Oh, Glasgow!

Quiz time: What do bedbugs, yellow fever, Scotland, and Chris Thile have in common? I'll give you a moment to ponder while I wax eloquent about my love/don't-always-love relationship with this thing we call sanctification (also known as that occasionally grueling onslaught of divinely-doled-out life lessons designed to make Christ-followers more like Christ).

I think I've already established the fact that I'm a total nerd, so I'm sure it won't surprise anyone that sometimes, when my mind is idle, I kind of lazily flip through my mental dictionary and put words in little families. Not just random families, mind you. Oh no, I put them right where they belong. For instance, magnify goes with magnanimous and magnitude. They're all about things being big. And chronology goes with chronic and chronicle...all having to do with time in one way or another. And just now the word sanctification just flitted through my head and its little "sanct" family followed right along behind--sanctity, sanctify, sanctuary. And then it hit me! Sanctification and sanctuary! Hold your horses!

No, seriously, hold them, because I have to give you some background before I unleash this epiphany on you.

The last few weeks have been pretty rotten. Things keep going wrong. Oh nothing major, just those little irritations of life that, taken one at a time, are just a part of being human, but which, when they all flood in on you in rapid succession make you want to tear your hair out and curse the day you were born. Melodrama aside, the last few weeks have been difficult. Things in my apartment keep falling apart, and there are roommate issues, and bugs, and a few emotional blows here and there. Now, I have recently emerged from a particularly "productive" period of sanctification (read: my own personal hell on earth), and the result has been a deeper intimacy with God as well as finally discovering joy, and more recently hope, that doesn't depend on circumstances--which is a good thing since the circumstances of my life don't exactly look like I thought they would at this point.

So in the last couple of weeks, this person (me) who is joyful and full of hope in Christ, and who honestly believes that everything I face is filtered through the loving hands of my Father, has encountered what, in polite company, I call disappointments, frustrations, and difficulties--but which in my head I call (in a thick Glaswegian accent, of course) TOTAL CRAP. And how does this trusting Christ-follower deal with the aforementioned total crap? She, like a good little girl, continues to trust that it is all part of the plan and that as long as she keeps trusting and keeps obeying what she knows to do, all will be well. Yada, yada, and yada.

The problem with that approach, I discovered, after feeling inexplicably crappy for a couple of weeks even though I was trusting and obeying, is that while hope and joy are by definition immune to circumstances, the intellectual steadfastness they produce doesn't and shouldn't translate to the emotional stoicism I found myself trying to maintain. In other words, the fact that my brain understands that the difficulties are part of the plan doesn't mean my emotional side is capable of staring them in the face without feeling something. My mind was saying, "It's all gonna be fine," which is true, and my emotions were trying to say, "Yeah, I agree," but what they really wanted to say was, in the words of the famously eloquent Samir Nagheenanajar of "Office Space" fame, "This...is...a...suck!" Unfortunately, even though that's how my emotions were feeling, they didn't feel justified in saying so, because they knew, right along with my intellect, that things really were going to be fine. The problem is, my mind and my emotions weren't designed to respond to disappointments, frustrations, and difficulties in the same way. So when my emotions try for steadfastness through stoicism, they hamstring my trusting intellect, and the whole faith-horse ends up hobbling around in circles, fighting no battles, and not even giving the Hero a chance to get on. In short, an un-emotional, stoic faith is an impotent faith.

That's where the relationship between sanctification and sanctuary comes in. When I was younger, like, last year, disappointments, frustrations, and difficulties would have likely resulted in a demonstrative and probably fairly soggy pity party. But "sanctification" and "fairly-soggy-pity-party" are not in a word family together. Becoming more like Christ is, in fact, mutually exclusive with pity parties. "Sanctification" and "sanctuary" are part of the same family because they are a part of the same process.

When the hunchback, Quasimodo, looked out over the courtyard of Notre Dame to see a mob of angry Frenchmen rushing toward the church, hearts full of blood-lust, he frantically cried out "Sanctuary! Sanctuary!" He sought refuge in the church and refused to leave until the courtyard was quiet and safe.

Part of sanctification is learning to cry "sanctuary!" in the face of the total crap rushing toward my own church doors. It is acknowledging the difficulties, trusting that all will be well, hiking up my emotional petticoats, and running full-gallop into the refuge of God's unwavering goodness. Outside in the courtyard, I can trust that the Hero, sword flashing, is cutting down the bloodthirsty hordes and, oh, by the way, helping my steadfast, trusting intellect to use its sword too. Meanwhile, inside the door, my emotions should be turning all that freak-out energy into prayer, into a passionate cry for relief and victory over the mobs outside. The intellect was built to fight with the Truth; the emotions were crafted to fight with fervent, relentless prayer.
So the next time (don't forget to use the accent) TOTAL CRAP breaks loose in my courtyard, I'm going to let the different parts of me fight the way they were designed to fight. I will trust in the goodness of my God and His plan, and my intellect will not waver. And I will take the frustration and the irritation and that feeling that I'm drowning slowly from the inside out, and instead of having a pity-party on the one hand or attempting not to feel anything at all on the other hand, I'm gonna cry "sanctuary" and run with all my might to my Father's feet and turn it all into prayer. ...and maybe next time it won't take me weeks to get there.

***

And now back to the brain-busting riddle that I'm sure you've already forgotten about. What do bed bugs, yellow fever, Scotland, and Chris Thile have in common? They were all a part of my life this week! Bed bugs: one of the difficulties/frustrations I had in the last few weeks were bed bugs. We had a big problem with them, but I think they might be gone now due to copious amounts of bed bug spray, a little Vaseline, and strict adherence Mad-Eye Moody's call for "Constant Vigilance." Yellow fever: I was able to get my vaccinations for Uganda this week. It turned out that I only needed one shot and one set of pills, so the vaccinations were alot cheaper than I had planned for! Yay!

Scotland needs its own paragraph. I think I will save the Scotland ramble for another post, but suffice it to say, the Lord has spoken. He said, "Woman, you need a vacation." Far be it from me to deny Him, so I'm going to Scotland. Thanks to some very generous friends and family, I was able to buy my plane ticket to Uganda this week. I had planned on the ticket being a certain amount, and had already decided that I wanted to take a couple of days' layover in England (for reasons I'm sure I'll share at some point or another), so I planned to spend a little extra of my own money and stop over for a quick vay-cay. But lo and behold, when I booked the ticket, staying over in England actually made it a couple hundred dollars CHEAPER than it would have been had I taken a straight flight!! So I'm going up to Scotland, the land of fairy tales and men in skirts. What more could a girl ask for?

And finally Chris Thile. If you don't know who Chris Thile is, I truly hurt for you. Look him up. Former member of Nickel Creek--best band ever--current member of Punch Brothers. Mandolin virtuoso, musical genius, tortured lyricist. And I got to see him live for free this week. Seeing Chris Thile live is like drinking a warm cup of Earl Gray on a porch swing on a rainy day, wrapped up in a blanket, listening to distant thunder, dreaming of secret gardens and country lanes filled with honeysuckle. In other words, I'd highly recommend it. If you'd like an exclusive Amanda-recommended playlist, let me know.

And those are the haps. Long? yes. Informative? absolutely. Life-altering? I guess we'll know the next time total crap breaks loose!