Mis-shapes III: Live free or mis-shapes

(Die Hard 4.0)

At this point, from where i stand right now (sit), the great potential strength of what lifeshapes offers could fall victim to its greatest weakness. I've mentioned in a previous post that the intention behind lifeshapes is to bring balance and focus to Christian living.

In brief (very brief), The shapes are thus:
Circle - the stages on the circle offer a means of learning. You follow it through a process from reflection to action.

Triangle - says that our life should be an appropriate balance of up, in and out. Ie. relating to God, our own well being and our ministering to others.

Square - this is about identifying the phases we go through when we're learning and following something, and when we're teaching and leading something.

Semi-circle - (Weak) Still unclear on. Something about rhythms in life, times to be busy, times to rest, times to be missional, times to foster care in the Church.

Pentagon - Not pentagram, as some of the bad lot i fell in with were calling it. 'Five fold Christian ministry' Pastors, teachers, prophets, apostles and evangelists. (bit desperate if you ask me).

The thing is this, to a point the shapes and the processes they represent work. They poke and prod us and ask questions about how we live, how quickly we jump to decisions, how we're gifted, why we feel the way we do (and all of those things before God) etc. It's those questions that matter and the thought that goes into responses to them. The problem is that they come in the guise of a system. So, to people who like answers rather than wrangling with questions; for people with quite modernal outlooks on life; and for people who deal with their faith in quite boxy, clear-cut, right-wrong definitive terms, there is a huge temptation to fit, or make fit, everything, including themselves, into this system. When that happens it loses its power because in some senses it's a system that's not intended to be fulfilled. Its job is done as soon as it's got us to think, it doesn't require us to come back to it and squeeze back in all that it got us to think about. If the whole time you're working with the questions lifeshapes throws up you've got one eye on making your thoughts fit back, you'd only be stifled in that thinking.

Hence my constant referring to it as mis-shapes; we don't fit, life doesn't fit, we can't make a system which is whole, accurate and exhaustive, but, it does still acknowledge it as a thing which may be useful. The mocking of it basically keeps it in its place, where it serves us, not the other way around.