Logos Online Commencement 2024

To the entire Logos Online community, greetings. To Larry Stephenson, thank you for the kind invitation to address you. And to all of you graduates, congratulations.

In The Horse and His Boy, C.S. Lewis provides us with a fine example of a lesson that I wish to pass on to you. I want to state the lesson first, down at the foundational level, and then give you a number of supporting illustrations. The point is well worth making, again and again, over and over.  

After Shasta and Aravis and Bree and Hwin made it safely to the home of the Hermit of the Southern March, Shasta was immediately told that he needed to keep on running. If he did so, he would be able to reach King Lune with his message of warning in time.

So that is the lesson. Doing well makes your life harder. Your reward for a significant accomplishment will usually be some kind of promotion, not some kind of retirement. And you will soon discover that the promotion involves “another and harder and better” set of tasks. Success makes your life harder. That’s the first part of the lesson. 

But of course there is a sense in which doing poorly makes your life harder as well, and so we realize that we must make some distinctions.

A lazy man makes his life more difficult, obviously, and missed opportunities would be one way in which that happens. As the saying goes, it could be raining porridge, and he’d have forgotten his bowl. And if you don’t have time to do it right, then how will you have time to do it over? All such circumstances illustrate the common sense truth that lazy people and procrastinators are making their own way difficult. The simplest task is weariness in the bones. So don’t be like Ludlum’s dog, who used to lean his head against the wall to bark.

The simplest task becomes an intolerable burden. It may not be a true difficulty, but it is certainly felt to be a true difficulty. And if feelings were what mattered, he could make his case. But they don’t, and he can’t.

But remember that those who work hard and who excel are also making their lives more difficult—but in a completely different way. The lazy man is caught in a trap of repetitive difficulties, spending a lot of time trying to get a job or a project completed. The industrious person, by way of contrast, is moving along a path of graduated difficulties, from one level to the next.

You are now in this enviable position. The work you have completed in high school was difficult, and you are now graduating. But if you are wise, when you graduate, you will not expect college to be easier. No, it will be more difficult. And if you go on to grad school, that will be even more difficult still. But like Shasta, you should keep on running.

The difficulties of the lazy man are exasperating, both to him and to others. But the difficulties of the industrious man are difficulties he is attempting to get into—a good man wants that kind of difficulty. It is highly to be desired.

This is the difficulty encountered by the Olympic athlete. The difficulty of finishing university with a 4.0 average. The difficulty of raising a brood of happy, well-adjusted Christians. The difficulty of starting and establishing a small business. So we should put it to ourselves this way—baskets of fruit are heavy, but we should still want to carry them all the way home.

So hard-working individuals and slothful individuals both have their challenges. The difference between them is not necessarily in the levels of pain or discomfort. The lazy man might actually even experience less of that. He also experiences less joy, and at a level commensurate with his lack of diligence. So the difference between these two individuals has to do with their outlook, their mental space, their worldview.

We can illustrate this principle another way. Suppose these two individuals are both asked what they would think about winning the lottery—a ten-million dollar windfall, let us say. They would each get the same amount of money, that being ten million dollars. But their thinking about all of it would be completely and entirely different. They would approach that money from opposite directions.

One of them would think that the ten million meant that he could stop working now. That is why he buys all those lottery tickets. He wants all that extra money in order to make the burdens of his life lighter. But the wise man understands that ten million dollars would put that much extra weight on the bar. He knows that he would have that much more responsibility.

Now of course, if a man intended to burn through his windfall as though there were no tomorrow, there would be virtually no extra weight on the bar. Have at it. Buy what you please. Want a new car? Buy two of them. But this is also the kind of person who will be eagerly buying lottery tickets again in five years. And why?

And so let me conclude with an exhortation to all of you assembled here. We read in the book of Job that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards. Life is tough, and this graduation ceremony will not alter that stark reality in the slightest. Nor should it. The people who want it to are people who are going to be worked over by that trouble.

Worked over? More like “beat up.”

A little sleep, a little slumber, and poverty is going to come up behind you like a thug in a dark alley. In a bad part of town.

So my exhortation is this. If you lean into the toughness of life, then you will be learning the value of becoming an overcomer. If you lean into the toughness, embracing it, then you will experience it as a completely different sort of thing than will be experienced by the shirker. There is a difference between winning a boxing match and losing one, even though the number of bruises might be the same.

You have graduated, and again, congratulations. But I am not here to promise you cotton candy clouds, umbrella drinks, and hammocks in the shade. It is not as though there is not great rejoicing in all harvest home festivals. There really is. But in between this moment and that one is there is a summer filled with hot work. Fix your eye on that, and you will be sure to plow a straight furrow.