The blog has moved…at least for now.

If you’re wondering why you’ve not been getting notices about new blog posts lately, it’s because my blog moved, at least for the time being, into the Patheos family of blogs. 

I’d love to keep dialogues going, and keep you informed of new posts, so if you’d like to subscribe to new posts and get an e-mail notice when they’re published, just go over to the new location (which is still accessed through richarddahlstrom.com ) and scroll down until you see a Subscribe by e-mail! on the right hand side.  Type your e-mail address in, and then you’ll be redirected to a different link where you’ll confirm your request. 

I’m grateful for each of you who read and respond, and hope you’ll join me in the coming year. 

Thanks…

I’ve moved!

If you’ve been accessing this blog through the raincitypastor.wordpress.com address, please change you bookmark to richarddahlstrom.com because that’s where all the future posts will be.  All the past posts are there too!  See you at richarddahlstrom.com!

A better story…on what to do with the rest of your life, and saying yes

(I’m happy to introduce my youngest daughter, Holly Dahlstrom, to you.  Her joy, courage, and love of people inspire me.  Her capacity to hear God’s voice and follow is a reminder to us all that “a better story” awaits, if we’ll but listen for the voice of our Maker and follow.  You can follow all her Rwandan adventures throughout the summer here.)

CEZ, OVC, ‘letter of invitation’, MOU, developing world, US Embassy, PEPFAR, cultural assimilation.

These are words I never expected to use in a single conversation.  Yet I found myself on the phone this morning speaking with the volunteer specialist for World Relief discussing the final details for my upcoming journey to Rwanda.  How did I find myself here?  The answer is simple.  To some the answer I will give is frustrating and naive.  To me it is merely the truth.  I would not have found myself using these terms on skype this morning if it had not been for God’s calling on my heart two years ago to do something very new.

I sometimes think that “call” is a term overused in Christian culture.  I always wondered how I was supposed to know if I was being “called” to do something or if I just felt like it.  Was God going to speak to me from the clouds like He seemed to do in the Old Testament?  Would it be through miracles and signs that I knew the feelings I was feeling were from God?  I truly never understood the concept of “calling” until I was in the midst of my own call.  One night I went to bed living my life as usual and the next day I woke up and realized that my life was never going to look the way I thought it would.

The world is wide…and cold: Advice to dads from one who loves being one

I don’t know where the line originates.  Maybe it comes from one of my children, who spoke to another of my children because they miss each other as they live their lives in Seattle, Germany, and soon, Rwanda.  Wherever it comes from, it found its way into this little exchange between two of them, and is at the core of an element in their intertwined lives that brings me great joy.

“Why are you so far away?” writes one.

“Because the world is wide and cold,” writes the other.  ”Alas.”

“That is sad…”

“Indeed.”

As Father’s Day approaches, I’ve much to boast about, in my opinion (and I’m not prone to boasting).  I love my three children fiercely, and have good relationships with each of them.  They’re all different, all beautiful, each displaying different facets of character – unique in their loves, joys, ways of living.  I’m proud of them and as this particular Father’s Day approaches, for reasons I can’t understand, I’m celebrating their lives and am mindful of the great privilege I’ve had to share my life with them for the past 26, 25, 21 years respectively.

But the dialogue that opened this piece is no doubt the matter in which I take perhaps the greatest pride, and joy because it tells me something very significant:  My children love each other; love each other enough that they long to be with each other, so much so that separation creates a hole.  It’s not tolerance, admiration, respect… it’s love.  And this brings me great joy.

Pentecost…empowered for what?

This is the weekend of Pentecost in the church calendar year, which means it’s the weekend we celebrate the church’s receptivity of the Holy Spirit.  Just a few short weeks ago, the entire journalistic world was cooing over the May 21 predictions of the world’s end, a subject to which Jesus spoke just before his physical departure so many years ago.  He made three things clear on that day:

1. Nobody would be able to predict the date of Christ’s establishment of the fulness of His kingdom.

2. Jesus’ departure would pave the way for the coming of the Holy Spirit, which would be the source of the power for the church.

3. The church would be “witnesses,” spinning outward from Jerusalem to far flung places.  This means they’d make Jesus’ character visible.

Well, it’s been two thousand years, and I’m thinking it’s time for a check-up.  I don’t think the power/witness thing is going so well.   Who can forget Annie Rice’s words last summer:

“For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.”

Brownie Points: Colorful considerations of race, class, and community

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.  —Plato

It’s true.  It’s also true that the ‘everyone’ of whom Plato is speaking includes me, and you, and each of us.  This makes his admonition all the more challenging because there are two edges to it: be kind…right in the midst of fighting your own battles.  It’s tough to be kind when I’m in the trenches, dealing with my own pains and poverty, be they emotional, physical, relational, financial, spiritual.  I need to work it out, get through it, overcome.  If you’re like me, that means focusing: on me, my pain, and getting rid of it.  Fixate on the pain though, and here’s the irony:  I’ll not only fail to find solutions… I’ll inflict pain on others, intentionally or unintentionally.

These weighty themes are artfully woven into a lighthearted comedy currently making its west-coast debut here in Seattle entitled: Brownie Points.  Set in Forsyth County (yes… of Forsyth County fame), the play gives us a front-row sit for the dialogue of five women joined together because their daughters are all part of the same Girl Scout troop.  They’ve come together for a camping weekend, and the moms are diverse: Jewish, African-American, divorced, and a WASP mom whose son is handicapped.  The mix is a blend of comedy and poignant, challenging realities waiting to happen—and they do.

Skinny Church – the wrong fast for a hungry world

If nutrition is a hobby of yours, then you know that something as simple and straightforward as eating food has dozens of conflicting schools of thought. Macrobiotic people swear by rice and seaweed. Paleolithic people think rice, and most agriculture for that matter, is from the devil himself. Vegetarians think meat eaters are cruelly killing animals, and, by eating meat, their own bodies.  Vegetarian Myth (a favorite book of mine) takes pretty much the opposite approach. Back in the day, low fat was all the rage.
Now it’s not low-fat, but good fat that matters. Milk will kill you. Milk is the perfect and pure food—you could live on it and nothing else!

Here’s what’s funny to me.  In spite of all the differing theories, everybody, and I mean EVERY. BODY. EATS!  What’s more, they all agree that real food is best.  Nobody’s fasting until the “right answer” is established as fact, because there’s a sort of intuitive belief that we don’t “know this” perfectly.  So we live into it—but all the while agreeing, even among the differing schools of thought, that real food is better than twinkies and chips, and that you should eat when you’re hungry, and stop when you’re full.  This is the basic stuff all foodies buy into, though there are chasms of disagreement under this surface.

The church ought to take a lesson.  

Glory, tragedy, and lessons…from the final minute.

It’s been the kind of spring that’s made me grateful to be a sports fan.  My soccer team has come with a couple of outcome changing goals in the final minutes of what we insiders call “stoppage time.” I’ve been waiting, since moving back to the Pacific Northwest in 1984, for Vancouver’s Canucks to win their first-ever Stanley Cup (that’s the big one, folks).  They too have scored last-second goals that moved them from the loss column to the win, most recently Wednesday night.  And then last night, the Dallas Mavericks rose from the grave in the last six minutes of their win over Miami, much to the delight of most of the country, for reasons beyond the scope of this post.  Last second—last second—last inning—last shot—last at bat—last corner kick.  Last header.  Three days after lying dead in a grave.  BOOM!  In a literal instant, everything changes.

But before the last-second victory, most of us have given up. We’ve determined the outcome, we’ve prophesied the end, we’ve turned off the TV, moved on.  I wonder how many people left the room on Wednesday with 18 seconds left in the hockey game, heading off to the kitchen or the bathroom, or out for a smoke, and missed one of the greatest ending in Canuck history?

Don’t find your passion—find your lover

what skills are needed to get to the future?

Graduation is in the air, and David Brooks’ excellent article about the wrong-headed speeches he’s heard this graduation season is a great jumping-off point for a very important conversation.  Brooks makes the important observation that today’s generation is entering a world of unemployment and an unprecedented convergence of challenges on several fronts.  But, as Brooks notes, “College students are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills, and they are then cast out into a different environment requiring a different set of skills, which they have to figure out on their own.”  In other words, having been raised in an educational zoo, today’s students are released into the “jungle” that is the real world.  What skills are needed to navigate this transition?

The preponderance of graduation speeches all follow the same flow according to Brooks:  ”Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.”  Of course the problem is that this mantra doesn’t work for anyone… Christian, or not so much.  This is because the hyper-individualism that built the American dream is presently running on fumes, as the middle-class disappears, prisons overflow, human trafficking continues nearly unchecked, soil erodes, water tables decline, and on and on and on it goes.  It’s not that there aren’t heart warming success stories here and there; but our commitment to follow our dreams and passions, and each of us following our own inner drummer hasn’t exactly gotten us closer to shalom.  There are other options: 

Messiah complex and conventional wisdom: a marriage made in hell

trying to do everything everyone wants is killing us

Two books found their way into my world this spring, and their convergence has helped me understand why so many pastors are suffering short tenures  (3-5 year average) and physical problems, and the battle each of us in professional ministry must face.  The books are The Time Bomb in the Church and Ignore Everybody.  The former is about pastors who have heart attacks because they’re doing too much; the latter is about creativity, which is a big umbrella under which many subjects can find cover, including “life management.”   Taken together, the two books have helped realign me, and though I’ve still some distance to before I can say I’ve achieved these things, these are truths that have risen to the surface to challenge me and most of my pastoral peers:

Truth #1: Notoriety is overrated. It saddens me when I read about “rising stars” in Christendom, because I’m fairly well convinced that the people who do the very best job representing Christ in this world aren’t doing it for notoriety, but simply, like Brother Lawrence, out of love for God.  I’ll be the first to share that challenges come about precisely when, for whatever reason, we’re granted a measure of exposure in the broader culture, because the temptation is to equate it with worth, even with wisdom.  That’s what our world does – but what our world does is wrong.  My favorite pastor leads a church that doesn’t even have a website.  He loves his community and his congregation.  He teaches well.  And he’s been there for over 15 years!  In God’s economy, the man’s work is golden.