The following explains the name of this blog and my story in a nutshell:
When I started loving Jesus at the age of 13, I was given a child’s shape sorter – that plastic spheroid with holes and blocks in different shapes. The kid is supposed to be able to match the shape of the block to the shape of the hole and deposit the blocks into the sorter swiftly so that mom and dad can proclaim to the digital universe that their child is a genius. Only, my shape sorter did not have four or five shapes. It had one. Let’s choose the triangle. So, I have a shape sorter with one hole – a triangle – and this is supposed to help me make sense of things and to love Jesus more.
This is really great because life, I was told, is full of triangles. Well, not exactly full of triangles. There are some triangles, but there are also occasional squares. No problem. I learned to cut the square in half diagonally, and now I have two triangles. Everything fits. What if a circle comes along? A little trickier and a little more work, but I can cut it into fourths or sixths or eighths, and each slice will be roughly triangular – like a slice of pizza. Everything fits. But then, maybe behind the scenes, the adversary puts God to the test, and God allows the devil to toss a star-shaped block my way. No worries. It’s okay because I’ve learned that the shape doesn’t have to fit well, it just has to fit in. I hold the star with a pair of long handled pliers over the triangle hole with one hand, apply a flame to it with the other, and I watch the plastic melt, acrid smoke ascending and molten polymer descending through the triangle into the bowels of the shape sorter in bright yellow globules. Everything fits. Life coheres. Jesus is loved.
This was the system I learned. This was how I was supposed to make sense of life and death, pain and suffering, good and evil, things in my own life that didn’t make sense, things I read about in an ancient Story that didn’t make sense. Everything has to fit, and, if it doesn’t, I twist and turn, reshape and redefine, sever and scorch, until it does.
I donated my shape sorter to a thrift store a few years ago. They threw it in the dumpster because it only had one hole and was filled with an amorphous plastic blob. Told me it wasn’t fit for children.
I left that child’s toy in the thrift shop dumpster and took home a book in its place. It was obviously used. It smelled like old paper. The cover called to me. Some kind of thin fabric stretched tightly over book bones. Stretched so tight I could see the strain in its fibers. Some of the fibers had given up or given in and turned upright, perpendicular to the cover, like a few of my eyebrows do toward the end of a long day. My wife pleads for me to excise these snarky rebels. I name them instead. The title was worn away, but part of the subtitle was still visible. “The Story of…” Surrounding these words was a ring formed by what I do not know, but I suspect a wine glass whose contents had runneth over. This brown circle betrayed its crimson genesis.
The pages of this book, oh, the pages. They are full of heroes and monsters, life and death, victory and defeat. They are full of creation and destruction, healing and affliction, courage and betrayal. They tell a story of redemption, restoration, and re-creation. Many of the pages are blank, but the story is not entirely unfinished. There is a lengthy beginning though it does not answer all of my questions. There is an end, fairly brief, saying little about how and when but a lot about Who. Most of the empty pages are in the middle.
It took me awhile, but I figured out that I am writing my story in these blank pages. My own heroes and monsters, courage and betrayal, redemption, restoration, and re-creation. Here there is no twisting and turning, no severing and scorching to make things fit. There is writing, reflecting, and maybe some rearranging. There are even exclamation points and question marks. It is not easy. I often do not know where to write what or how this fits with that. But knowing the end, and knowing that I have not run out of room, I am less compelled to force the middle to make sense. This is, after all, a work in progress. So, get rid of the child’s toy and pick up a good book. Because life does not come at us in shapes but in stories.
Shapes and Stories 