Mother's Day Commencement

I will not be in church on Mother’s Day this year. Instead, I will be at Rutgers University as our youngest son graduates. At first, it seemed to be odd to have his commencement on Mother’s Day, but the more that I’ve thought about it, the less odd it has seemed to me.

            He is the younger of our two boys, and so this commencement marks a real change for us—the commencement of a new phase of life for our family. Our children, our kids, the ones we brought home from the hospital, played with as toddlers, sent off to the first day of school, snapped prom pictures in their rented tuxedos—they are grown up. Graduating from college is the commencement of adulthood, in a way, it seems. And on Sunday, this Mother’s Day, both of our boys will have graduated.

            And yet, Donna and I remain their parents. That is the thing that you discover as you move through life. You remain parents. On this Mother’s Day, we will commence a new kind of relationship, to be sure—a relationship, not with boys, but with young men, making their way, finding their place. When they were younger, we were, as their parents, more active, more in control. But now, all sense of control is gone, and we are more passive—our hearts still powerfully linked to them and what happens to them, but with so much less to say about what happens to them.

            All of which makes it seem to me to be less odd to think about sitting in the stands as our youngest son graduates this Mother’s Day—removed from corsages and Hallmark cards and brunch—deeply engaged in matters of the heart with the two human beings on the face of this earth who made the biggest change in our lives, making Donna a mother, me a father—the two most precious gifts we have received from the hand of the loving God.

--Pastor Don Steele