THE COMMENCEMENT SPEECH I’VE NEVER BEEN ASKED TO GIVE
I have given several thousand speeches and sermons in my 25 years of pastoral ministry, including motivational and political presentations before I was ordained, but I have never given a Commencement address. That would have been a fun thing to do since I love public speaking even more than I do writing. It’s too late in my life now for such a thing, but here’s what I would say if I were doing it.
I would tell you to continue your education in whatever area you feel comfortable and/or challenged. Not everyone is suited for college, but this country also needs people who have graduated from trade schools like beauticians and mechanics and plumbers and electricians.
Six months of barber college qualified my husband to get a barber license, but it took many years of hard work and long hours to enable him to build a large customer base here in Lebanon. Now in his 57th year of cutting hair for some of his original customers and now their children and grandchildren, he still goes to work each morning with as much excitement as he did in 1962. You will notice I didn’t say “energy”, (at age 76) but definitely excitement. He has provided a very comfortable living for us and a college education for our daughter.
I regret not going to college. For several reasons, it was just not possible for me when I graduated from Lebanon High School in 1961. I loved being a student, and still do. I have never stopped learning, and that is a very important part of my advice for you.
I wish I could impress upon you the importance of passion. A doctor or a lawyer or any other professional will not take adequate care of you if they have no passion for what they do and also for your well-being.
Passion is the engine to keep you going through life, and an insatiable curiosity and hunger for knowledge is the fuel for powering that engine. You will never know everything but the journey of seeking to know will be worth it all.
Don’t forget the basics. There is a reason we use that word. Whether it is fair or not, people judge your level of intelligence by the way you write, whether you can spell, how you construct a sentence.
Always dress professionally and people will treat you as a professional. I received a flu shot a couple of years ago from a pharmacist who was wearing scrungy looking denim jeans and a baggy sweat shirt that didn’t quite meet his jeans in places and I was very uncomfortable with that. I didn’t want to create a scene but it certainly did not instill any confidence in me with regard to his professionalism.
If you dress or write or speak in a sloppy manner, you will project an image of a person who takes no pride in yourself and potential employers or business associates or customers will not want to do business with you.
Remember to treat everyone with respect and always do the right thing. Maya Angelou tells this marvelous story in her book “Letter To My Daugher” where she often talks about the civilities of life she learned from her grandmother.
She writes about going to Morocco as a young woman and visiting a village where she was welcomed by a group of elderly men. They were sitting on their haunches and she noticed roaches were crawling everywhere. She had been taught by her grandmother that it was not polite for a younger person to stand or sit taller than an elderly person, so she too squatted as best she could in a dress and high heels.
The men motioned to some women who were looking out the door of a little hut nearby and the women brought her a miniature cup of steaming hot coffee. As she swallowed it, she realized it had several roaches in it. To quote her from the story “...I could not spit it out. My grandmother would have pushed away the grave’s dirt and traveled by willpower to show me her face of abject disappointment. I could not bear that. I opened my throat and drank the cup dry. I counted four cockroaches.”
She then tells how she managed to leave the group and when out of their sight, she grabbed onto a wall where she was violently sick.
Some time after the incident she read a Reader’s Digest article about the various tribes in Morocco and some of the surrounding countries and how they live by the barter system. They swap goods for goods but they will spend their scarce money to buy raisins, and to show honor and respect to visitors they will drop a few raisins into a small cup of coffee.
It was only then she realized that what she assumed were bugs in her coffee were precious and costly raisins given to her as an honored guest of the tribespeople she had visited.. She was so thankful she had been true to her grandmother’s teachings.
I hope you are never confronted with making such a decision, but if I were giving a graduating senior advice for life, I would remind you that it never hurts to be kind and gracious and polite. I would urge you to be the generation which puts civility back into our civilization.
Remember where you came from. Your parents and grandparents sacrified much to bring you to this day. Chances are that if you were raised in this part of our great country, you were taught from early childhood to honor and obey God and to love your country and its flag. Those words might seem rather old-fashioned now, but the longer you live the more those early teachings will mean to you, and, like Maya Angelou, you will never forget them nor the people who taught you about them.
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