The Little Yeses

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, friends and family, people who are part of us, people who stumble upon us. It's good to be with you. I'm James Henry. I'm the pastor at Dulin United Methodist Church in Falls Church, Virginia. And I'm just glad to be with

you today.

We're in the midst of a season in the Christian year that is called Lent. It is a preparatory season for the season of Easter. And it mirrors the forty days and forty nights that Jesus spent in the wilderness. It's an opportunity for soul searching. I've described it as an opportunity to seek realignment.

In fact, on the at the Ash Wednesday service I talked about it a lot like when recently well, in the last year Linda's car had a problem as we were driving on the Beltway in Baltimore. Tire blew out and we discovered ultimately that we were slowly destroying or ruining the tires because her cars, the wheels on her car were so far out of alignment. So, we took it to a shop and it was pretty easy, pretty simple. They measured the alignment misalignment and then realigned all the wheels so that they all pointed in the same direction at the same time, the correct direction as prescribed by people who made the car. And I compared lent to a season when we would bring ourselves back into that same kind of alignment.

But I want to say this because that's a wonderful metaphor until it breaks down. And all metaphors about the spiritual life probably almost always break down in some way. They're not complete because our lives are so infinitely varied that you can't pick one metaphor that will always speak to it. So, when you think about wheel alignment on a car, it seems like something mechanical. You just adjust this, if you turn that, there are probably specific items I don't know about when they align cars that they move around and adjust.

But it sounds as though it's something that's relatively easy to do. You take it to the right shop, you find the right expert and they will adapt it for you. I want to say that realigning our life during Lent is perhaps a bit more complex than that. And it doesn't always it's not always as simple as you take something in to the shop and when you get it back out, there's an immediate improvement. And a noticeable large improvement in the case of driving Linda's car after it was realigned.

For us as human beings, realignment during the Lenten season is a series of what I like to call small yeses. It can be a small no as well, but we're not making major course corrections. We are learning. Some of you are learning during the Lenten season by fasting from something specific. You've given something up.

You know, I always hear or have always heard things like giving up chocolate. I told you about a friend before who gave up beer. And you know, it's an opportunity. Also people who add things. You're trying on new patterns and seeing what they're like.

But, and sometimes you're succeeding and sometimes you're failing at whatever those patterns may be. What I want to say to you is you don't always have to make grand gestures. In fact, most of the time our lives are not made up of grand gestures. They're the small yeses we say when we stop to talk to somebody who might need to hear from us, reach out, call someone. When we treat each other with dignity and respect and not dehumanize one another, those little things, the little yeses that we say in our lives do as much if not more to correct our course than the big grand actions.

In fact, the little yeses may in fact be what empower us to say the big yeses later on down the road. Little yeses just begin to shave away some and some of the ingrained practices from our life. The recognition that we need to change, but we can't change everything all at once. We have to begin to change the little things, little habits, little practices that we carry in our lives. And so if you've been looking for the grand gesture that would really make your Lenten season.

I am inviting you to step back from that. Maybe you'll find one and maybe you'll correct me and send me an email or give me a call or talk to me after a worship experience on Sunday morning or after some other event. But what I suspect you're going to find is that instead of those grand gestures, it's the little times that you know you're just, you're tired, you know you're tired, but this one little thing could make all the difference. This one yes, as hard as it is, as challenging as it is at your own energy level, be just the thing to help you realign. The same may be true that you've reached the end of your day, the end of your energy level, and maybe the little no will be exactly what you need to say because you need to protect that little bit of energy or because you realize that what you have to give is not enough.

It's not something that's immediate or important in this moment, and that it can wait until there's a higher energy level later, tomorrow or some other time. These are the kinds of choices we get to make in our lives and they're not always easy for us, but, it's the little yeses that will begin to slowly change things, slowly. You know, the course of the Colorado River that carved out over millions of years the beautiful Grand Canyon changed gradually over time. Heavy rains pushed it one way. You know, a dry season could force it to fall back into other different beds.

It's constantly moving, constantly changing in little ways, even ways that are imperceptible to the human eye unless you take time lapse photography over a period. And those are the same kinds of things that happen in our life. It's not a mechanical check these boxes, pull out these exact right wrenches and move some things around and everything will be straight. Instead, it's testing the nuances of your connection to God, testing the subtleties of your connection to people you already love, people you're just meeting for the first time, and other people that you just run into when you're out shopping or at work. Those subtleties, those small yeses and perhaps small noes are an opportunity for you to discover more about what it feels like to be aligned with God.

At the end of every day, you can take stock about the small yeses and the small nos. And what you may be surprised to discover is it was those small yeses when you felt close to God. It was those small nos when you felt close to God. Not in the big grandiose moments, they weren't necessarily mountaintop experiences, but as you're reflecting on your day, examining the day that you've had, looking for the moments when you felt closest to God, looking for the moments when you felt furthest away from God, you might find in those moments that those moments are shaped by the little yeses and the little nos. So as you think about aligning yourself and we're not that far into Lent.

This past Sunday was only the second Sunday in Lent. We still have Sundays left to go. We've just made our way into March and it's at the very March that we will celebrate Palm Sunday, and so you have a little bit of time and Palm Sunday is still a part of Lent. So as we move in that direction, as you seek to realign your life, look for the little ways, the little things you can do to realign. If those things that you've given up or taken up in this season are part of that, great.

If they've already fallen by the wayside because they didn't quite speak to you in the way you thought they would, perhaps it's just an opportunity to try to say, who am I really? What yeses do I need to say, little yeses? What ways do I need to cooperate with God? What ways do I need to say no to draw boundaries to be clear? Because those may truly shape and realign you in the ways that you least expect.

Give it a shot. As always, it's good to be with you, and I wish you all the best on this journey, this Lenten journey if you will, of discovering more and more about how to be aligned with what God hopes for in your life. Wishing you all the best until the next time I see you my friends.