Commencement

I just attended my first and only commencement exercise of the year. High School graduations are the places I go to hear all the well-known cliches I have not heard for the past year--"This is the first day of the rest of your life." "Life is not what you get but what you give." Speeches are given, and some of them are quite amusing, but many of them seem to have a real disconnect with "real life." By "real life" I mean the place where you and I live and love and hurt and deal with "stuff" and "people." And so, with that in mind, here is my commencement speech for this year:

Class of 2008: you are about to begin a new journey that is going to be more difficult than you can fully realize right now. You have achieved some notable accomplishments--your freshman year, going to homecoming dance alone, the writings of Shakespeare (and you're right, you probably will never read them again, but that doesn't mean they aren't important), and the public humiliation endured when everyone found out who you really liked and spread that information all over school. Each of these events is, in its own way, a right of passage. We have all looked back upon the humiliating memories of our middle school and high school years and hoped that the evidence of our existence during those times could be permanently buried and never see the light of day again.

This is one of the reasons I am grateful for the finality of the educational experience that occurs at graduation, because now one gets to move on to the next phase of life. That's an exciting prospect, because there is so much potential, but it is also quite frightening, for now is the time when you have to begin making decisions that really count for something. Do I go to college or do I get a job? Do I continue to live in my parents' basement or do I go on the road with my band? Do I begin a new relationship with someone I like knowing that it's only going to last the summer, or do I stay "single" and hope to find the love of my life in the fall?

But there's another element that's frightening about the future you will face--it's unknown. As one who has been through what you are experiencing right now, I can guarantee you this one thing abotu the future: you have NO IDEA what's going to happen. This year marks my 25th year since graduation from high school, and as I look back over my own life I realize only in hindsight that many, if not most of the dreams I had when I commenced into adulthood have been forgotten. This is not to say that life has been a disappointment, it's only to say that I have learned to live in such a way that I take life as it comes--the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Pure statistics tell us that a certain number of you are going to be dead in 25 years. Some of you will face illness and disease. Many will become parents. There will be divorce and job changes and moves both local and across country. How will you handle these changes? The mark of an individual who has truly commenced a life that is worth living is the ability to handle these changes without losing sight of who you are. For me, my sense of value and recognition of "who I am" comes from an external relationship with a God who knows me by name and who walks with me through each circumstance of life, no matter how painful it may be. Because my value comes from my relationship to Someone unchanging rather than from my own accomplishments or gains, there is an inherent ability to weather change more easily, for the "who I am" part of life remains constant even when everything around me is changing.

So commence into life, but find an anchor against which your life can be held sure, for there will be challenges and disappointments you cannot imagine, and the last thing I want is for you to be washed away.