Merry Christmas 2008

I definitely need to write an addendum to the previous entry! As I looked back in my files, I realized that I only skipped my annual Christmas letter last year - not the several years that I eluded to! And besides, we have so much to be thankful for in our family - I have no business whining about what DIDN'T happen. So here goes - a short family update letter complete with NO picture because I still haven't learned how to do pictures. I sent this out to our families and a few friends as well via email WITHOUT our wonderful Thanksgiving picture because, again, I didn't know how to make it work! Use your imagination. We look pretty much the same since you last saw us except we look younger!


CHRISTMAS 2008

Christmas greetings from cold, snowy, brilliantly white Minnesota! When I wonder WHY we live here (as you in warm climates are wondering), I just take a good look out the window at the unsurpassed beauty of pure, glistening white, and I know. Well, I know until I have to step outside and brave the icy winds and navigate the slippery roads. Some of you have never experienced pushing a loaded grocery cart through a nasty, freezing, slushy parking lot to your car. Salt does wonders to the beautiful white stuff in short order. But in spite of all of that – we still love Minnesota. Besides, how can one ever truly experience the wonders of spring without enduring the trials of winter?

Anyway, it has been a while since we’ve updated you on our family so here goes and I promise to be brief. Kids first:
Jodi and Tony are still busy with their respective jobs – Jodi teaching 7th grade reading at Valley View Middle School and Tony running his Grounds Control business. This year he has added snow removal to his repertoire and has had plenty of work already. They both are still very involved with the music and youth ministry at their church.

Mindy is working part-time at our church as an associate music pastor and part-time at Starbucks. She was recently asked to add missions to her responsibilities at church. She lives in an apartment just down the street from us and we love having her so close.

Jeremy is busy working at the Apple store as the concierge supervisor at one of our malls and is enjoying it very much. He is dating a beautiful girl named Jennifer whom we love and recently moved north of us to a little place on Lake Minnetonka.

Steve and Diane are both at home now – Steve on disability and Diane still teaching piano, doing medical transcriptions for Words to Go, and working a few hours at church helping out with childcare. She enjoys singing in the church choir and participating on a worship team about once a month. The highlight of our week is still One-by-One Tutoring – a ministry that now has over eighty children in it and seventy or so volunteers. We’ve seen many of our kids come to Christ already this year. There’s just nothing better than that.

Well, that about wraps it up. Thanks for all your prayers for us over the years – we feel them. May God bless you abundantly and fill you with the riches of the knowledge of Him. Oh, come let us adore Him! Merry Christmas!

Love, Steve & Diane

Things Will Be Great

I haven’t attempted to write a Christmas letter for the last few years because I just couldn’t think of what to write. A Christmas letter from the Dahlens was tradition – and I’m big on tradition. So to let it go was no small thing. Christmas letters are fun to write and to read when they are full of life and good things and blessings and progress. Much of the last three years or so, haven’t been that way for us. And who wants to read a letter full of illness and problems and struggles? Some people call Christmas letters “brag letters” and often they are –especially to those reading who seemingly have nothing to brag about. I find myself in that category once again this time around. I have nothing much to brag about in the natural. I did have a thought the other day though that might be worth sharing. Maybe from God’s viewpoint, the last three years for us have been the best of years – where He was able to accomplish inside of us something that would not have happened in any other way. You know “the worst of times, the best of times.” Sometimes I really believe that, when a surge of faith comes, as God seems unusually real in a prayer time or speaks profoundly through His Word or through a book or someone else. At other times, the difficulties of daily life seems to smother any sense of spiritual growth. I want to be a person who remains full of joy no matter the circumstances and I pray to that end. I’m not sure how to get there, but God is giving many opportunities to learn how.

Don't be mistaken. We have experienced wonderful blessings along the way. God has delivered us more than once from impossible situations. He has answered prayer time and time again.

And so, we come to the end of another year. I read in my journal the other day that at the beginning of it my slogan was “Things Will Be Great in 2008.” I really believed it and looked forward to God doing new and wonderful things. In reality, the kind of “greatness” I had anticipated did not come. However, I choose to believe that from God’s perspective, greatness did come in the form of changed hearts, growing faith, deeper trust.

Thank you, God, for a great year. Merry Christmas!