I’ve already written about the commencement speech I attended at the University of Texas by a Nobel laureate. It was about changing the world, and if you missed it, I encourage you to check out that blog. Good lessons. But I’m not sure it matches a commencement speech by country singer Eric Church at the University of North Carolina (UNC). Kudos to my son Mark for posting this on our family’s chat.
If you click the picture, you can listen to the entire speech, worth the 18 minutes. He likened one’s life to the strings on a guitar. Here’s the overview:
- Low E: your faith
- A: your family
- D: your spouse (choose carefully!)
- G: ambition balanced by resilience
- B: your community (e.g., for these kids, their UNC community)
- High E: your uniqueness
Don’t let any of your strings get out of tune. I want to focus only what he said about the Low E, the foundation string, your faith:
Your faith is the low E of your life. The thing that sits at the very bottom of you. Your belief in what this life is for. What you owe. What holds the universe together when science reaches the edge of its own explanations and shrugs.
Eric’s faith is in Jesus although he didn’t mention Jesus in the speech. He was raised in a Christian home.
Faith’s a big part of my life and it’s always been a part of my life. – Eric Church
Here’s what I want you to take away from this blog. It’s what he said about faith:
The people who tend to their faith in ordinary seasons do not come undone in the extraordinary ones. They still hurt. They will still sit in hospital waiting rooms asking unanswerable questions at 3 in the morning, but they have a foundation to return to. – Eric Church
This is remarkably close to what our long-time pastor Dr. John Stevens used to say:
When you’re sitting in the waiting room of the ER or the OR, it’s too late to work out your theology.
In Eric Church’s words, we need to “tend to our faith in ordinary seasons” so it will be there “in the extraordinary ones.” We recently attended the memorial service for a 3-year-old who was murdered by his father before the father committed suicide. The mother discovered them when she returned from a business trip. Unimaginable.
I don’t know the family well, but it’s not clear to me that their foundation was solid…or solid enough. All the uncle talked about was his anger. I get it. I’d be furious myself, and there’s a whole set of “Psalms of Lament,” e.g., Psalm 35, where the psalmists were angry. But the uncle’s eulogy was never tempered with “But Jesus…”
Folks, our faith in Jesus is our foundation, and the foundation of that faith is our daily time with him, which I write about frequently. You never know when the unimaginable will happen.
The people who tend to their faith in ordinary seasons do not come undone in the extraordinary ones. – Eric Church
Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. – Jesus (Matthew 26.41, ESV)