Jay’s Blog – Always Home
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We conducted the commencement exercises for the Grace Community School Class of 2026 on Saturday night. This close-knit group of 69 students received over $9,183,504 in scholarship offers and were accepted to dozens of the finest colleges and universities in the country. They are prepared to further God’s Kingdom and spread His good news to the world around them, wherever and to whomever He calls them. The following is my charge to the class.
I will be taking my customary break from blogging over the summer, but I pray you will have a peaceful, restful summer. I’m grateful you choose to read what I write, however often you do. Thank you, and we’ll see you in the fall.
I’m so grateful I got to travel with your class to DC. It was the first time I traveled with a class since COVID, and I’m grateful because it really gave me a chance to see how you loved, cared, and watched out for each other. You’re a bright class, a high-achieving class, but I was so encouraged most of all by that. That kind of vision spreads to the rest of the school. We’ll miss your leadership, and we’ll miss you.
They call what I’m doing right now a “charge,” and it’s an encouragement to you as you leave from here, no longer a student of Grace Community School, a place and a people that, together with your parents and church, have educated and equipped you for the life you are now ready to live. As I thought about what I was going to say in this charge, I thought about what I would say to myself as an 18-year-old, if I were a graduate all over again, this time at Grace, sitting where you are right now. I think you may know my dad passed away this year, and his birthday was on Mother’s Day last Sunday. I went to see my stepmother to take her a book for Mother’s Day. She, in turn, gave me a bunch of old photos as keepsakes. One of them was the old football buttons from my senior year, like many of your parents wore this year, which is what I think gave me this image.
So, right now, I’m imagining myself seated right over there, right between Turbo and Jackson, Fenton, Ferguson, and Ford. Unlike y’all, I was that tall, gawky one, the Accutane poster child, recovering from tragically bad acne with new contacts in my eyes and just learning how to keep my hair cut short enough so that with my skinny body and poofy hair, I didn’t look like Reunion Tower in Dallas. So, here’s what I’d say to 18-year-old me, sitting right over there, as well as to all of you, whom I love, as well.
First, don’t take yourself too seriously. Deciding where you’ll go to college or the next step in your path is really your first major decision besides the biggest one, which is accepting Jesus as your Savior, assuming you’ve done that. You’re going to make a number of big decisions in your life, probably five or six, but no more than ten. They’re all important, but none of them is as important as Jesus. Even who you marry, because if you love Jesus, and they love Jesus, too, and really press into Him, you won’t be selfish people who are unhappy with each other, no matter who that person is. If you get the Jesus decision right, and you seek out God’s direction on the rest, every other decision you make will be fine, no matter how momentous each one seems at the time.
You won’t take yourself so seriously if you understand why it is you matter. You don’t matter because anything really momentous hinges on you or the decisions you make. The chances that any of you will be president with access to the nuclear codes and the ability to blow up the world are very slim. Short of that, your decisions won’t change much about the order of the universe. You matter not because of that. You matter because you are the Beloved. You are God’s Beloved, in whom He is well pleased, not because of anything you have done or will do, but because He created you, as you. He has chosen you, chosen to love you, and chosen to send His son to die for you and give you a new life and a new destiny. You are a son or daughter of the Almighty Ruler of the Universe, and you are an Heir of the New Earth and the New Jerusalem if you are His and in Him.
The challenge is just not to forget it. Staying constantly rooted in God’s Word and connected to His people, which we’ll talk about in a minute, is how you consistently remind yourself of who and whose you are.
The second charge I have 18-year-old me and all of you to remember kind of ties into the first one, and is that Life is about surrender– There are so many things you think you control- your spouse, your children, your career path, your future- that you really, really don’t. But you can control how you show up every morning. You can bring your best lamb, your best self, as a living sacrifice to the Lord every morning, with Him and in His presence. You can do that. You can turn yourself over to the Lord every day and let Him make you who He wants you to be. And, someday, you can turn your job, and your husband or wife and children, if that’s what the Lord has for you, over to Him every single day.
If you do that, He will transform you by the power of His Holy Spirit, making you into the person He’s calling you to be, someone so much better than you can possibly dream of yourself being right now. But don’t be in a hurry. It takes a lifetime to become that person, and God knows that. You won’t be the same follower of Jesus at 18 that you are at 28 or 38 or 48 or 58, and that’s okay and good and how it’s supposed to be. And, who you are becoming and who you ultimately become is so much more important than what you become. By God’s grace, I have been able to do everything there is to do in my career field, things I never could have imagined, and you know what? It doesn’t really matter. Because who the Lord has made me is infinitely more important than any of those things.
This is true because of the final thing I want to leave you with- people are more important than things or achievements. God saved the best for last, waiting until the end to create us, His people. Jesus died for people. You can have everything in the world, accomplish everything in the world, but if you don’t have friends and people who love you, you will be miserable. God created you to be a part of something, meaning part of a community of people. Like the man and/or woman who is sitting out in this crowd right now who loved you and hoped God’s best for you when you were just a “maybe someday” in their imagined future. Or the teacher or coach whose hearts beat a little faster when you read your first word, or finally got the ball over the net. Most of all, you are part of the Body of Christ, a beautiful, diverse, messed-up but bound for glory bunch of outcasts falling on the grace of Jesus, finding victory in His name.
Don’t re-make the mistake you’re going to make in law school, 18-year-old me, or any of the rest of you, where you get separated from friends who are followers of Jesus and from a church home and a community of people who love you, losing your way and forgetting that these people matter more than achievements. Where you feel empty and lonely, and like you’ve lost your way, forgetting your home and being ashamed to go back there even if you remember where it was. Instead, find and stay with your people.
But if you do get lost, come home. Remember your Father, who’s waiting by the roadside, looking down the road, hoping He’ll see your outline in the distance, returning to Him. And, all of Heaven will rejoice, as His Beloved comes home.
We love you, and no matter where life takes you, this will always be your home.
Jay Ferguson, Ph.D., Head of School at Grace Community School, writes regularly on his blog, JaysBlog.org.