Sermon!

Last week, I attended the Taste of Danbury. As you probably know, it is a community-based event where businesses around town can set up booths to sell their products and services and get acquainted or reacquainted with the community. There was music and dancing and food and crafts and it was an overall good time. Last week, a few hours later, the ladies in my family also had a Julia Childs cooking party. We wore French hats and cooked French food, played a few games, drank French wine, had a few laughs and talked about life. Both events were important reminders that I am apart of something bigger than myself. That I am not alone in the world.

You all are probably able to tell similar stories about the communities that you have in your own lives. Here at church we have the lady’s society and the men’s society. We have Teen Soyo and Sunday school for our youth and a Choir for those who love to sing. Outside of church we belong to a myriad of different social groups or jobs that foster a shared sense of self. The Orthodox College Federation offers this sense of community to college kids as we venture off into the world on our own for the first time. Having gone through four years of college, I can testify to how unnerving the experience can be. We are thrown into dorm rooms with 6 other roommates who we’ve never met and are forced to get along with them. We are given books to read and ideas to toil with that force us to examine our beliefs and either strengthen or weaken our convictions. We are surrounded by so many different lifestyles and have to make an ungodly number of decisions about who we are and the experiences and people that we want to shape our lives. Some of us become athletes, some scholars, some of us politicians, some artists, and some human-rights advocates. As Orthodox college students, we are so many things, yet, hopefully, above and beyond all of the different directions that our lives take us in, we are children of God.

College kids have the world at their fingertips, a whole bed of knowledge to play with and a thousand different roads down which they can travel. What the Orthodox College Federation offers us is peace of mind. We can go out into the world and achieve our dreams when we know that we have something constant in our lives to turn to during trying times, despite the changing tides of the social world. We can rely on God and a community of patient, compassionate, kind, loving Orthodox Christians who enable awesome service programs like Real Break, Just Love, and College Conference to be made manifest. We can live in peace knowing that there is a community of other Orthodox Christians who are all striving to live according to God’s word. We can feel that all-important sense of connection with other people through the programs offered in and around the college community by the OCF.

For the past two years, I have attended college conference at the Village. You’ve probably heard testimonies about what a wonderful, peaceful place Antiochian Village is from the youth of our church who have attended the conference during the winter or camp during the summer. It is a place where we go to worship, where we go to dance and pray and make new friends and attend workshops that remind us what it means to be an Orthodox Christian. The conference is something I look forward to going to year after year, in part because of the programs and the prayerful environment that is fostered there, but also because of the other college students who attend the event from all over the country. How great it is that we can reunite for four days a year and get our dose of spirituality and community, then take all that we have learned and apply it to real-life situations. How comforting and lasting are the relationships that we form. This is what the Orthodox College Federation has done for me and for so many others; it has given us peace of mind and the comfort of knowing that we are not alone.