The Folding Chairs at Graduation

Row K, seat twelve, and there are eleven speakers on the program and they are on the fourth.

Folding chairs on a lawn. The kind that sink slightly into the grass so that everybody is very gradually tilting. His wife is on his left with the program folded to the list of names. His mother is two seats down with a cardigan she did not need. The sun is on the wrong side and about four hundred people are being extremely patient.

His son is somewhere in the third block from the front and cannot be picked out from here.

And the fourth speaker is doing a thing about journeys, and the man in row K has stopped listening entirely, because somewhere in the second speaker he started doing an accounting and he cannot get out of it.

He has been grading himself for eighteen years.

That is what he has just understood, sitting on a chair sinking into a lawn. Every stage of it has had a scoreboard. Is he happy. Does he have friends. Is he all right at school. Did we handle that year properly. Should we have moved him. Is he going to be able to talk to people. Does he know he is loved, and how would we tell, and what does it mean that we cannot tell.

And in about forty minutes that boy is going to walk across a stage and take an envelope and then, in a manner of speaking, he is finished, and the grading closes, and a father in row K is going to get a result.

Except he is not. That is the thing that has him sitting very still.

Because the result is not available. It is not available in forty minutes and it will not be available at twenty-five or at forty. There is no envelope anywhere that says whether a man did this well, and there never was one, and he has spent eighteen years working toward a verdict that is not going to be issued.

And you know that chair. You are at the end of some stretch of raising somebody, or in the middle of one, and you have been quietly grading yourself the whole way, and you are starting to understand that nothing is going to come back and tell you.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not waiting on a verdict and there was never one being prepared. Psalm 139:16 says His eyes saw that boy's substance before it was fashioned and every one of his days was written down before there were any of them, and the Holy Spirit is in row K with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

The joy is in the hearing

There is a line in a very short letter written by an old man, and where he locates his joy is the whole of what a man in row K needs.

I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth.3 John 1:4

No greater joy. That is a strong claim from somebody who has had a long and eventful life and has seen a great deal.

Now look at the verb. To hear. Not: to have raised children who walk in truth. Not: to have produced this. To hear that they do.

He is describing the joy of receiving news. Of finding out. Of somebody coming and telling him. Which locates the whole thing at a distance from him, in the lives of people who are living them somewhere else, and puts him in the position of a man who gets word.

And the children he is talking about are not his by birth. He is an old man writing to people he taught, about people he taught, and he has no jurisdiction over any of them and has not had for years.

That is the position you are about to be in, and the verse says the greatest joy available to a person is found there. Not in the years of doing it. In the hearing about it afterwards.

You are moving into the position where the greater joy actually lives, and it was never located in the years of producing. The written word puts the joy in hearing rather than in having made, which means what you are about to lose access to was never where the best of this was kept; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into row K during the fourth of eleven speakers.

The scoreboard was never installed by anybody

I want to be exact about the grading, because you are going to want to feel bad about it and it does not deserve that.

Nobody gave you that scoreboard. You did not receive it from Scripture, which never once offers a parent a metric. You did not get it from your own father, who by your account was not a man who thought in those terms at all.

You built it because you were responsible and because you loved him and because eighteen years is a long time to do something enormous with no feedback. A person doing important work without any measurement will construct one, out of whatever is available, and what was available was outcomes. Is he happy. Does he have friends. Did that year go well.

And every one of those is a real thing worth caring about, and not one of them is a measurement of you, because every one of them has another whole human being in it making his own decisions, and a metric that depends on somebody else's freedom is not a metric.

You were not vain to build it, and eighteen years without feedback is what produced it. Psalm 127:1 says that unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it, and it puts the building on Him rather than on the labor of the ones on site; His Spirit is the one who has done that building, and He is not issuing you a result.

And here is the second half, and it is the one that will matter in forty minutes. You are about to lose jurisdiction. Not all at once, but genuinely: the years in which you could arrange things are over, and from here you are a man who gets news.

That is not a demotion and it is not the end of the relationship. It is the arrangement the old man in that letter was writing from, and he called it the greatest joy he had.

You are not losing him, and the position you are moving into is the one with the joy in it. Isaiah 46:4 says even to your old age I am he, and even to hoar hairs will I carry you, and the carrying continues across the whole length of a life on both sides of the handover; the same Spirit doing that carrying is the one who has kept you sitting still in a chair sinking into a lawn.

Forty minutes

Here is the practical thing, and it is small because you are in a folding chair in public.

There are seven speakers left and then the names, and then he walks across, and then there is the business of finding each other on a lawn full of four hundred people, and then photographs, and then somebody's grandmother needs a chair.

Somewhere in that, you get about eight seconds with him.

Say one sentence about who he is. Not about today, which is an outcome and which everybody will be discussing. Not about the future, which is a place neither of you can see. Not that you are proud of him, which is true and which he will hear forty times before six o'clock and which is, when you look at it plainly, a verdict on a result.

Something about who he is and whose he is, said in an ordinary voice on a lawn with people milling about, and then let somebody take a photograph.

You have eight seconds and a sentence, and neither of them requires a quiet room. Scripture says I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth, and the man saying it was on the receiving end rather than the producing end; the Holy Spirit is the one who has sat in row K with you through four speakers already.

So row K is not where a verdict gets read out. It is a folding chair on a lawn with the sun on the wrong side, and a man who has been waiting eighteen years for a result that was never being prepared, and about forty minutes before he becomes somebody who gets news.

And before the child, you. If there is something under this that is heavier than a page can carry, do not hold it on your own. Find one real person this week who can sit with you without needing to solve it, and if it has gone further than tired, call or text 988 in the United States, at any hour, and a person will answer.