Hope and Laughter – Yours for the Thaw

April 20, 2012 By Richard Dahlstrom 2 Comments

thaw - the sun will win

I’m driving east today from Seattle, into the mountains for some R&R (Reading & wRiting).  I’ve been east often during this past ski season, often enough to watch the snow pile up, to watch upper story windows become encased in snow.  Up in these coastal mountains, most of that rain that famously falls in Seattle comes down as snow, creating tons of beauty.  Still, enough is enough, and one begins to wonder, with the white stuff still falling in late March, when this frozen beauty will be released to water the earth.

“It’s been coming down without sinking in – for months now” I think to myself as I ponder the parallels between this all this snow and our souls which are o-so-slow to receive some of that which we need to sustain our life of joy, and hope, and healing, and progressive transformation. We can show up day after day to hear God’s voice, but like so much snow, it can, and does, fail to penetrate our cold hearts.  We begin to wonder if it’s worth it, if all this ‘showing up’ isn’t just creating a big white out that’s killing our capacity to enjoy life.  It’s discouraging to people.  It’s discouraging to pastors too (who are also usually people, but you get my point).

“Nothing’s changing” we say to ourselves.  Circumstances?  Emotional blockage?  Cynicism?  Fear?  Shame?  Yep – still there.  “Screw this” is sometimes the next response as people head to the desert, metaphorically, where they’ll be released, at least, from the frustrations of expecting change, and finding sameness.  The desert promises nothing, if not sameness.  Yes, that’s where we’ll go – a little vacation from the God who showers us with snow. We call this backsliding for some reason.

I’m thinking about all this when I round a bend in the road and find, cutting right through the mounds of snow, a gigantic waterfall, relentlessly melting the frozen landscape to reveal a waiting earth beneath.  I smile.  “Spring”.  Then there’s another, and another, and another one after that – thick, powerful, eager, relentlessly melting to water the earth that’s been waiting since sometime last Thanksgiving for the life giving stuff.  My smile becomes pure joy, and soon I find myself, against all notions of propriety, laughing, and shouting “marvelous” right there in the car on the way to some R&R.

Yes.

Isaiah talks about all this.  “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, And do not return there without watering the earth And making it bear and sprout, And furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater ; So will My word be which goes forth from My mouth. It will not return to Me empty”.  I love that God’s word comes to us as rain, received fully by parched hearts that desperately need what God is offering us right in that exact moments.  I love, even more, that the Word comes as snow during those seasons when our hearts are to cold to receive.  We’re not ready, or willing, or able sometimes, to receive what God has for us.  Instead of vaporizing us in anger, I love the promise of Isaiah, that we can rest in the truth that the word comes as rain and snow.  Sometimes we receive it immediately, and sometimes not.  The thaw will come though, and when it does, there’ll be a few drops at first, but eventually it will be more – it will be a waterfall, refreshing and invigorating our parched hearts.

For Pastors, teachers, spouses, counselors, and all you caring types:

Keep pouring it on.  Keep preaching, serving, counseling, caring, loving – when people respond, and when they don’t.  You’re the cloud, and you don’t know whether your offering will be snow or rain in any given place.  You do know this much though:  The water won’t be wasted! When the time is right, thawed souls will be able to receive your contribution, one month or ten years later, or even fifty.  Relax.  Your just the cloud, pouring out the water.

For all of us:

I know about the frozen soul.  I know the value of showing up for coffee with God, even when the entire enterprise feels like a waste of time because my soul’s so cold.  I know, because the thaw always comes eventually, and when it does there are smiles, joy, laughter.  Nothing’s wasted after all!

God of all seasons

When our hearts are eager, you saturate us with your life giving truth, who is the Christ.  Thank you.

When our hearts are frozen, you appear as snow, which accumulates for later.  Thank you.

When our hearts are warm, the thaw begins, and the beauty, power, and abundance of it all can only make us sing with joy.  Thank you for this too.

May we keep showing up in all seasons confident that, whether we’re able to receive it in the moment or not, you too are showing up!

Amen

PS… check back tomorrow for more pictures of the thaw.

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , 2 Comments

Raw Gospel – Convicting and Challenging

March 14, 2012 By Richard Dahlstrom 1 Comment

In a book filled with stunning events, one that surely must rank near the top of the list is found, almost in passing, in John 13, where Jesus, just hours prior to his arrest and execution, washes his disciples feet.  That the maker of the universe would stoop so low is, itself, a shocker.  People of rank aren’t prone to embrace the towel and basin, not even in the best of times.  But on this night we’re given clues into Jesus mindset as he enters this evening, and it’s these “behind the curtain” details that put this event, in my mind at least, among the all time shockers in the Bible.  What did Jesus know that makes this even so stunning?

1. He knew that “his hour had come”, which means that he knew he was about to be betrayed, arrested, tried, beaten, and executed.  This, for any human (and Jesus was full blooded as the rest of us) would be devastating.  Think “death row” on the night of the 16th, and you know that the 17th is your scheduled death, know that this night is your last night, this meal your last meal.

2. He knew that Judas was about to betray him, knew that Judas knew many of the right words but that in the end he would sell out his leader for 30 pieces of silver and a kiss on the cheek.  It must be strange to know the human heart of another so well that you can see their darkest parts, hidden beneath a veil of piety, about to be poured out in hatred on you.

3. He knew too, that the rest of the disciples would all, to a man, flee from him.  In spite of his three year investment in them, he knew he was about to die alone.  They’d fall asleep.  They’d argue about who’s greatest.  They’d bitterly deny they knew him.  They’d flee and cower in fear.  “Well done Jesus… your graduates really get it”

To say that it’s a stressful night for Jesus would be the greatest understatement in the universe.  I don’t know about you, but stress doesn’t put me in the mood to wash other people’s feet.  My favorite response to stress is to take a nap, or go to bed at 8:30, or listen to Sigur Ros, alone in front of the fireplace.  I’m in withdrawal mode.

Say, though, you’re an extrovert, the type who’d want to be surrounded with your closest friends on the night before your arrest, unjust trial, beating, and execution.  I wonder, would you want these friends?  Judas will sell out.  Peter will melt in fear.  They’ll all fall asleep in your hardest hour.  They’ll all flee you when you’re arrested.  You want these people at your last party?

I didn’t think so.

Jesus does though, and not so that he can give them a piece of his mind and expose them for the shallow frauds that they’ll appear to be before the sun comes up.  He invites them and then, knowing all that’s about to come down, gets up from the meal, takes off his robe, wraps himself in the towel of a servant, and washes the feet of his followers.  They’re arguing about who’s greatest.  He’s washing they’re feet.  They’re clueless regarding the events about to unfold.  He’s in tune with his own impending agony.

Anyone else would have given them a lecture, or a beating, rather than a foot washing.  Or they would have asked for a “little sympathy for God’s sake…” exasperated over their callous self-seeking natures.  Or they would have kicked them, locked the door, and drank all the wine.  Not Jesus – He serves people who he knows don’t get it.

How can he do that?

It’s too glib, too easy, to simply say, “he was God” as if that settles everything, because the fact is that he tells us to behave exactly the same way.  We’re to serve one another, even when those we serve aren’t worthy of being served at all because of their blindness, stubbornness, arrogance, or whatever.  Further, we’re called to serve not just when we’ve “bandwidth”, but apparently also when we don’t feel like it.

Now this is really getting to be too much.  Serve people who don’t deserve it... when I’m so filled with my own pain that what I really need is a little more “me” time? Be real Jesus.

He is being real.  He’s telling us to be ready to serve, both when it energizes us and when it doesn’t, both when we’ve warm feelings the recipients of our service, and when they annoy us.  That’s the essence of what it means to make God visible in this world, because that’s how God made Himself visible in the world most clearly.  I’m challenged by Jesus’ example of the towel and basin, chastened with the awareness that I withdraw from serving at times, both because “I’m wiped out” and because “they don’t deserve it”.  I rarely use those phrases precisely.  I talk about boundaries and enabling instead.  Those are two legitimate principles for all of us who work with people must invoke to serve will, but which can also be used to baptize our own selfishness and pettiness at times. What Jesus is saying is true service needs to happen even when you don’t feel like it, and should be offered even to people who don’t deserve it.  That’s the gospel.

There’s hope though, because in this same passage, Jesus shows us how a proper state of heart can empower us to serve like this.  That, though, is for another post.

O God of the towel and basin;

Thank you for showing the centrality of serving through your astonishing last night before your execution.  Grant us eyes to see that you not only did this for us, but that you’re calling us to live this with you.  I confess that I fall short too often in this central principle of serving.  I withdraw out of weariness.  I withhold out of frustration.  I need your Spirit if I’m to grow here.  Guide me along this path I pray, thanking you that I can ask with confidence, precisely because you serve your people on the basis of your love rather than our worthiness.  In your great name I pray….

Amen.

 

Filed Under: Inhaling, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , 1 Comment

Loving People, Losing Life – The Gospel made Real

March 6, 2012 By Richard Dahlstrom 9 Comments

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone.  But if it dies, it bears much fruit. Jesus the Christ

Jeremiah Small was a student who attended the Torchbearer Bible Schools, the family of schools where I am privileged to teach on a regular basis.  Jeremiah was teaching in Iraq until last week, when he was killed by one of his students, before turning the gun on himself.  An e-mail I received from one of his friends remembers Jeremiah this way:  He did much more than spread the gospel, he trained individuals to seek truth.  Seeing truth is something that Jeremiah did unlike anyone else. He committed his whole being to knowing God and wrestled to know his character with exemplary  diligence and faith.  In this news video Jeremiah’s dad speaks of his son’s life, of his passion to live life generously, courageously, fully, even if such commitments meant a shorter life.  He was 33.

I was moved by reading the perspective of a Kurdish student in this article from the Kurdistan Tribune, where he wrote:  In the classroom he taught his students a love of Literature and Humanities and encouraged them to always look for truth and seek knowledge; he spent all of his energy and time teaching, mentoring, and giving. Most importantly, he encouraged his students to pursue education as a way of giving back to their community; he was himself a servant leader and wanted to see more servant leadership in our country.

In the community he was a faithful and friendly expatriate. He cared for Kurdistan’s nature, environment, traditions, and way of life. A camera slung on his shoulder, you could spot him walking down of Mawlawi Street in his Jili Kurdi with his colleagues and students during Nawroz. He was no regular teacher; he was a mentor with immense God-given capabilities.

Our world is obsessed with economics, upward mobility, and security.  Here’s a man who cared for none of these things.  Our world is filled with arrogant pontifications, both political and theological, with acidic language becoming so commonplace that my soul’s nearly numb.  Jeremiah, it appears, didn’t care about any of it.  He  just got on with loving the people around him, challenging, serving, blessing.  On the day I read of his death, 60 minutes had yet another stories about hundreds of boys abused by priests, making me nearly throw up.  Jeremiah met people and helped them become whole.  His death comes right in the midst of this Lenten season when I’ve left behind any writings about politics and divisive issues in order to focus on one single question:  What does it mean to identify fully with Christ? Jeremiah’s life and death shed light on the answer:

Following Christ means emptying oneself. This is what sets the gospel apart from everything else I’ve ever seen.  Real faith is not some path to upward mobility, or downward mobility either for that matter.  Real faith means so fully identifying with Christ that we, like him, empty ourselves of self-seeking, self-promotion, self-preservation.  Philanthropy gives off the top, out of the margins.  Philanthropy’s good, but it’s not the Christian life.   Christ gives everything, lavishly pouring out his very life for a broken humanity, and then invites us to follow His example, noting that only those who are pouring their lives out will really find the life for which they were created.  This is paradox.  This is the core of the gospel.  In an age where the core’s gone missing, where the gospel has become “self improvement” instead of self-emptying, Jeremiah’s example shines.

Following Christ means loving. One of his students wrote: For me personally, Jeremiah Small was both a teacher and a friend. After my parents, he contributed the most to my personality and knowledge. He taught me how to turn my vision into reality and challenged me to be diligent, observing, meek, organized, and detailed.

He was also a great friend outside of the classroom; we went on numerous hikes, trips, and other outings. God knows I would not be who I am today if it was not for him and what he presented to me. I am sure hundreds of his other students feel the same way.

Jeremiah’s life and ministry of loving his students deeply, sacrificially, unconditionally, stands in stark contrast to too much of what passes for Christianity these days.  I’m chastened, humbled, challenged, by his example of delighting in his students and serving them tirelessly, for this, in the end, is the essential ingredient to making God’s good reign visible in world.  I see this love in my daughter and her work as a teacher in Germany.  I see it in friends who are caring for spouses and parents during their last days.  Would to God that all of us would grasp that this simple posture of sacrificial love, of delighting to serve the other in Jesus, is the most powerful force on the planet.

But alas, the pricetags have been switched, and the Christian machinery of the West has created a “faith” that adds activities, books, radio stations, camps, and the endless words of sermons to our lives, without necessarily calling people to empty themselves, follow Christ, take up their cross, and love deeply.  The results are loud – but not pretty.  Thank God for the Jeremiahs of the world who, without fanfare, are getting on with the work of serving and loving in Jesus’ name.   May the death of Jeremiah cause their tribe to increase.

O God of life;

You call us to pour our lives out as a sacrifice, promising that those who “lose their lives” for your sake will find them.  Thank you that Jeremiah found his life, found his true voice, found deep joy, by emptying his life.  Now, having paid the fullest sacrifice in his service to you, I pray that the example of his life will continue to “preach Christ” for generations to come, and that we who knew him in life, or only just now in death, would follow you fully as a result.  You point us to the cross, and now Jeremiah stands beside you, counted among the millions who’ve gone before to show us the way.  This is our hope and joy.

Amen

 

 

Filed Under: church, intimacy, leadership, life Tagged With: , , , , 9 Comments

Cultivation – Freeing ourselves from “the latest and greatest”

February 29, 2012 By Richard Dahlstrom 4 Comments

I normally teach in Germany at the end of November, when the harvest has just come in and the farmers are taking a break.  This year, though, I’m privileged to be in this agrarian region of southern Germany (wine, apples, honey, plus much more) at the end of winter and the farms are anything but sleepy.  The vines are being trimmed.  The soil is being tilled, as I encounter numerous tractors on my morning run.  Folks are in their yard gardens, prepping, planting, trimming, cleaning, turning the soil.

I ponder, while I run, that this work, more than any, sustains life for all of us.  We can do without most things in our lives – bankers, i-phones, facebook, sleek new jets, lawyers, preachers, bloggers, even the internet itself.  But trying living without the harvest that comes from the soil and see what becomes of your life.

In spite of how vital the work is that’s going on all around me as I run this morning, the truth is that this is wholly unspectacular stuff these people are doing.  They’ll never end up sitting on piles of cash because of it.  They’ll never know the adrenaline rush of an IPO or new product launch.  They wake up each morning and get on with it, each day a familiar rhythm, each season with its own unique chores – the sun comes, the sun sets.

“Dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness” is what David invites us to do in Psalm 37, and wiser words couldn’t be spoken, ever.  The words make more sense here, among the farmers who are dwelling and cultivating, than they do in my urban home where buying, selling, mobility, and words like “extreme” and “fastest” and “biggest” elicit admiration from a culture where the price tags were changed while we were all sleeping.  We digest Tebow mania, and then the Super-Bowl, and then Lin-sanity, and in between we argue about church discipline, and the roll our eyes when Romney coos about Michigan because their trees are just ‘the right height’.  I sometimes think we’re addicted to distractions – on an endless quest for the ‘next big thing’.  Yuck.   The whole pursuit leaves our souls barren.  Meanwhile, farmers everywhere are waking up and doing what needs to be done; without fanfare or adulation.  They have a word for that, and its a word we’d all do well to build into our lives as a priority:

Cultivate -

I’m reminded, as I run through these fields, that crops don’t grow themselves.  A fine red wine, enjoyed with friends over a lingering supper, is the climax of a process that began years, even decades earlier, when someone married vine to soil.  You can bet when they did that, nobody was there to cheer them.  Neither was it “extreme” or “epic” when the first shoots were trimmed, so that all the energy could be challenged into the ultimate goal of it all, which is fruitfulness.  The sun comes up.  The sun goes down.  Another day in the vineyard.

I think about what it means to cultivate my life with God and my calling, and I’m reminded of Hosea’s exhortation to “sow with a view to righteousness, reap in accordance with kindness; Break up your fallow ground, For it is time to seek the LORD Until He comes to rain righteousness on you”  The thing about breaking up soil is that it requires focus on what’s right in front me in the moment – this heart, this family, this calling.  Thomas Merton warned that our attempts to magnify our influence and sphere of influence would backfire on us.  He wrote:

“To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects … is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism … kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

“the root of inner wisdom” I love that phrase.  It reminds me that Christ has been planted in the soil of my heart and that I’m the farmer.  I need to cultivate the soil of my heart so that the root of inner wisdom (which is the spirit of Christ in me) can grow.  Merton reminds me that a diffused life, torn in a million different directions and pursuits, cultivates nothing.  Such is world, too often.  We’ve become a people addicted to trivial knowledge, but lacking wisdom; acquainted with multitudes on social media, but known by too few.  As a result, we’re often bored with the daily-ness of living, because we’re unable to see that it’s this glorious rhythm of cultivating faithfulness that creates the conditions for us to be people of blessing and hope in our world.

Am I willing to show up faithfully, nurturing relationships with God and others, using my gifts in small unnoticed ways, serving without fanfare, praying in my closet, giving in secret, washing windows and dishes, listening to a student in need during my week of teaching, turning off the computer to say a prayer of gratitude to God during a spectacular sunset?  I hope so.  I pray it will be so.

God of the soil;

Thank you for this season of preparation, with farmers caring for their fields faithfully, day after day.  Bless the work of their hands.  May their testimony of faithfulness, their delight in faithful nurture, their fidelity even when nobody is looking, shape us as we care for the soil that is our hearts and lives.  Forgive us for our addiction to the spectacular, for our insistence on big results and impact.  Grant that we, yoked with your life, might learn that value of faithfulness for its own sake, leaving the scope of fruitfulness entirely in your hands.

Amen

 

Filed Under: church, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , 4 Comments
« Older Posts