bruise your body
before rising again
on the third day:
grant us imagination to bless
even the groaning
of our bodies
as the brave beginning
of resurrection,
that in the beating
of our hearts
and the breath
within our chests
each day we would practice
the exhale of disdain
and the inhale of
the Spirit’s love instead.
Amen.
Written by: K.J. Ramsey
From this week’s guest series titled "Faith That Doesn’t Leave Your Body Behind", with a subscription, in the App.
