And Thus We Have Commenced

Dear Hohenfels Family,  

Thank you for joining us as we celebrated our graduating seniors, Emi Patterson and Micaiah Lopez.  

We appreciate your friendship and support!

For our stateside family and friends, here is a glimpse of our lovely daughter and her proud papa on the big night.  Patrick's commencement speech follows...

Thank you, Jared Patterson, for taking this photo!

For those of you who do not know, my wife spent many years as a high school principal.  She had to deliver many of these types of addresses.  She is reveling in this moment right now.  She always liked to point out that a graduation ceremony is called a commencement because even though it is done at the end of one thing, it actually signals the beginning of another.  As parents of seniors with our natural desire to hold on, we invariably focus on a look back to what we can no longer have again.  In just a few months I will deliver my daughter to Moscow, Idaho, and nothing will ever be like it once was.  And to avoid a long period of blubbering, I am going to stop talking about that for a moment and instead tell a story I once heard from Pastor George Grant. 

It is a story about the dining hall at New College in Oxford England.  New College was founded in 1379, and at that time the name likely seemed much more fitting than it does today.  They constructed a magnificent hall.   It is a dining hall built in the grand old tradition.  High, vaulted ceilings spanned by enormous oak beams. It is, to this day, a truly beautiful building.

In the middle of the twentieth century rot was discovered in some of the beams.  Someone must have been cleaning or doing some maintenance on the ceiling.  This, of course, was very concerning to the trustees.  They began a search throughout England for the appropriate quality and quantity of timber.  When no one was able to fill the order, they widened the search to all of the UK and then to all of Europe.  And again they were unable to find what they needed.   They eventually sent requests out to the Americas and to Australia, but no one could do it.  Disappointed and frustrated they began to consider some sort of laminate material to replace the beams with.

This is where the story becomes disputed.  Someone -- a janitor, a grad student -- we don’t know who for certain, but someone discovered some old scrolls in the basement of the building.  The scrolls contained original copies of the plans for the building.  On examining the scrolls, they discovered a note regarding the beams that read something to this effect:

We expect that in about 500 years the beams will need to be replaced.  For that purpose we have planted a row of oak trees to the west of the structure.

They went upstairs and looked out the huge windows and saw a row of massive oak trees that were perfect for what they needed.

These fourteenth-century builders had planned more than 500 years in advance.  We live in a culture that struggles to think two weeks ahead.  Long-term planning is one or maybe two years out.  But, scripture challenges us to think generationally.  To a thousand generations.     To a Thousand Generations.     I am still working on wrapping my head around the many promises in Deuteronomy to my children’s children.

When we determined to homeschool Micaiah ten years ago we were not focused on making sure she could get into the best college.  We were not trying to ensure that she could find a well paying job to support herself as a modern independent woman.  Our goals were much more long-term than that.  We wanted to give her an education that would drive our children to understand God and His world better,  to be able to serve Him throughout their life in whatever way He chose to use them.  And most importantly, we wanted them to be in a position to give their children a better education, a broader understanding of His creation than we were capable of passing onto them.   We wanted our grandchildren to receive an inheritance that can only be built over generations.  Deuteronomy tells us that this is what we are supposed to be pursuing.  Or as New Saint Andrews, the college that Micaiah will be attending, likes to call it - the pursuit of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

When we determined to take on this type of education, it meant, as many of you have found out, that a lot of reading was about to ensue.  More specifically, it meant that Mom was about to read a lot.  It meant reading Thucydides, Augustine, and Chaucer.  Pascal, Dante, Bede, and many others …and while Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France might make for compelling reading for a former history teacher, my wife was doing it strictly out of her love for the education of our children.  And as all of us who are homeschool fathers know,  it is Mom who works the hardest in this endeavor.  There is no doubt that Micaiah would not be where she is today academically if not for the efforts of her mother.  For that, Shelly deserves a tremendous amount of credit and appreciation, and I love her for it.

Micaiah, from shortly after her birth, was always a very little girl.  Her little brother passed her in height by his second birthday and never looked back.  But Micaiah’s size did not define her, and it never held her back.  When she was just seven years old we decided to start her on riding lessons.  One of my earliest memories of little Micaiah is her sitting atop a fat horse with her legs nearly straight out, smiling, certain that she was in charge.  That has pretty much defined Micaiah.  Despite the fact that others in the room might be greater in stature, she has always been pretty sure that she was in charge. 

This confidence has benefited her as she has taken on many challenges - whether it be painting, dancing, singing, hiking, camping, writing, sewing, decorating or just about anything else she has tried.  And today, even though she does not have a license, she is still convinced that she is a very good driver.  But as we look back it is easy to only focus on the easy, fun memories.  But that doesn’t tell the whole story.  God didn’t only give us happiness, laughter and grand adventures throughout Europe.  Along with relaxing days on beaches in Crete and Hawaii, He also gave us trials and grief and sadness.  He gave us wounds.  And while we won’t delve into all of these tonight, we are comforted in knowing that these too are gifts from Him.  Hebrews tells us that “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those that have been trained by it.“  Hebrews 12:11

Micaiah, while your mother and I have been your teacher and principal, and others have been used to teach specific subjects, it has always been God who has been teaching you even when your parents stumbled.  He has always been the lesson planner, the author of your course syllabus. It is God in His providence who has written your story.  Your curriculum.

Micaiah, over the past few years I have seen you grow in beauty and poise, and I have seen you grow academically.  But most importantly, I have seen you grow in wisdom, in your trust in God, in your compassion for others and in your desire to live for sake of our Saviour.  And even though you have had to work hard to satisfy your math teacher and your Latin, Omnibus and Rhetoric professors,  I will drop you off for college next fall knowing that you will be challenged like never before.  I can do that confident that God has prepared you for the challenge.

So today we are honoring my daughter Micaiah, whose education is not yet complete. She is not being celebrated tonight because of what she has accomplished but because of who she is and who she is becoming.   I am humbled to know that the wonderful young lady that we are honoring tonight is who she is not because of anything I or her mother have done but because of the grace of God and who He has made her to be and who He is still making her to be.  A gift to future generations.

Micaiah – Presh - I love you.