I sit in bleachers on Friday night as sun and storm clouds play tag over a stadium. My beautiful niece will soon walk across the stage to receive her diploma. As students wait, hands on their caps to keep the wind from stealing them, my husband points to glints of light on the other side of the fence. “What’s that?” he asks.
We both squint toward the odd shapes stretched out across a green stretch of grass. I finally realize. “It’s a cemetery,” I say.
And the rest of the night my eyes drift between students beginning the next chapter of their lives and the markers of the ones who have closed the last chapter (in this life, anyway).
It seems I hear echoes as the valedictorian talks of making each moment count, being sure you change the world, that you have one life to live.
The years between that walk across the stage and the walk into eternity will fly by. You and I–we’re somewhere in the middle.
So lean in and listen to this…
“You are the only you we will ever have. God didn’t create a plan B for your life. We need you to be who you are, to do what only you can do. And to do it now, today, in whatever way you can.”
We live our lives waiting for the big moments–the “walk across the stage” times in life. But those are few and far between.
I think the folks who have completed the journey would say instead that it’s the little moments that really matter. The ones you think aren’t important. The ones you wish you could skip.
But those moments? They’re life.
Make the most of them.
My niece crosses the stage. We cheer as loud as we can.
Joy.
And I wonder, just wonder, if the same is happening in heaven too. Perhaps it does every time we take a step of faith until we cross that final stage. Not because of how big we are but because it shows how BIG our God is.
Do you think angels ever say, “Woo-hoo”?
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