It's graduation season and as I am being invited to different commencement ceremonies and celebrations I am reminded of my different graduations. I have been a part of a few graduations, as partaker and guest speaker, but there are two graduations which have been so instructional (believe it or not, important) in my life that i reflect on them often. The two ceremonies caused a shift in my understanding of my life and the way I choose to lead it. The first graduation which helped shape my world view was High School.
To be certain, high school graduations across America are filled with bad cleshaeys and hooky sentiment. I'm sure my high school graduation was a partaker in the above, yet there was a truth shared by my biology teacher that caught my attention. James Gillham quoted from Mark 8:36 "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" and for the first time in my buddying young adult mind I was tasked with thinking about not the end of school but the beginning of my life.
I feel the society we live in encourages all to "gain the whole world." Sadly, we all might agree with the above as it applies to others, but we would never be so fooled or duped. I speak from experience, I thought I would never fall in the trap only to come to the place where I didn't own stuff, stuff owned me.
The warning is simple:
1st- Focus on the eternal not the temporal.
2nd- Focus on the internal and not the external.
Jesus makes a way, over and over, for all to come to terms with being lost to self so that we can be found in Him. "If you grasp and cling to life on your terms, you'll lose it, but if you let that life go, you'll get life on God's terms." (Luke 17:33)
I would much rather have life on God's terms!
