Thirty Years in Seattle

On immigration, belonging, faithful presence, & the slow education of beauty.

In the first days of August, thirty years will have passed since Lynette and I loaded everything we owned into a moving truck, hitched our rust-colored Oldsmobile behind it, left Chicagoland and graduate school in the rearview mirror, and headed west across the Badlands, through the Rockies, toward a life we could scarcely imagine.

I was twenty-six.

Like many twenty-six-year-olds of that era, I imagined I was choosing my future.

Thirty years later, I suspect my future was quietly choosing me.

We were leaving behind friends, a familiar Midwestern sensibility, and almost every certainty we possessed. We were not simply moving to another city. We were still in the process of immigrating. In my wallet was a greenish card identifying me as a “Temporary Permanent Resident Alien”—a wonderfully awkward phrase that somehow managed to communicate both welcome and distance. We were learning another country, another culture, another civic imagination.

We thought we were moving to Seattle to help plant a church.

We could not have imagined that Seattle—and Cascadia herself—would slowly begin planting us.

There is a photograph somewhere of our first apartment in Renton.

I remember almost nothing about the furniture.

I remember the light.

I remember the smell of cedar after the rain.

I remember standing outside and feeling as though I had arrived at the edge of the world.

It wasn’t only the geography that was unfamiliar. Immigration has a way of exposing parts of yourself you never knew were there. The road signs looked familiar until they didn’t. The grocery stores stocked brands I didn’t recognize. People spoke the same language, yet often with different assumptions.

I found myself asking questions I had never before considered.

Who am I when the stories that formed me no longer surround me?

Who am I when my humor, vocabulary, holidays, and instincts no longer quite match the room?

Who am I when no one remembers the younger versions of me?

I didn’t know it then, but these were not merely questions of immigration.

They were questions of belonging.

During that first year, Lynette and I rarely stayed home. We went to clubs, open mics, art walks, festivals, neighborhood gatherings, and nearly every party we managed to get invited to. We visited more than fifty churches. We collected handbills, folded maps, coffee shop napkins, and free weeklies like The Stranger and Seattle Weekly. Every so often we’d spread the whole pile across the floor of our little apartment, Lectio Divina style.

Looking back, I smile. It must have looked like chaos. But it was really a spiritual practice. We were trying to listen to a city. What did Seattle want us to know? What wounds did it carry? What stories did it tell about itself? What stories did it refuse to tell? Who did it celebrate? Who did it overlook?

We thought we were searching for a neighborhood and a church. Looking back, I realize I was also searching for myself. If I’m honest, I desperately wanted to belong.  The unresolved traumas of my early life rebranded as a church-planting calling.

The first year was exhilarating.

It was also lonely.

Family was fifteen hundred miles away. Every friendship had to begin from scratch. Every invitation felt like grace. Every goodbye carried a little more weight because there were so few people with whom we shared a history.

I quietly assumed that if I worked hard enough, loved well enough, and faithfully followed G-d, belonging would eventually arrive as a reward.

Crossing an international border exposed how fragile that assumption really was.

Belonging cannot be achieved. It can only be received.

Meanwhile, Seattle was becoming too. The city that welcomed us in 1996 is not the city I inhabit today.

When we arrived, Boeing still cast its long shadow across the region’s imagination. Grunge had helped place Seattle on the cultural map. Coffee shops were becoming neighborhood living rooms. Amazon was still a young online bookstore. South Lake Union had yet to become a forest of glass towers. The skyline itself seemed almost modest.

To help pay the bills while we poured ourselves into the uncertain work of starting a church, I took jobs in marketing research and technology startups. Like so many in those years, we believed the internet was opening an entirely new world.

Then the dot-com bubble burst. The startup collapsed. So did some of my assumptions.

I had quietly believed life was mostly transactional: work hard, do good, trust G-d, and things would generally work out. Life proved far less predictable.

It would not be the last time Seattle reinvented itself.

Over three decades I have watched cranes become almost as common as evergreens. I have watched neighborhoods transformed by extraordinary creativity and staggering wealth, while housing became increasingly unattainable for many. I have watched innovation flourish alongside loneliness, technological brilliance alongside profound inequality. I have watched the city become more global, more diverse, more beautiful in many ways, and also more fractured.

Cities, like people, are never finished. They are always becoming. Looking back, I realize my own story unfolded alongside Seattle’s. As the city changed, so did I.

Lynette and I arrived in the waning days of being newlyweds. Thirty years later, we’re still discovering that marriage isn’t something one accomplishes. It asks for continual listening, repentance, forgiveness, curiosity, surrender, and courage. She has loved me through versions of myself I hope never to become again. Whatever wisdom I possess today owes at least as much to her patience as to anything I ever did.

We became parents.

We buried dreams that never came to be.

We welcomed gifts we never knew to ask for.

We discovered communities that profoundly shaped us, and said goodbye to communities we imagined would last forever.

There were seasons when ministry was deeply meaningful. There were seasons when it broke my heart. There were seasons when depression settled over me like one of our long November skies. There were seasons when I wondered whether I still belonged in the work at all.

Some identities had to die.

The young church planter convinced he could change the world slowly gave way to someone more interested in accompanying people than impressing them. More interested in asking better questions than offering quicker answers. Less certain. More hopeful.

My vocation did not change as much as it widened.

One of the many gifts this city gave me was a home at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.

When I joined the faculty more than two decades ago, I imagined I would be teaching practical theology. I did not realize the students, colleagues, and institution would be teaching me just as much. Every trimester, new voices entered the classroom carrying stories unlike my own—stories marked by beauty and trauma, certainty and doubt, privilege and marginalization, faith and deconstruction. They kept enlarging my imagination. Again and again, I found myself leaving class with better questions than the ones I had prepared to ask.

Somewhere along the way, I realized practical theology is not primarily the application of theology to life. It is learning to attend—to G-d’s presence already moving within lived experience. The classroom became another neighborhood. Teaching became another practice of faithful presence. I arrived hoping to shape students. More often than not, they were quietly shaping me.

When I arrived, I wanted to help build a church. Today I find myself wondering what it might mean to help cultivate an ecology of belonging.

That shift did not happen in a single moment. It emerged through thousands of ordinary moments: conversations over coffee, classrooms filled with remarkable students, shared meals, neighborhood gatherings, liturgies, failures, protests, forests, grief, friendship, laughter, and wonder.

For thirty years these forests, mountains, rivers, neighborhoods, and the Salish Sea have quietly become some of my most faithful teachers. They continue to teach me that roots grow more slowly than dreams. That identity is received before it is achieved. That faithful presence is almost always more transformative than anxious productivity. That the deepest work of love cannot be rushed.

Much of what I now call Shalomic Imagination was first learned not from books but from this place.

Shalom gradually ceased being merely a Hebrew word or a theological concept. It became a way of seeing and inhabiting the world—an invitation to imagine flourishing not as my success, or even our success, but as the well-being of the whole ecology of relationships. Human and more-than-human alike. Salmon and cedar. Orca and moss. Neighbor and stranger. Immigrant and lifelong Seattleite. Child and elder. The flourishing of all and everything.

The same is true of what I have come to call Orthoparadoxy.

People sometimes ask where these ideas come from. The honest answer is that they did not begin at my desk. They emerged from trying to remain faithfully present in one place for a very long time. Seeing the same neighbors. Walking the same streets. Watching the same mountains through different seasons. Learning that love often appears not after paradox has been solved, but while we are learning to dwell within it.

Perhaps that is why I have become less interested in certainty and more captivated by faithful presence.

Not mastery. Presence.

Not control. Presence.

Not having all the answers. Presence.

The evergreens continue to teach me perseverance. The rain, patience. The tides, rhythm. The salmon, the courage of returning. The mountains, perspective. The Indigenous peoples of these lands continue to remind me that belonging begins not with possession but with gratitude, humility, and learning to become a respectful guest.

When we crossed into Seattle in August of 1996, I thought I had come here to make a difference. Thirty years later, I realize this place has made a far greater difference in me. Perhaps that is one of love’s oldest surprises. We think we are choosing a place. All along, the place has been choosing us.

The truth is, after thirty years I don’t always feel like I belong. Some mornings I still miss Canada in ways that surprise me. Some weeks I drive through neighborhoods I once knew and realize they no longer know me. Belonging, I’m discovering, may not be a destination one finally reaches.

But more of a practice of returning.

Perhaps that is why the salmon have become one of my greatest theological teachers.

They keep coming home. So do I… or at least aspire to.

As I look toward whatever years remain, I find myself carrying fewer ambitions than I once did and deeper hopes than I could once have imagined. I hope to become more rooted, more attentive, more courageous, and more loving. More faithfully present to G-d, to my partner, to family and friends on both sides of the border, to my neighbors, to my students, to this city and its neighborhoods, and to the fragile beauty of creation itself.

If these thirty years have taught me anything, it is this:

Belonging is never finally achieved. It is continually being offered. My work is finding the courage to receive it—to welcome belonging on its own terms rather than through the expectations my wounds have placed upon love. Can I trust the love already here, quietly wooing me toward life, relationship, and home? After thirty years, I’m still learning. Perhaps I always will.

Like grace.

Like friendship.

Like home.

Thank you, Seattle.

Thank you, Cascadia.

Thank you for teaching an immigrant that home is not merely where we live. Home is where, over many years, Love patiently teaches us how to belong.

Peace, dwight