shape

"Believe in the holy contour of life"

Jack Kerouac

embody

“If leadership fails to embody the message, no one is going to follow.”


Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch
The Shaping of Things to Come

thriving church

“The thriving church grows because growth is never its primary purpose. Mission is its primary purpose. Increasing participation and membership is a side effect – but it is an inevitable side effect. In the universal yearning for self-worth, inner meaning, and a noble destiny, people always discover that it is far more meaningful actively to give life away to the world, than passively to preserve life within the institution.”

Thomas G. Bandy from Kicking Habits

Coin

A few posts ago, Craig-Bob (of Out Of Fellowship fame), asked about the rogue row beneath my Fourfold Fitness table: Finances. He wondered why it was set apart from the main grid.

My answer was that the financial dimension began as a subset of Physical, but since it isn't physiological, per se, it seemed to warrant a separate row.

T-Wolf argued that “Finance is not a component unto itself but rather an intention zone of the cognitive + the attribute strength.”

Craig-Bob followed with the idea that "Financial might fall on a z-axis because it has attributions in each of the 2-dimensional cells […] defined.”

Michael C. brought in the notion of metrics, suggesting that money measures momentum in each of the sixteen zones. He referenced Jacob Needleman's book, Money and the Meaning of Life.

For now, it remains a fifth row in my provisional paradigm. At some point, however, I intend to incorporate an additional four-directional plane to the map. It describes the way I think of resources: Time, Energy, Money, and Affection.

Copyright Scott Burnett 2006

circus ride

The best circus rides are the ones that feel terrifyingly out of control, but are not -- the ones that have been engineered to be completely safe while simulating the sensation of impending disaster. We’ll pay good money for the thrill of careening toward annihilation, as long as the ride comes with a guarantee that all will turn out okay in the end.

Life doesn’t come with that sort of guarantee, of course. But according to Jesus, there is an Author who weaves our crazy fragments into a meaningful narrative. I need for this to be true. Daily, I re-surrender to the trueness of it.

Sometimes my world accelerates into the red zone, when my beliefs, my dreams, and my loves quake on the verge of disintegration. At those moments, I remind myself that all things fall into the hands of God -- nothing slips between those fingers, or spills over the edges. All things constellate meaningfully within the Creator’s cupped hands. And it will turn out okay in the end.

TRANS|plant|action|formation

Transplant Transaction Transformation

Look at God’s declared intent in this lovely couplet: the equation contains three additions and one subtraction.

"I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh."
Ezekiel 11:19, NIV

{PLUS} Integration (undivided heart)
Meaningfully constellating our fragmented souls

{PLUS} Inspiration (new spirit)
Breathing into us a second wind

{MINUS} Petrification (heart of stone)
Stone became set in its ways a long time ago
It would rather break than bend
It’s incompatible with breath and blood

{PLUS} Corporeal Reanimation (heart of flesh)
Flesh is pliable, vulnerable
And capable of growth
It’s a suitable habitat for life

absorption & transcendence

Self-absorption is a symptom of relational entropy.
It exacerbates fragmentation.

Self-transcendence, on the other hand, integrates the self within a greater meaning .
It paradoxically deepens identity and propels individuation.

"It takes all sorts to make a world; or a church. This may be even truer of a church. If grace perfects nature it must expand all our natures into the full richness of the diversity which God intended when He made them, and Heaven will display far more variety than Hell."

C.S. Lewis

miracle

"There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle."

Albert Einstein

Decipher

I currently have a crush on the word decipher because of the fetching poetry of its etymology.

cipher = zero; therefore, decipher = de:zero making nothing into not-nothing un-nothing-ing nothing

Here’s the thing: we communicate via symbols and gestures encoded with meanings. Until decoded (deciphered), our symbols and gestures are null and void of meaning. Zero communication occurs.*

The Jesus Story deciphers the Creator-Created relationship (which is arguably at the heart of human meaning).

Maybe the life of faith boils down to inhabiting the deconstruction of meaninglessness.

Go into all the world and decipher...

*[The continua of coding/decoding accuracy/inaccuracy would be a tantalizing tangent to explore...]