Graduation: Moving Up

We just returned from Tennessee for our grandson’s high school graduation. I was surprisingly stirred on several levels.

Graduation, from a school (or a feat of any kind), speaks of leaving the past and moving forward to something more, something better. The satisfaction of accomplishment collides with expectation and hope. I find it all quite emotional, beginning with the processional.

“Pomp and Circumstance” always moves me, and I must not be alone because it’s been played at graduations since 1905. The music is celebratory and triumphant. Like every grandparent in the arena, my eyes sought only one graduate in the processional.

The students’ addresses in Tennessee, 2025, echoed other graduation speeches I’ve heard, sprinkled with teen emotion. When they speak of the challenges they’ve survived, the lows and hard times, I kind of cringe. They have no idea! I don’t downplay the angst of the teen years, but I’m well aware that the hardships they’ll likely face as adults will be far heavier. But I digress, back to the second-best part of the graduation—the tassels!

I love the move of the tassel from the right to the left. I can’t even describe why. I just know it touches me. And then the tossing of the hats—the pure, uninhibited joy of it!

When I reflected on the ceremony and the emotion of it, I thought about the graduation in my future.

• I thought about triumphant music accompanying Christ’s return.
• I savored the realization that I was leaving behind all hardship and pain.
• I imagined moving a metaphorical tassel to indicate absolute separation from my old life and entrance to my new life.
• I saw hosts of “graduates” throwing down their crowns before the Lord of Lords.

The celebration of any graduation—high school, college, or beyond—is a mild foretaste of the joy that awaits us. (Even as I wrote this post, I couldn’t help smiling.)

For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise… to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. 
Therefore encourage one another with these words.
I Thessalonians 4:16-18

Image by Gillian Callison from Pixabay