Making Impossibles Possible. A Note From Jan.

A little over a week ago, I hung onto the pulpit at Gordon College like it was a walker and spoke to the graduating class of 2015. Nothing easy about it. Thinking, writing, praying, limping along with the processional, and, finally, standing to deliver the message I believed I was to give to these graduates. So nervous. Not about what I was going to say but just getting up there. Standing in a place where last I stood with Jud beside me, at that same pulpit, delivering the baccalaureate address in tandem to the class of 2011.

Full of grief and nerves…So nervous, I scripted the talk, then flipped two pages at once. Left out introducing my family and telling one of my favorite Lily stories. Well, you got all the pages in the baccalaureate script on CaringBridge.

After a week of reflecting, I’m left with several impressions:

1. What a privilege to speak to these graduates, their families and the larger Gordon community. I’m grateful to President Lindsay for inviting me.
2. What a responsibility.  Him to ask.  Me to accept.
3. How much I owe Jud for believing in me and making me his running-mate…And I did have to run to keep up with him and his long legs and size 14 feet. Not to mention WHO he was.  An awesome privilege to team up with him for so many years.
4. What a God to love the likes of me, gift me, then turn me loose to love in His name.  
5. And final reflection: does anyone look good in those hats we wear for baccalaureates and commencements?!  The black robes cover a “multitude of sins,” not so with those hats.

The ongoing challenge for me is to live what I preached to the graduates and their families. To live a life worth following because I’ve chosen to follow Jesus. To mend because I’ve been mended by Jesus and live among broken people in a broken world. To go after the right Lamb come Monday morning, or when they, like I, “head off into the real world.”

The days since delivering the message, reading the Boston Globe, listening to the news and just being around folks, leave me more convinced than ever that we need lovers more than a fresh crop of leaders. Men and women who choose to love as Christ loved. To lead as He led, by living a life worth following. There is a scarcity of love. Not enough to go around. Unless. Unless we do the impossible, the unthinkable, for the ungrateful, the undeserving and choose to love for no earthly reason. Like God loves.

Making impossibles possible through Love. You. me. them. Us.