graduation thoughts

June is an exciting time for high school students (actually all students) and their respective families. We've attended graduations and graduation parties and moving towards a summer schedule. Kids have more time when they are around, but are gone (vacation, camp etc) more frequently.

Here are my thoughts on a graduation ceremony that I attended at a public high school in the area. The students value service, compassion, helping the community, and turning from selfishness towards the needs of others. Sadly, they find no basis in reality for these values. The question of whether our lives have meaning was raised again and again, but was never answered. Students wanted to avoid the cliche sayings of "giving back" and "paying it forward," saying there was not a basis for telling people to do this, but one girl said, that even though these are cliches I am going to tell you to do this anyway. It was a sad occasion because teens had this sense of being made for loving and serving others, but found no basis for that in their view of the world. If there is no God then we have no ultimate obligation to each other and can't really say that you should love and serve instead of exploiting and using. Each of us wants to say, "you should serve and not exploit. You should love and not use people." Yet without a God who truly exists and provides some external standard we are left with no ground from which to make such statements.