TheyCallMePastorBryan

Just the writings of your stereotypical pastor / programmer / writer. Bryan Dormaier is a leader of Sacred Roots, a small church in the Foster-Powell & Mt. Scott Arleta neighborhood areas. If you are looking for more information about what Bryan is doing or how you can help, click here

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Check out this link for a list of books I'd recommend and if you buy through that link, a small proceed also comes back to me to help me pay my bills!
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• May 13, 2013

  I’m excited for the release of the new Halcyon Project album by my friend Hannah Glavor and her band. The bass player in the video is my old roommate, Lucas.

• I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I’ve been thinking of one of the lines from the Great Gatsby:

  “I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”
  “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
  He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
  “I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.”

  In reading the novel, one thing becomes clear to me - everyone in the novel is living in their past, unwilling to let go of the ghosts that haunt them. Gatsby’s ultimate downfall is one of optimism - he can relive the past and with material excess he can make himself someone he isn’t.

  It seems to me that we are constantly tempted in two directions, both haunted by our past. One temptation is an irrepressible optimism that refuses to deal with reality and assumes that we are the only ones that shape our destiny. The opposite end, equally dogged by the haunting of our past is cynicism. Somehow the things that have happened to us have beat us to a point in which there is no hope, the world is a cruel place and it will always go against us.

  Somewhere in the midst of those two is where we live life, giving into neither naive optimism nor haunted cynicism.

• May 12, 2013

  a prayer for mother’s day

  I wanted to share a prayer that my dad wrote for his church for Mother’s Day. I may be biased, but I think it’s quite good.

  Lord,

  We thank you today for mothers. Bless them today as we honor them on Mother’s Day.

  We thank you for what mothers teach us about the heart of God, for most love unselfishly. They bind up the hurting and lift up the fallen. They train the next generation daily. They pray for us and long for us to be men and women of God.

  We pray for those mothers who are hurting today. Their hearts may be broken due to the death of a child, a miscarriage, or an abortion in their past; comfort them daily. I pray for those who are ill; give them strength for the day. I pray for those with hurting hearts because their children are not walking in your way; give strength to their mother’s prayers. For those who are victims of physical, emotional, or mental abuse—be a protector and a healer.

  Today, Lord, we honor all the ladies who are a part of this church family. we pray for the married, the widowed, the single ladies, and the divorced. Be with the youngest baby girl, the toddler, the elementary school girl, the pre-teen and teen-age young ladies. Raise them up as witnesses for you, and help them to keep their eyes on you, to choose rightly, and to follow your path.

  We pray for young women leaving high school, going to work, going to college, looking for adventure, looking for purpose, maybe thinking about a family of their own. Please help them to look to you for guidance. Help them not to run ahead of your plan. Protect them, Lord Jesus.

  Lord, there are ladies in this church family who have not been physical mothers. Some have chosen that path, and some not only did not choose that path, but expected a different one. Please be with them. Be their friend, and continue to walk the path of life with them.

  Encourage all women in our church as they express those God-given attributes and talents to all of us—in loving and teaching and helping and encouraging and ministering in so many ways.

  May we all take to heart that godliness is great gain. Help us to echo the words of Proverbs 31:30-31,

  “Charm is deceptive, and beauty does not last; but a woman who fears the Lord will be greatly praised.

  Reward her for all she has done. Let her deeds publicly declare her praise.”

  Help us all to praise and love and honor and protect the mothers and the ladies in our lives.

  Help us all to draw closer to you.

  In Jesus name,

  Amen.

• May 01, 2013

  

  Last year, an eight year old soccer lover named Atticus was diagnosed with cancer. His wish with the Make A Wish foundation was to play a game against the Portland Timbers. Today, he and his team, Green Machine got the match up of a lifetime, getting to play against the Timbers at Jeld-Wen Field. 3000 people, including many from the Timbers Army with their drums and chants and flags, showed up to cheer on Atticus and the Green Machine!

  Just another reason I love our city’s soccer culture.

• April 27, 2013

  

  Thank you mysterious light bulb note writer…

• April 26, 2013

  

  I spend a good part of the week with some friends at the Mt. Angel Abbey for friendship and solitude (a great balance for a spiritual retreat). Anyways, check out some drawings done by fcb4 this week. (Featuring yours truly in the top left)
  

• April 16, 2013

  My friends in Fallstar just released Backdraft, their first album since signing on Facedown Records. Here’s a lyrics video for one of their songs, if you like it go buy the album. They’re solid dudes!

• March 26, 2013

  Through social media and the internet we are constantly being met with more and more ideas and false standards of what it means to live a good life. Be it the overwhelming amount of opinions on food, politics, fitness, ethics, decorating, finance or whatever else. It is quite easy to subtly laden ourselves down with guilt at all of these ideas and ideals we are constantly encountering. I hear within myself and many of my friends a constant slow drip of guilt that there is some standard that we are not living up to - not being a good enough parent, not getting enough excitement or eating the right things, reading the right books or consuming the right media. We live in a time where we are too easily defined by the products we consume and the ideas we affiliate with.
  
  I wonder if in our time there might not be any better spiritual task than to refuse to let these things lead us into constant guilt and feeling as though we are not living up to some grand expectation. Could it be that to live the good life is as easy as understanding that we are accepted as we currently are? Could it be that maybe we’ve gone a little overboard in letting our opinions, what we do and what products we buy define us too much? I believe so.

• February 27, 2013

  

  A picture of our wonderful weeding crew at Our Happy Block on Sunday.

• February 13, 2013

  

  Allow me a moment to brag about some stuff connected with our little Sacred Roots project. If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll be familiar with some of this story, but I think it’s cool to see how it’s blossomed.

  About two years ago, Sacred Roots was looking for opportunities to invest in our part of town, and we believed that we had a really great opportunity to affirm and express our love for things going on in the neighborhood that were doing things to love our neighbors like we love ourselves. In the middle of that, we became aware of a project called Our Happy Block. Our Happy Block (OHB from here on out) emerged as a neighborhood driven project to fix a parking lot that connected streets and was serving as a cutoff, making the block much less safe for pedestrians. It was pretty much a large piece of asphalt, in need of love and repair. My now friend Terah Beth was frustrated with a lot of what happened as a result of the state of the parking lot and chose to try to do something instead of just complain about it. And with that OHB was born.
  
  Fast forward a couple years, and we’ve seen something like 4200 square feet of the sidewalk depaved and turned into natural plant gardens. We’ve seen neighbors band together to support work to better their neighborhood. We’ve seen a really cool mural painted on a building that helps brighten everything up. And as a result of all the hard work, we’ve seen crime drop fairly dramatically in the block around it.

  I’ve bragged about OHB before, but I recently remembered a conversation from the first time we showed up to help out with a work day. Somebody asked me a question along the lines of “so… you’re a pastor, huh? Why would you care about something like this?” My answer then and one I stand by now is “Well, I believe that when Jesus said love your neighbor like you love yourself he meant we were supposed to actually love our neighbors and I think Jesus would see a project like this as a great expression of that love!”

  To fast forward to the present, Sacred Roots has been graciously given an opportunity to have a gathering space in Calvary Lutheran(the building on the property where we’ve participated in OHB at). After a couple work days of clearing out a large collection of things, multiple trips to take things to Goodwill and recycling and 2 painting days, we’re close to starting to move in. The picture above gives you a glimpse of where we were before starting our painting day last night. I can’t wait to share the finished version and more stories of the life sprouting forth from our partnerships in the neighborhood!