Lessons For Graduates: Lesson 1

Description

This week we are offering 4 lessons for graduates. In this first lesson, I offer a blessing that may sound strange at first: “we wish you good problems.” Life does not arrive neatly solved. Social concerns, financial concerns, relational concerns, and spiritual concerns all come with us, and spirituality is not this answer machine that fixes everything. It is a container strong enough to hold it all. Through the lens of James, we hear again, “Let perseverance finish its work,” and from a Swedenborgian perspective, that perseverance becomes part of regeneration, the slow movement from a “heart of stone” into a “heart of flesh.” Good problems teach us to see differently. They invite us into use, service, humility, and meaning. So graduates, and all of us, are called to find the problems worthy of your life’s best efforts, the ones that help the world heal, even if we never fully solve them. That is where God shapes a new will in us. That is where we learn to go on.