The Grace of a Reset

Hi, friends, and welcome to the Weekly Dulin Podcast, a brief weekly reflection from Dulin United Methodist Church in Falls Church. Here, we take time to think together about faith, community, and what it means to live as disciples of Jesus in today's world.

Hello, Dulin Church. It's me, James Henry, your pastor, and it's so good to be with you today. I love coming and sharing some thoughts with you during the week. I hope they're helpful for you. If there are some things you wish I would talk about for any one of these Dulin Weekly Moments, Dulin Weekly Podcast, I hope that you'll take the opportunity to email me, pastordulinchurch dot org, and let me know what your thoughts are.

If you can think of some topics that might be especially helpful to you in your faith journey or some things you'd like for me to kind of open up or talk about in terms of biblical understanding or any of those kinds of things, I am always open to those things. So let me know. This week I wanted to talk to you as we're coming up on we've just come out of the Labor Day weekend. And oftentimes when I was growing up in the Commonwealth of Virginia, which is where I grew up, there was a law in effect that school could not go back in session until after Labor Day. It was a well, in any case, couldn't go back until after Labor Day.

And so everything leading up to Labor Day sort of was in anticipation of going back to school and Labor Day became sort of a reset. Now, are some natural resets every year for some of us depending upon who you are. Even in the church, I mean, we may follow the Christian calendar begins with the first Sunday in Advent and ends at the end of the Christian year in what is called Christ the King Sunday, the reign of Christ Sunday, if you will. That is a moment when the church sort of resets and enters a new Christian year. For many of us, we do a reset when it comes time for the turning of the year.

The turning of from 2025 to 2026, from 2026 to 2027 when a year turns. And for school students, churches, organizations, and maybe even for you, you've always kind of thought as the summer comes to an end and Labor Day comes, pools close, we move out of what we were thinking of as summer into the fall, it's a time to sort of reset, To take a look at things and to sort of set some new patterns. Maybe you've taken the summer, you've been traveling, you've been in different places. And this is a time to reset some of the priorities you had before. It's time to reset some habits that you changed over the summertime.

People often come back to church in the fall. They prioritize different patterns in their life, particularly if they have school age children that are in school. Or if they have college age kids, the kids have been home perhaps for the summertime. The young adults have been home for the summertime and now they're back in school and it changes the flow of things. Well, I'm here to suggest to you that as we come to this reset, whatever it is, and for us right now, I guess it's maybe it's not a reset for you, but I'm inviting you to let it be a reset in your life.

What are the things that you find yourself struggling with? What are the things that are in your life that maybe you were hoping to transform a change as we come into this fall season? Is there something you wish you reset? Maybe it's something about your spiritual life. Maybe you wish you could take some time every day to maybe read a little scripture, do a little devotional or have a small quiet time, a moment to meditate in the morning.

This is a perfect time to kind of take it as an opportunity to reset. There are resets every single day of our lives. We get up in the morning, we've had hopefully a good night's sleep or at least some portion of a night's sleep. And it's a new day that we get to engage with. The sun's come up again and we get to go out into the world or engage in whatever other thing that may not be out in the world in this day.

The opportunity to reset is an invitation to take stock of your life where it is right now, and maybe figure that little place in your life that you'd like to see some transformation. Now, when I invite you to a reset, what I need you to hear is something that I need to remind myself of and that is this. When you try to reset, when you try to find a new grounding by doing something a little differently, trying a new habit, looking at a new way of being, adding something to your life, subtracting something from your life because you want to reset your timings in life. This is not just another opportunity. I've said this before about other resets in life, but it's not just another opportunity for you to find something else to beat yourself up about.

Oh, I wanted to reset this but I failed. Oh, bad me. And no matter whether you found yourself kind of chuckling a little bit about me saying that, I even had an inner chuckle about that. The truth is so often when we don't succeed at the things we want to succeed at, when we do a reset, when we try something new, and if it doesn't work out, we point the blame inward on ourselves. We use it as another tool to think less of ourselves or to use negative self talk.

None of this resetting language that I'm using right now is about thinking less of yourself. It's not about adding something or subtracting something hoping it becomes a pattern. It takes apparently somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty eight days to set a new pattern in your life, a new habit. And so that requires a great deal of repetition to set that habit. But let's say you set the habit and two days straight you do it and then the third day you don't.

You get to choose in that moment, do I continue with this reset? Do I try it again tomorrow? Do I try it late in the day? Maybe you have a morning plan that you're trying to reset. A new grounding principle in the morning.

Maybe it's a five minute silence sit and you want to get that into your life, but the third day life got away from you. There's nothing to say that even though if you want to keep that silent sit but it's already the afternoon, there's nothing to stop you from trying it in the afternoon. There's nothing to stop you from trying again tomorrow. It doesn't then become, oh, I failed at this. I can never do this.

It becomes, what did I learn by having missed this morning reset, this plan that I had for today? What did I learn about myself? That when I've got a chaotic morning schedule, I am probably going to not do this exactly the same way. I will tell you a brief story about a habit that I was working on and developed in my life. And that was, this was ten years ago and it's still a part of my life.

I was adding Centering Prayer to my life. Centering Prayer is a form of meditation, Christian meditation. And I wanted to add it to my life. And so I began doing it every single morning after everybody left the house. I was at home alone, before I went into the office, before I engaged in anything else, I started my day after breakfast when everyone had gone with twenty minutes of sitting in silence, absolute silence.

And I did that. And then came the day that my normal timing for that was going to be disrupted by my needing to be somewhere at the same time that I normally do it. On that day, I got up an extra hour early so I had time to do it because by the time that came around, by the time this snafu in my scheduling came up I had found it was so important to have that morning sit that I couldn't miss it anymore. It had become so much a part of my life that I needed it. And because I needed it, I made a space for it.

In this case I made a space for it extra early in the day. There's nothing to have stopped me from making it later in the day. Here after Labor Day, you can reset your intention to be in certain places. What you might do, you know, I'm a pastor. So of course you're thinking to yourself what he's thinking is he hopes I'm going to reset my attendance plan at church.

He wants to see me every Sunday. If you find that edifying I would love to see you every Sunday. But what I would really love for you is to find the right grounding that will help you be transformed in your love for God and your love for humanity. Isn't that what the path of Jesus is all about? Jesus offers a group of disciples that we hear about in the gospels the opportunity to reset their lives.

They were all doing things. They were not unimportant things. Some were fishers and they were supporting their family by fishing and caring for their family in that way. And he invited them to reset their life and do something different, come and follow me. What does come follow me look like for you?

Because it's not just a one time claim on your life. You have to decide every day that you're going to come follow Jesus. And this is an opportunity to reset the things that you may feel may be blockages in that. So sure, it could be come to church this Sunday. And yes, we'd love to see you and you're welcome.

But it could be simply the need to find a quiet space in your life where God can kind of show up, an intentional quiet space where you assume a stance that's least resistant to God's showing up in your life so that when you're being least resistant one of those times, you may experience the presence of God in a new way. You may not, but you may. So what are you looking to reset? What do you hope to get from it? I'm inviting you to consider that.

I'd love to hear your responses. Please, if you have something you're going be resetting in your life, send me an email. I love reading it. Several of you actually respond to some of the sermons when I give you homework, you send me an email or you talk to me in person and say this is something that I saw something I did. And I love to hear about those things.

If this helps, let me know. If it doesn't help, also let me know. And maybe you have some thoughts about ways that I could help you on this journey of faith. After all, as your pastor, that's part of what I am called to do and I find great joy in doing it. Thanks for joining me in these moments together in the Dulin Weekly Podcast and the Dulin Weekly Moment.

Do you know we have reached 50 episodes together? We've done 50 of these together in my little over a year being your pastor. And it has been a great privilege to share these with you And the time does pass. So if there are ways I can help you, ways these moments could be improved or encouraged, please let me know. Otherwise, I wish you all the best on this and I encourage you if there are things you want to reset, give it a shot.

And if there aren't things you want to reset or you need some help resetting things, maybe you want some suggestions, someone to listen to you while you're doing that, you're always welcome to reach out to me and I'd be glad to listen and perhaps help you clarify what it is you're seeking to reset. Take this opportunity, let it be yours. Do it or don't do it, but let yourself find that path to renew your sense of connection with Christ in your everyday life. Thanks so much for joining me. I wish you all the best.