Opinion

As seniors in high school begin to graduate this month, my advice for them is that this is only the beginning; although your senior year was cut short, and nothing I can say can make that any better, I do hope you will enjoy every single moment of the next season of your life...whether that be college, military, the workforce, or trade school.

In this moment, the world is spinning along its usual path in a universe so gigantic that we can’t even really conceive of its magnificence. Earth is just one small dot on a grid of millions of heavenly bodies of different kinds. Yet, here we are, special creation, made in the image of God, bent under the weight of incredible sin, grieving over wars that are raging as I write, powerless to control what cannot be controlled. Worried. Terrified. Wondering how it all turns out okay in the end.

Today I read that people are turning to familiar books, movies, television shows, and music during the pandemic. When questioned as to why she has turned, once again, to a book series that she read many times in childhood, one respondent explained that she is drawn to the books because, unlike this season of coronavirus, she knows exactly how the story will end. Maybe this is why we are attracted to old television shows that made us laugh or cry in our younger years, and the music that soothed us as twenty-somethings when we faced an unknown world. These things are predictable. They seem simple. They comfort us in their familiarity.