Youth Sunday Sermons
March 2, 2025
Caroline Vandersea
This past summer, I was a counselor at Camp Seafarer for 9 weeks. I’ve been going since the age of 6, but this was my first summer on staff. Over the course of those nine weeks, I had three sets of campers, but there was one whose story still sticks with me. For the purpose of this, we can call her Lucy. From the moment she arrived at camp, it was clear Lucy was struggling to settle in. She had a tough time connecting with the other girls in our cabin, most of the time keeping to herself. I soon learned that things at home had been rough for her. Her dad had lost his job, and she had switched schools the previous year, which hadn’t gone well at all. The stress from her home life made it difficult for her to open up to others, and these feelings of uncertainty followed her to camp.
Over the next few weeks, she slowly settled in. She started to open up more, not just to me and her other counselors, but to the other campers as well. It wasn’t an immediate change, but as she found support and started to feel more at ease, her demeanor shifted. She began to engage with the girls around her, showing kindness and patience where there had once been withdrawal and hesitation. I could see how the right environment–one built on support and encouragement–had a transformative effect on her.
As I sat with today’s scripture, the way I came to understand it was that clothing ourselves in the virtues of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience – creates the right environment and context to let God’s peace and word dwell in our hearts, allowing us to act out of love. But Paul isn’t just telling us to “have” these virtues, he’s telling us to clothe ourselves in them. Just as we choose every day what to wear, we also choose to go forth with our values. And just as clothes protect us from the elements, the spiritual clothing we put on–the values we live by–shape how we exist in our environment, and its influences, and how we respond to it.
Unfortunately, in today’s world, we see many places where people fall short: from bullying on social media to divisiveness in communities and “othering” in our government. Often, it feels like compassion and kindness have been forgotten. This passage reminds us that when we fail to clothe ourselves in these virtues, we also lose sight of love, the very thing Paul tells us to put “above all.” Love should be at the center of our decisions, but too often we act out of anger, fear, or self-interest. The people we surround ourselves with, the habits we develop, the communities we are a part of–all of these things create the context in which our faith is lived out.
Lucy’s situation has really stuck with me since leaving camp. It was remarkable to witness how as she began to experience more compassion, patience, and understanding from those around her, she started to reflect the same things back.
If we choose to put ourselves in environments filled with negativity, selfishness, and cruelty, it becomes harder to let love and peace dwell in our hearts. But when we intentionally step into spaces that encourage kindness, and when we seek out relationships built on humility, patience, and love, we make it easier for ourselves to embody those virtues in our own lives.
As I leave for college next year, this passage will be something I hope will guide me. It has definitely shaped the way I think about choosing the right environment for my experiences ahead – much like finding the right college. And while I’m sure I’ll often clothe myself in the black and gold of Wake Forest’s school colors, I know it will be important that I first wear the clothes God picked out for me–the clothes of compassion, kindness, and love. With black & gold on the outside, and kindness and love on the inside, I feel confident that I can step into this next chapter with faith.
Colin Minton
As graduation rapidly approaches for us seniors, my mind is already racing to how my freshman year of college is going to go. What dorm am I going to live in? Will I have a good roommate? Am I going to transfer? … From the moment I stepped foot in Chapel Hill I knew where I wanted to go to college, Duke. (pause) Just kidding, just kidding UNC is all I wanted. As soon as my family moved in with my grandma in 2009, I was hooked, from the plastic UNC basketball cups to the retro UNC clothes. I couldn’t get enough of it. UNC was something that I loved, and I still love, and when that rejection letter came back to me, it felt like UNC didn’t love me back. It hurt so much because I had spent so much time in my past being a fan of the school and supporting their sports teams, I mean I bawled out crying in my grandma’s living room when Villanova hit that buzzer beater in the 2016 National Championship. I’m not going to lie, in the coming days, I noticed that I was comparing myself to my friends and peers that were accepted into Carolina and wondering what I did wrong. I was caught in this loop that I couldn’t seem to escape. Should I have done more in High School? What could I have done a better job of? And what did I say wrong? But after some time, I knew to get over this pain I had to love myself. I had to have faith in God and know that he has a plan for me, and most importantly I had to be patient.
Comparing ourselves to those around us can be one of the worst things we can do to ourselves. When we get caught up in comparing our deepest insecurities with the surface level of someone else it can end up doing more harm to us, causing us to forget to take time to love ourselves and to love those around us. Nowadays people compare themselves to others on such a high level because of this little thing called social media. People are able to post the perfect and most glamorous parts of their lives they want you to see. People do this because they want to have a positive self-image of themselves and as humans, we generally seek validation from others. But in reality, no one is perfect and glamorous, and we all have our problems.
In the following days, my feed on Tiktok was flooded with people celebrating their acceptance letters and showing the grades they earned in high school to get in. When I would see someone with similar grades to me I would think to myself, how did they get in, and I didn’t? These posts on social media were breeding grounds for comparison, and that comparison was holding me back from loving myself and reaching my goals. Learning to love yourself as God loves you is one of the most important things to master in your life, and loving yourself is the first step to reaching your goals. This disregard of self-love caused me to feel lost and filled my body with the burning sensation of jealousy. I was angry that I wasn’t accepted, but this anger was just wasted energy. Redirecting my energy and focusing on the positives allowed me to reach the clarity I needed and allowed me to move forward in my life.
“Put on love, which binds all together in perfect unity.” After the shock of rejection had finally settled I decided that I had to focus on what I can do now instead of focusing on what I could have done in the past. A saying that stood out to me during this time came from one of my close friends, “rejection is just redirection.” The first time I heard this I thought to myself, “well that’s easy for him to say, he got into Carolina.” But I kept saying those words over and over in my head, and then it clicked. I had been spending so much time and energy on what could have been that I lost sight of what is right now. For it to be my time now I have to clothe myself in patience, and love. I’ve got to stop stressing about what others are doing and focus on the present. The time is now, not yesterday, not tomorrow, now. Now is the time for love, and now is the time to remember where that love came from. Once we acknowledge God’s love, those questions you have had and those answers you were looking for will reveal themselves to you and will fill you with peace. So go onward into the world and love as the Lord loves you, and let that love bind your life in perfect unity.
Abigail Bozymski
My dad once told me that for every minute you are angry, you lose 60 seconds of happiness. It’s a quote you’ve all probably heard, and if you know my dad, I bet you’re thinking: wow, that’s fitting coming from him. You can also probably guess that I grew up with the happiest role model in the world. I don’t think he has ever stayed angry for more than 60 seconds, so you’d think I would have picked up on it by now. But, unfortunately, when something needs my forgiveness, I’m quicker to hold a grudge. Honestly, apart from my dad, it seems to me that a lot of people in the world are the same way.
The meaning of forgiveness- the way that God wanted it to be -is almost diluted today. Sometimes it feels like there are two options: we either forgive someone because it is easier to get it over with and let it go, or we hold a grudge because it is better for our egos. We center ourselves in our forgiveness, making it less about building community and being loving and more about being conceited and self-centered, weaponizing forgiveness for personal gain or relief. Instead of “bearing with one another and forgiving one another as God forgave us”, we find it easier to hold a grudge. It’s a crazy thing to admit, I know, but to let that anger linger rather than forgive gives us the satisfaction of being right and having the upper hand.
About a year ago, I had a huge fight with a best friend. When I say huge, I mean we did not speak for at least a month. It was a situation where neither of us wanted to admit defeat and apologize, because – you guessed it – we were each holding our own grudge. At the time, I thought it was easier to ignore it and keep the wall up. But looking back, it was one of the most exhausting months I’ve had. As it turns out, not being able to talk to your best friend actually is hard. (sarcastic tone maybe – if not then just delete this sentence). There are so many little things I confide in her with daily, so I’d go to call or text her, and then remember I couldn’t. Even though I have other good friends, it got really lonely without her, and eventually, I spent that month feeling sad, anxious, and angry.
There came a day when we were both going to another friend’s birthday party. We both accidentally arrived at the same time and were forced to walk up together. While we were waiting for our friend to answer the door, she turned to me and hugged me.
I had never been so shocked, but I was surprised to notice that I had also never been so relieved.
During that hug, there was a sort of release that just felt like a huge weight off of my shoulder. That feeling was about 10 times better than what I felt while holding a grudge. Even though at the time it felt good to be in control, accepting and forgiving immediately overpowered those feelings.
We talk a lot about forgiveness in church. I remember being told that before you even ask God to forgive you, he has already done it. If God can do it so quickly for us, why does it sometimes take us months? God forgave us before we even did anything wrong, but for some reason, we have a superficial need to hear heartfelt apologies. Everyone makes mistakes, and it may say more about our character to forgive sooner rather than later because the sooner we do, the sooner we start to follow in God’s footsteps. There is a reason I felt so much relief during that hug. Holding onto grudges and letting anger fester is not what God intends for us to do.
The scripture says that above all, we should clothe ourselves with love. If love were a coat, it would be 2 sizes too small for most of us, because we carry around too much resentment to dress in love. We may be surprised at how much more love we have to give if we remind ourselves to forgive and act as God would have. Once we start to do that, the coat might even grow to be baggy.
There are 1,440 minutes in a day. 43,200 minutes in a month. If you can see where I’m going with this, I’ll give you a second to do the math. During that fight, I lost 2,629,746 (two million six hundred twenty-nine thousand seven hundred forty-six) seconds of happiness. A year has probably 3 trillion seconds. When you put it like that, maybe 2 million doesn’t seem like all that much. Laughing, smiling, being happy, and talking to the people who matter. Those are all the things I wish I was doing for 2 million seconds instead of feeling how I did when I was holding that grudge. Dont let another slip away. Forgive, let go, and embrace the peace that comes when we choose love over resentment, just as God chose forgiveness.