the love we all are longing for
adapted from the sermon I gave at Chi Alpha Live on September 13th
I’m a writer, okay? I just want to have complete control over my words and only release them into the world when they’re perfect.
But speaking doesn’t work like that. You walk on stage with the skeleton of an essay and you flesh it out right there in front of everyone. There’s no back-spacing, no editing—just one chance to successfully communicate your idea.
When I wrote my first sermon last fall as part of my Chi Alpha internship, I approached the task as producing a spoken Swimming Pool Thoughts article. Now, I know that it’s a totally different skill. If writing is like developing a recipe in a test kitchen, public speaking is like competing on Chopped.
But this is what I was thinking about in the pool during the beginning of this month, so here’s an attempt to recreate the message I had the privilege of sharing at our large group worship service on September 13th. Any imperfections are mine, any glory is God’s.
And, as always, if this hits for you—or if you want to talk more about any part of it—I would so sincerely love to have a conversation with you! Just text or email me. :)
When I arrived at Yale in the fall of 2019, all I wanted was to take an art history class. I’d tried to take AP Art History every year of high school—but apparently I was the only kid in the school who wanted to take the class, so it always got canceled. I studied art history on my own, developed opinions on Cassatt and Cezanne and Degas and Dali and Duchamp… but I just wanted to talk about art with someone. I just wanted to be around other people who cared. Jacques Louis David and the baroque period and the twentieth-century avant garde movement were the things that made my eyes light up—and I’d spent years longing for people who could understand me.
And I found that at Yale. My suitemates were all interested in art history. I was in a two-hundred person History of Art lecture. At home, I was trying to explain why Picasso paintings are actually art even though they aren’t “realistic.” Meanwhile the Yale University Art Gallery has a dozen of his original paintings.1
I was, finally, surrounded by art and people who cared.
And whatever your “thing” is, I bet you found other people at Yale who care about it as much as you do, or at least people who are interested in hearing about why you care so much. One of my favorite things about Yale is that everyone here is interested in something, and they’re not afraid to tell you why.
And I think a lot of us have been looking for this our whole lives. In an essay about her time at Yale, one of my friends wrote:
“For the first time in a decade, I felt like I could breathe, and that I didn’t need to hide who I was. For the first time in a decade, I felt like I belonged. I spent all my teenage years persuading myself, with ample help from poets and philosophers, that eternal solitude was what I desired. But in truth, I just never found my people, until Yale came along.”
For the first-years, you’re now three weeks in, and I think a lot of you are realizing that Yale is unlike anything else in the world. We’re part of something really unique and incredible here.
To quote the now-famous essay by Marina Keegan: “We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I’d say that’s how I feel at Yale.” Keegan describes Yale as a place where “there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together.”
I know exactly what she means. Yale is small enough that you have a connection to every single person on campus, but it’s big enough that there’s always someone you haven’t met before. I remember going to events like Masquerade as a senior and realizing that even though I was in such a large crowd, I saw so many familiar faces. I didn’t know everyone, but I’m positive that I had a mutual friend with every single person in that room. I was surrounded by people who were only a few conversations away from becoming my friends. I was in a room with hundreds of people, and I felt so incredibly safe and at home—and now, I realize that’s an experience most of the world will never have, and an experience I’ll probably never have again.
And as a Christian, I think that God made us to live in community like this. God exists in community, God made people for each other, and God came to be with us. I believe that God knows how important it is to be around people who love you, because that’s how He designed us to live.2
Yale has a lot of positives and a lot of negatives. There’s a lot that can be said about this institution. But I think that the friendship and community so many people find here is a whisper of the way God wanted us all to live.
But… a few weeks into my first-year, I got rejected from working at the Art Gallery. I found out that most of the people in that massive History of Art lecture were there because they heard it was a gut. My suitemate got the job at the Art Gallery, and then she and my roommate started hanging out without me. Yale had so many things I so desperately wanted to do, so many clubs and activities I wanted to be part of… and I had been rejected from all of them.
Last week I was sharing this story with another friend, who also graduated in 2023, and she said that rejection stings the most at Yale because you realize that “there are the right kind of people, but I’m not good enough for them.”
I remember crying at some point in October of my first year because I realized that even if my family didn’t understand the things I was excited about, they knew me. And no one at Yale actually loved me because no one knew me and all my flaws.
So I do believe Yale is better than anywhere else. But even here, people are still lonely.
A 2022 YDN piece describes it perfectly: “Yale breeds a distinct form of loneliness. It lies at the junction of FOMO and imposter syndrome. It cloaks the campus like a thin layer of fog, gaining opacity at your most vulnerable moments. When you fail an assignment. When you eat alone at the dining hall while the group next to you loses it over a convoluted inside joke. When you walk back from the library on a late Wednesday, Friday, or Saturday night, muffled bass tones and distant laughter haunting every street corner.”3
There’s this feeling that other people are always doing more things and cooler things with more people and cooler people than you are.
Yale can be like a major city—there’s so much going on, there’s this beautiful web of people… but you can still be lost and unseen and unloved. You have FroCo groups and CC families and suites and FOOT trips and acapella groups and societies… but does anyone really know you? Do your friends know everything about you? And would they still love you if they did? Would they still love you if you weren’t so talented and interesting? Would they still love you if it was inconvenient? Will they still love you after graduation? Will they be there for you ten years from now?
And if we can feel alone even at a place like Yale, how could our need to belong ever be satisfied?
Here’s the good news: God gave us this need to be known and loved, and only He can fill it. God is what we all thought Yale was going to be.
Let me share with you 1 John 4:9-12 :
“This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”
The first thing I want to point out here is that God sent His son to die for you. As Christians we believe that God is perfect and sin separated us from relationship with Him. “Atoning” means to make amends or pay back—so God literally sacrificed His only Son as payment for our sins, so we could be in a relationship with Him.
And if God literally sacrificed His only Son so you could have life with Him, this relationship isn’t transactional or networky. God isn’t trying to get anything from you, He just wants to give. So maybe you have friends who say “let’s get a meal!” and then they don’t. Or they make plans with you and then flake. But God is the opposite of that; God doesn’t want anything from you, He just wants to love you and give you life.
The other thing we see in those verses is that God sent Jesus to die for your sins. God doesn’t love you because of how great you are, He doesn’t love you because you’re funny and interesting, He doesn’t love you because of your resume—He just loves you and all of your scars. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And the Bible says that Jesus laid down His life willingly. He wanted to. Jesus saw you at your worst… and said, “I would die for her. I would die for him.”
But let’s revisit that last verse: “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.” The word complete can also be translated as mature. God’s love is fully sufficient on its own—but us loving each other is the final phase in God’s love for us.
I’ve seen this play out in my own life. As a first-year, I believed in God—but I didn’t know what God’s love was like until I experienced it through His people.
I’m a little suspicious of anyone who is nicer than me. I think of myself as being unreasonably bubbly and friendly, so I used to assume that anyone as welcoming as I am was just faking it. But I found out pretty quickly that the people in Chi Alpha were genuinely kind. They sincerely wanted to get to know me. They actually wanted me around.
A staff member named Jenny took the time to get to know me, and she cared about and listened to me in a way no one else had before. Over the years I was one of the people she loved and invited into her life, and her love and friendship was just so incredibly different. We could laugh together, hang out together, go to Ikea together… but I could also tell her things I’d never been able to tell anyone else and I knew that she loved all of me, even the hardest parts, because God loved all of me and she loved me the way He did.
After six years here, I’ve learned that a community based on God’s love is just so different from anything else. A circle of Christian friends won’t let you walk away when things get hard or inconvenient or awkward. They’ll chase after you. Belonging isn’t dependent on being good enough or even “having the right vibe,” because that circle of friends is anchored in God’s love—and God’s love doesn’t have prereqs or interviews or auditions or a tap process.
In Chi Alpha, we call those circles of friends Core Groups. These are people who saw what Jesus did for them, and now they’re loving others self-sacrificially and unconditionally. So a Core Group is not just another group, it’s an outpouring of divine love. Being part of a Core Group is an opportunity to be part of people who are creating bonds that live out God’s love, the friendship and belonging that we’re all craving.
So, what do we do about this?
My first suggestion is to be part of a community where you can experience God’s love. Join a Core Group and be vulnerable. Let them love the real you. And stick around! I think a lot of times the real stuff happens after the official stuff ends—it’s in the long, unhurried hours after Chi Alpha Live that people become deep friends. It’s in the basketball or card games or late-night shenanigans. It’s in the nights you stay at Core Group long after you close your Bible, talking about your childhood memories and your deepest fears and telling your friends you think you’re in love. I remember saying I needed to go work on my thesis but then spending Monday nights my senior year with the girls who are still my best friends, laughing until we cried and crying until we laughed.
But also, it’s important to experience God’s love from God Himself. If you already have a relationship with God, I encourage you to deepen that relationship. Jesus isn’t just an acquaintance who wants to catch up every week or two—He wants to be part of every moment of your life. What would it be like if you prayed to Jesus the way you talked to your closest friends? What if you looked forward to reading your Bible the way you look forward to conversations with the people who love you most? That’s the kind of friendship He wants to have with you.
And if you don’t have a relationship with Jesus yet—you can start one. Jesus sees the real you and everything that makes you unlovable, and He loved you enough to die for you. Life with God is joy and peace unlike anything else, and He wants to be your closest friend. Jesus is the love we’ve been longing for all our lives—and I’d be honored to introduce you to Him.
Picasso actually gives me the ick but that’s a separate point
See Made For People, by Justin Earley