Courage to Believe You're Beloved
Painting by Mike Torevell.
Like a few other emails this summer, here is an excerpt from a book we love on a truth we struggle to embrace. This is from KJ Ramsey's latest book, The Lord is my Strength.
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 open 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’” (Matthew 3:16, 17).
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 will ever encounter. . . .
The light that shined on Jesus as he came up out of the muddy waters of the Jordan River is the light that can illuminate our whole lives. No darkness is thick enough to evade this light. No fear fierce enough to extinguish this fire. Nothing can separate you from the courage available to you in your union with Christ. Courage is choosing to spend the rest of your life listening for and receiving these words as true:
You are my Beloved. With you I am well pleased.