Graduation

Mary’s Monday Musings to Quilt Encouragement

Pomp and Circumstance. Sir Edward Elgar’s composition always puts a lump in my throat when graduating classes march into their places to the flourishes of this stirring music. Perhaps it’s the significance of a graduation that moves me as much as the music. At a graduation, students receive a diploma because they have satisfactorily completed a course of study. We beam with pride for the person we are celebrating, but the event actually launches the graduate into a new, uncharted course for the future. And that, my friends, is worthy of a lump in the throat.
Beside the completion of an achievement, graduation always signifies the beginning of something new. A transition. A step into new experiences. Often the graduate moves on to a higher level of learning or perhaps leaves the atmosphere of school for a job. Continued learning always follows graduation whether it is planned via a school, a job, or simply the life lessons we stumble into without planning. In reality, life is a series of graduations whether or not they are celebrated. We learn a lesson, a value, a skill, or an attitude and then comes the application of what we learned. The next thing we know, we need to learn something more. We are always growing. We grow in how to apply our book learning to something practical, in how to relate to others, in how we make choices. It’s the importance of those choices that lodges that lump in my throat.
We hope our graduate never graduates from the school of inward spiritual growth. We can search the Bible daily all the years of our lives and still gain insight and understanding we missed before when we read any particular passage. We hope our graduate will never outgrow the desire to know God better and to understand His ways more thoroughly, and to love Him more completely. Graduation is most beneficial when we have a plan for a new beginning. Let’s pray to keep on searching for deeper relationships, to develop important attitudes, to recognize goals God wants for us.