Lollipop Moments

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou

There’s a TED Talk by this motivational speaker Drew Dudley called “Everyday Leadership” that I’ve probably watched at least half a dozen times—in classrooms, at conferences, in those years in my teens and early twenties when you’re just trying to figure out what kind of person you’re becoming.

In the talk, Dudley tells a story about his last day of college. A girl comes up to him and tells him, “I remember the first time that I met you.”

And then she tells him a story that happened four years earlier.

She had just arrived on campus, and she was sitting outside with her parents, absolutely convinced she was going to quit before she even started. She remembers feeling this wave of panic—like she had made a mistake, like she wasn’t ready, like she didn’t belong there.

She was so sure of it that she actually turned to her parents and told them she needed to go home.

And right at that moment, Dudley walks by.

He looks at the situation, sees this nervous student, and instead of ignoring her or just moving on, he does what can only be described as fully committing to the bit.

He’s got this ridiculous hat on, he’s running this campus charity table, and he just leans all the way into it.

He pulls a lollipop from his bucket, hands it to someone nearby, and suddenly turns this quiet, anxious moment into something loud and slightly chaotic and very embarrassing in the way only campus orientation events can be. Everyone bursts into laughter.

And in the middle of that laughter—this unexpected, ordinary moment of being included, being noticed, being part of something instead of alone—something shifts for this girl.

Not everything. Not magically. Not perfectly.

But enough that she doesn’t leave.

She stays.

And she tells him, years later, that that moment became the reason she made it through her first day, and year, then her degree, and eventually built a whole life she almost walked away from before it began.

It’s a really sweet moment. This “lollipop” moment. But my favorite part of this story is when Dudley admits… he doesn’t remember the moment at all. For him, it was just an ordinary day. He was being silly, handing out lollipops, cracking jokes left and right. That interaction was just one small moment in a long, busy day. But clearly, for her, it was enough to change the direction of her life.

And I think about this story a lot because I’ve had my own version of it—both sides of it. Moments I barely remember that someone else has told me they still carry. And moments where I was the one holding onto something someone else probably forgot as soon as it was over.

I'm guessing that's true for many of you, too.

If I asked you to think about the people who changed your life, you would probably come up with parents, teachers, partners, friends. But if I asked you to think about the moment they changed your life, if you can remember the moment at all, I suspect a lot of those memories would be surprisingly ordinary.

My long-term childhood friend and I became friends because one day we realized we were wearing the exact same Old Navy skort. At the time it felt almost laughably insignificant. We were just two kids excited to have something in common. But that tiny moment grew into a friendship that lasted years.

When I was a freshman in high school, I interviewed our student body president for the school newspaper. Somewhere in the conversation she mentioned, almost in passing, that she was planning to attend Mount Holyoke College. Until that moment, I didn't really know women’s colleges were still a thing. I went home and started looking them up, and before long I had fallen in love with the idea. Years later, I ended up attending Wellesley. I doubt she remembers that conversation, or even knows my name.

A few months ago, I walked away from a sermon feeling like I hadn’t done a very good job. As people were leaving, someone stopped to tell me it was exactly what they needed to hear that day. They probably don’t remember saying it. I remember it because it reminded me that we are often the worst judges of whether what we have to offer has any value.

The moments that stay with us are often so small that they don’t even feel like moments while we’re living them.

I think that’s part of what I love about Drew Dudley’s story. It reminds me that we almost never get to know which moments will matter. They remind me that our lives are woven together in ways we rarely get to see while they’re happening.

And yet we live in an economy that teaches us to value what can be measured, bought, sold, or produced. We are taught to count productivity, efficiency, growth, and profit. Even our worth can begin to feel tied to how much we accomplish or how useful we are to someone else.

But love has never obeyed those rules.

No spreadsheet could tell you the value of someone believing in you before you believed in yourself.

No annual report can quantify the feeling of walking into a room and realizing that someone is genuinely glad you’re there.

There isn’t a graph for the moment someone looks at you and, without saying it outright, communicates, “You exist to me. I see you.”

Most of what has ever changed our lives cannot be measured.

That's also why communities survive hard times the way they do. Not because one heroic person swoops in to save everyone else, but because ordinary people keep showing up for one another. Someone brings dinner. Someone watches the kids. Someone makes the phone call. Someone slips twenty dollars into a friend’s pocket without making a fuss about it.

We call that mutual aid now. But communities have always known that our lives are sustained by gifts we can never fully repay.

And maybe that’s part of why we miss it so often.

The truth is, you don't get to see most of the impact you have.

You will probably never know when you were the reason someone didn’t quit. Or didn’t disappear. Or decided to come back next Sunday. Or found the courage to apply for the job, have the conversation, make the phone call, or simply get through another difficult week.

Most of our impact remains invisible to us, and yet it matters – so much.

I felt this same way when I first watched the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. At its heart, it’s a story about a question none of us can really answer, even though we keep trying to: What difference has one ordinary life made?

George Bailey is shown what the world would have looked like if he had never been born, and what he discovers is that so much of the good he brought into the world came through moments that never seemed particularly extraordinary while he was living them. They were simply the accumulated effect of showing up, caring for people, and paying attention over the course of an ordinary life.

I think that’s what stays with me about stories like that. They remind me that our lives are woven together in ways we rarely get to see. Most of the time, we don't get the bird’s-eye view. We simply move through our days – having conversations, running errands, coming to church, checking in on a friend – without realizing how those ordinary moments may become part of someone else's story.

And if that's true, if any ordinary moment might become someone else's lollipop moment, then I think our faith asks us to take that possibility seriously.

Our core values as Unitarian Universalists call us to generosity and interdependence, centered in Love, and that’s just what I see present in these moments.

They remind me that generosity isn’t only what we put in a collection plate, and interdependence isn’t simply a comforting idea. It’s the way human beings survive. Every movement for justice has depended on ordinary people sharing food, opening their homes, watching one another’s children, offering rides, making introductions, showing up for court dates, writing letters, refusing to let another person carry the burden alone.

They also remind me that this kind of generosity isn't reserved for people who think of themselves as leaders.

One of the things Drew Dudley says is that we’ve made leadership into something bigger than most of us believe we can be. I think we’ve done something similar with justice. We imagine that changing the world belongs to elected officials, popular activists, or charismatic organizers.

But every movement I’ve ever admired has been built by ordinary people making ordinary decisions over and over again. Someone sets up the chairs. Someone cooks the meal. Someone remembers who hasn’t been here in a while. Someone knocks on the neighbor's door. Someone keeps showing up.

Justice, like community, is mostly built that way.

The beautiful thing is that none of those people usually think they’re doing anything remarkable.

They are simply living into the covenant we make with one another. They are putting Love into practice, one small interaction at a time.

And because of that, someone else may decide to come back next Sunday.

Someone else may discover that church can become home.

Someone else may begin to imagine a future they couldn’t quite picture before.

We’ll probably never know which conversations become someone’s lollipop moment. We'll never know which smile interrupted someone’s loneliness, which invitation quieted someone’s fear, or which simple act of welcome became the thread that kept another person connected to hope.

But perhaps we don't need to know.

Our calling isn’t to calculate our impact. Our calling is simply to keep offering what we have – to trust that every act of love enters a web of relationships far larger than we can see. We don’t get to watch where that love travels. We don’t know whose courage it strengthens, whose loneliness it eases, or whose life quietly changes because of something we almost forgot doing.

We simply offer what we have.

And somehow, in ways both mysterious and beautifully ordinary, what we have to give becomes part of someone else's journey, just as countless others have become part of ours.

So in that spirit, and in the spirit of this month’s theme of fun, it’s time for us to have our own lollipop moment – literally.

I have this bucket of lollipops.

And I’m going to give you a lollipop– actually, two lollipops. One of them is for you – a small reminder that someone, today, wanted you to know that you belong here. Eat it right now, save it for later, whatever you want. Trade your flavor with a neighbor after the service.

But the second one – the second one is for you to give away. You might tuck it into a lunchbox, slip it into a care package, leave it on a colleague’s desk with a note, or hand it to someone as you tell them you’re glad they’re here.

Because of course, it isn’t really about the lollipops. It’s about noticing that we always have something to offer. It’s about trusting that even small acts of generosity can become part of a much larger story.

We rarely know what our gifts will mean to someone else. We rarely know which moments they will remember, which kindness will stay with them, or which small offering will remind them that they are not alone.

But we can choose to keep offering what we have.