It’s Commencement for North Central University, where I teach as an adjunct. This class represents a significant number of students I have known their entire college career. Among them are students I have had the privilege of mentoring one on one for a couple of years, those we have had over to our house at various times, those who have come to me seeking counsel over the years, and those who have made my church their home while they were students.

They are set to go out. They are set to launch into new fields, new opportunities, and areas where they will live scared to death because they have no idea how to navigate a new world that is not as regimented for them.

It’s a new day.

Families will be here. Parents who are my friends (and we’ve gone to school together “back in the day”) will be here. Parents who I get to meet for the first time. And the last.

I am excited for graduates. I am scared for graduates. I am prayerful as they walk that line today.

This is the height of a generation that has been fed the line: “You can do ANYTHING.”

They are in the middle of realizing… no… they cannot.

Here is the truth: What you can do, do it with fullness of life. Do it with passion. Do it in the grace of God. 

Do THAT.

Most of all, I pray they know Christ. 

¹⁴ For this reason I kneel before the Father, ¹⁵ from whom every family^[a] in heaven and on earth derives its name. ¹⁶ I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, ¹⁷ so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, ¹⁸ may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,¹⁹ and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

²⁰ Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, ²¹ to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. (Eph. 3:14-21, NIV)

And Amen.