26 - Becoming a Portable Sanctuary
Episode Highlights:
We cannot escape the way God designed us. (Only addiction gives us the illusion that we can.)
There is no escape from our design. We’re designed by God as feeling creatures who are spiritually hungry and craving. We’re designed to do one thing in this life, live fully. And we can’t live fully unless we are doing so in relationship with ourselves, others, and God. And being fully alive, expresses God’s glory.
“The glory of God is man fully alive.” Saint Irenaeus
A human being who is fully alive as God created us to be, is God glorified, because He created us to shape, make, do, multiply, create, serve, help, etc. It means to care when others quit; to continue on when others stop; and to walk when others lie down.
Where do we draw the strength and courage to carry on? It comes from God Who generously gives it to us. Given to us so that we can give it away to others. God made us to live like that.
Once we give ourselves to The Process, we have gotten off The Ladder. We are living in the River of Euphoria. The river takes us forward to becoming a Portable Sanctuary.
More on Euphoria River in Episode 18, “Living Fully in ‘The River”
FREE DOWNLOAD > River of Euphoria
What is “The River of Euphoria” or “Euphoria River”? Euphoria means “good bearing.” The River of Good Bearing. It means to bear life well. Live the good life. It’s a flow. It’s a promise. It’s a process.
The river is where we meet God’s faithfulness.
We want to live fully in The Euphoria River. This means we are moving in a particular direction, going somewhere specific. And it leads us to a place that is called a “portable sanctuary”.
Euphoria means “to bear well”.
Hyperphoria is an escape to action. It is anxiety-driven.
Hypophoria is an escape to apathy or escape-to-control.
Both hyperphoria and hypophoria are about escaping having to feel.
The Three Movements of living fully, that move us into becoming Portable Sanctuaries are:
Awaken-to return to or awaken to feelings, needs, desire, longings, and hope and imagine what can happen if you enter living fully again.
Acquire-gaining the skills required to live my passion and my purpose.
Arrive-you have become a portable sanctuary, a person who others can come to. You can relate to them, and they can relate to you. You can have your feelings heard and your needs addressed.
Once you awaken and begin to be in pursuit of the life you’re made to have, you need to know how to do hurt, sadness, loss, celebration, grief, hope, desire, needs, and fear; in other words, we live life as feeling creatures who have to struggle.
The Four Realities of living are:
Clumsy is as good as we ever get.
We have to live life on life’s terms.
It is all practice.
It takes a lifetime to learn how to live.
Acquiring the skills of knowing how to live on the river, is really about:
feeling your feelings.
telling the truth.
handing yourself over to the movements of the river.
This means that you’re going to have to struggle with trust. God owns the river, so you will have to struggle with having confidence in what God is doing. You’re going to have to trust that God knows what He is doing.
This kind of trust only occurs through conversation/challenge. So, we’ve got to be in conversations with God and be able to listen to what He says as we converse with Him. The Bible is full of people talking with God, and God talking back to them. It is called the Psalms.
While in the river, there are 4 Questions we can ask ourselves that allow us to trust where the river is going in order to keep us connected to others, connected to ourselves and keep us in the struggle with God.
Where are you? (Where are you emotionally? “I feel sad.”)
What am I doing with where I am? (I’m hiding out. I want to run away.)
What happened? (I dared to try something new, and I got laughed at.)
What was it like? (It was scary and lonely.)
REMEMBER… it’s the river that carries us along the way to becoming portable sanctuaries.
We live the Psalms, remaining in need of God, because we don’t own the river; we don’t own life. We’re not in control of life. We are, however, in charge of our expectations, but not in control of the outcomes.
“Behold, a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell by the wayside; and the birds came and devoured them. Some fell on stony places, where they did not have much earth; and they immediately sprang up because they had no depth of earth. But when the sun was up they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked them. But others fell on good ground and yielded a crop: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” Matthew 13:3-9 (NKJV)
Jesus says, Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving,” as a way to begin to explain the parable to the disciples. The intellect isn’t the answer. Isaiah 6:9 (NIV)
The parable Jesus says, means we must “understand with their hearts and turn and I would heal them.”
Matthew 13:15 (NIV)
We have to keep struggling with our own dreams, taking risks, being willing to feel feelings, be embarrassed, etc.
The third movement is arrive. In this movement, we never really arrive, we just get better at asking and answering the 4 Questions mentioned beforehand.
Unfortunately, many people have continued to age, but they haven’t gotten any better at asking questions or answering questions. Sadly, as a result, older people are often not considered thought-leaders today.
Tragically, Twenty-two-year-olds are today’s thought-leaders, and they don’t have the right to be thought-leaders. They have the right to think and feel. But they are asking too few questions. They are giving way too many answers without knowing their own hearts well enough to be able to be responsible with it. But, it’s not their fault; its old people’s fault for not mentoring and bringing them along and rowing back down the river and saying, “You need to know what’s coming. Let me tell you what happened to me, what it was like, what I did with it and maybe you could do it differently.”
Arrival is what we become through those questions; we become portable sanctuaries.
The river runs up to our last breath and still keeps going. Along the river, we become people who other people can go to in order to find a sanctuary. We become a place where people can experience replenishment and redemption with us.
Anyone who falls off the ladder, and crashes into the river, may think they are going to drown. But they don’t know that there are hands around them to pull them up and say, “You think you’re worthless now, but you just bumped into returning to your great worth.”
We are called to become people that others can go to and find safety.
A person who has become a portable sanctuary is a person whose garbage has become somebody’s blessing. They have known mourning and awakened to gladness, but they never forgot what it cost.
A sanctuary is where a person goes to replenish when they are empty, find redemption when they feel worthless, and find restoration when the storehouse is empty.
People who are portable sanctuaries are not only safe people, where you can go and experience somebody who can relate, but they are also people who understand daily life. They know that in the mundane is the miracle, and in the present is the gift.
Portable sanctuaries live daily life with their eyes on the future. They walk in faith more than they walk seeing where they are going, because they have experienced that their neediness is a key that opens the door that gives them strength.
People who become Portable Sanctuaries belong and matter by being of maximum service to others. They continue to learn about life by answering the questions we spend most of our lives running from: Where am I? What am I doing? What happened? and What was it like?
Our stories and the feelings that go with them are extraordinarily important. They give health and hope to others who have lost their way.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan, Luke 10:25-37
If you’re in recovery of heart, you are officially a Portable Sanctuary.
If you can feel your feelings, tell the truth, and daily risk trusting God in the process, you are a Portable Sanctuary. You have become a safe place that others can come to, and you are attracting those who are looking for life, by being yourself, as God created you.
Children can’t stop wanting their parent’s to be sanctuaries, so that they can have a place to come to instead of a world that will misguide them by handing them a ladder.
Parents, if you have handed your child a ladder, go to them and ask for forgiveness. Help them to begin to live cooperatively instead of competitively; because otherwise, your child will climb the ladder trying to prove himself or herself to a parent who failed the ladder. Because everybody fails the ladder. Everyone.
We’ve got to be great at taking so that we have plenty to give.
You can’t give what you don’t have.
Dr. Chip Dodd
Voice of the Heart Center