Maybe life needs more
graduation days. A day where you can say
of a period of your life that you at least survived, if not necessarily
thrived. I don’t know that I would go so far as to say that Graduation Day is
wasted on the young, but I am not so sure that they “get it”. For high school graduates there is a sense of
accomplishment, but mostly a sense of “freedom”. For college graduates there is
a sense of completion, but also a sense of dread, as in “now what?” What Graduation Day should be about is
examining our lives with the question, “Who do I want to be?”
If we could have more “graduation
days”, we would be recognized by society, family and friends for successfully
completing the various stages of life: getting a job; paying for your own
housing from your own paycheck; finding a mate with whom to share life and, for
some, to expand the gene pool; finding a way to retire with grace and
purpose. We do have, of course, some
version of “graduation day” for these life events, usually some sort of “party.” But I think we need something more serious
than a few stupid jokes and a couple of drinks to mark life’s progress.
I am advocating more frequent
graduation day exercises which invite us to examine whether we have yet discovered
who the person is that God wants us to be:
“Could’st thou in vision see
Thyself the man God meant,
Thou never more could’st be
The man thou art, content.” Emerson
Like the song says, we are
tempted to just keep “Dancing through life/skimming the surface”, living the “unexamined
life.” To get the most joy out of life we should instead invite others to help
us see the vision that God has for our lives, and to help us not be content
with who we are until we live into that vision.
Can you think of anything
that would bring more joy on your final graduation day than to know that the
person you ended up being is the person God meant you to be?
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