Tis the season – graduation invites are dropping in my mailbox like flies on watermelon juice, so I am re-visiting some of my previous thoughts on the season.
(This year, our third child, second daughter is graduating from college — and getting married 3 weeks later, and moving, and starting a new job….! So, once again, I want to write some new thoughts, but it turns out the old ones still apply — and I have to make a day-trip to our youngest son’s college today, so…we’re returning to 2013.
I want to write some new thoughts about graduation, I really do.
But the fact is, I have to figure out how to print return address labels for his invitations, go to the post office to get the “additional postage required” because I didn’t know the invitations we ordered were an “odd-size,” and buy more laundry detergent, because our household is again filled with kids who have laundry (and do it themselves).
Human experience includes those dangerous and difficult times of dislocation and disorientation when the sky does fall and the world does come to an end.” Walter Brueggemann, on the Psalms
I was reading this great Brueggemann quote this morning, and it hit me. My daughter (and every other senior) is disoriented. Please don’t hear what I’m not saying — it’s not like she’s doing crazy things like wrapping the school up with caution tape or lying around the house all day watching old episodes of Gilmore Girls (well, she is doing that!).
It’s just that she, and every other senior, has arrived at one of those times when a world has come to an end.
I’ve been focusing on how disorienting it is for me to have my third of four graduate from high school, but this morning I decided to turn the tables and think about what the seniors are wondering. Here are six questions disoriented graduates may be asking:
- Who am I now that I’m not…the class clown, the All-A student, the “most-likely-to-be-tardy,” the state wrestling champ…?
- Will anyone here miss me? Will they remember me?
- How will they get along without me? Who can fill my shoes in the part I played in this world?
- Who will be my new friends along the next part of the journey?
- What IS the next part of the journey?
- Will I make it in the “real world”?
For the graduates and their parents, siblings, and friends, reading and praying the Psalms of orientation and disorientation remind us that in the midst of a season of uncertainty, God’s unchanging love and all-knowing plans bring a sense of security.
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