Posts Tagged: "Bryan Stevenson"

Celebrate The Victory And Embrace The Burden

Brian Dolleman - January 16, 2017 - Life With God, Uncategorized

My church celebrates MLK Day each year. Yesterday, our friend Tiffany Bluhm spoke in all three services. She’s an immigrant – adopted from an orphanage in Delhi, India and raised by a white family in an all-white community (for the first 10 years of her life). Tiffany and her husband Derek adopted their son Jericho from Uganda in 2013. She’s passionate about the subjects of race, reconciliation, and justice.

In the morning service, while talking about the Martin Luther King holiday, she said:

I hope you don’t just binge-watch HGTV tomorrow on MLK day. Celebrate the victory… and embrace the burden.

After nodding my head and saying amen, I took my bulletin and wrote down a short list of suggestions – other things to… Read More

Cops, Convicted Felons, Communion, & Church

Brian Dolleman - April 21, 2016 - Life With God, Uncategorized

*picture above: Barry (left) and Don (right) at church together last night

* * *

Cops, convicted felons, communion, and church… these concepts might, at first glance, seem like they are worlds apart, but if we pause and think about it long enough, we’ll see how beautifully they go together.

Barry shared his story at church last night. He committed a violent crime when he was 13 years old, was sentenced to die in jail – life without the possibility of parole. The youngest in our country to ever receive this sentence, Barry was placed in a Washington state adult prison at the age of 15. It is a miracle that he is out today. Because of the work of Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative, the laws have been changed making life without parole sentences no longer possible for children.

After serving 29 years in prison, Barry Massey was released because of these new reforms. He has never stepped foot inside a high school, and has never driven a car, having spent his teens, twenties, and thirties behind prison walls.

Don, a Seattle police officer who attends our church, was also at the… Read More

Maybe We’re Addicted To Bad News

Brian Dolleman - February 25, 2016 - Life With God, Uncategorized

I once heard Paul Scanlon say something like this:

A bad report makes it around the track 10 times before a good report gets around once.

Headlines aren’t made with sweet stories of love and peace and harmony, now are they? Maybe we’re addicted to bad news – so addicted that we can’t recognize what’s good, even when it’s sitting right in front of us.

The other day I stumbled across this headline: Today’s Teens Are Better Than You, And We Can Prove It. The article is online – and it’s interactive. You can select the year you were born, and it will compare your generation to this generation on things like drug use, sex, suicide, and weapons.

The bottom line? Today’s teens are better than you.

It’s shocking, I know.

We’ve been given a script and we bought in… Read More