Thank you very much for that kind introduction.

It’s both a great pleasure and a great privilege

to be here and speak to you today.

When I first learned that I would be on today’s program, I started thinking about ways to do what
any father would want to do in these circumstances: embarrass my son. I’m tempted, but sadly
for the entertainment value of this speech, I won’t give into the temptation.

The truth is, I admire Andy enormously. And I’m pretty sure that a lot of parents in this room
would say the same about their sons and daughters in this graduating class. That’s an unusual
thing; admiration is not ordinarily on the list of feelings parents have for their teenage children.
But then, this is no ordinary set of high school graduates. The young men and women sitting
before me are a truly remarkable group of human beings, with reservoirs of talent, passion,
energy, and commitment that command admiration. None of us knows what God has in store for
us, but I firmly believe that you will lead remarkable lives, filled with acts of great service and
acts of great accomplishment.

I want to talk with you today about those future lives, and I’d like to start by posing two
questions. Here’s the first: Why do you work? And here’s the second: How do you make plans
for the future?

They’re hard questions, and important ones. Let me suggest some answers. As for why we
work, my preferred answer is a twist on something I was told many times when I was in high
school and college. When people talked to me about what I ought to study in college or about
what jobs I should pursue, the most common line I heard was this: Do what you love. I think
that line gets it backward. If you want to have the kind of motivation that will sustain you for a
lifetime of work, the better advice is this: Love what you do.

As for how we make plans, my suggested answer comes from something one of you said at a
dance earlier this year. Apparently, some couples might have been dancing a little closer than
they should have been, and two seniors were talking about how they ought to address this issue.
One of them suggested saying this: “Hey, leave a little room for the Holy Spirit!” It’s a good
line; I laughed out loud when I first heard it. It also turns out to be very good advice, and not just
in school dances. You will spend much of the rest of your lives making plans for the future.
When you do, remember those words: leave a little room for the Holy Spirit.

I’ll say a bit more about each of those two answers, and then I’ll sit down.

Start with work. This is a hard-working school, as you know better than I. The diplomas you
receive today represent years of effort and commitment. You’re not just graduating from a
terrific school; you’re also graduating from a job—and a tough job at that. And it’s a job you
have done extremely well.

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Why did you do that job? And why did you do it so well?

I don’t know how each of you would answer those questions. But I can tell you the answers the
large majority of people, in your generation and mine, would give. We work, and we work hard,
and we work well, in order to get things. In my business, people work partly for the paycheck,
and partly for the status that goes along with the job, and I think for one more reason: we work
hard at the jobs we have in order to get the jobs we want. A large fraction of the young lawyers I
teach will spend their entire careers positioning themselves for the next job—until it’s time to
retire, and the next job is out of reach.

That may sound strange, but it’s exactly the same thing most of your peers do in the best high
schools in this very competitive part of the world: students work hard and work well in order to
get the grades that will get them into the colleges they want to attend. College students work
hard and work well so they can get the jobs they want after graduation, or so they can get into
their preferred graduate schools.

This is what twenty-first-century Americans do; I fear this is who we are. We position ourselves.
We live our lives on ladders. Most of us, most of the time, are working very, very hard on the
rung to which we cling—so that we might have the chance to work hard on the ladder’s next
rung, and then the one after that, and so on until our working lives are done.

I said a couple minutes ago that when I was younger, I was often advised to do what I love.
Many of the people I’ve known over the years—students, professors, practicing lawyers, friends
in a wide range of jobs and professions—many of those people would say they are doing what
they love. But they won’t give that answer for long. A funny thing happens when you climb
those professional ladders. The single-minded focus on the next rung, the focus on the benefit
that you can extract from the work you do—the grades, the paycheck, the status—that focus kills
the love that you once had for the work you do. I’ve seen it happen many, many times.

The desire to climb those ladders our culture sets before us is both powerful and seductive. But
its power is dangerous: like a fire built not from logs but from paper and kindling—the fire
burns hot but only for a moment, and then it burns out. We live in a land filled with burned-out
people whose lives and hearts have been consumed by that fire.

You and I need a different motive for the jobs we do. What might that different motive look
like? I think the best way to answer that question is to ask this one: Before He entered His full-
time ministry, God’s Son made tables, and whatever else ancient Middle Eastern carpenters
made. I think we can safely assume that He was good at it, and that He worked hard at it. What
do you suppose was His motive?

The Bible doesn’t say explicitly, but I think the answer is fairly clear: making those tables was
an act of love—love for Joseph, love for the customers who bought the things He made. And, I

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believe, one more kind of love: love for the act of creation in which He was engaged. Making
tables was a modest form of a kind of work He had done long before, when He made mountains
and oceans, continents and stars—and when He made the human beings who exercise dominion
over this planet. Why did our God create? Out of love for His creatures, and out of love for the
enterprise of making a world filled with good things. We were made in the image of that
creative God. Part of what that means is that we were made for work, made to create knowledge,
beauty, healing, laughter—and a long list of ordinary but very useful things, like those tables
Jesus made.

The most important thing about the jobs we do, I believe, is not the nature of those jobs, and it
certainly isn’t the benefit we get from those jobs. The most important thing about the jobs we do
is the reason we do them. Our culture tells us that love is a feeling over which none of us can
exercise control. But love is also a decision, a choice. Choose to love what you do—and if you
can’t bring yourself to make that choice, find work that you can love. Do that, and whatever job
or course of study you follow, you will find it much easier to work hard and work well and, more
importantly, you’ll find it much easier to love those with whom and for whom you work. Do
that, and work becomes a gift—a gift you give to your bosses and teachers and fellow students,
but also a gift they give to you: an opportunity to create good things, and thereby to honor the
One who created you. That’s a motive that will sustain you across a working lifetime.

There is one more question that needs answering. How do you choose the jobs and courses of
study that you’re supposed to love? How do you plan future careers? One possible answer is,
you ask yourself what you would most like to do, out of all the possibilities this world offers, and
then go out and follow your dream. That’s pretty much what the world around us tells us to do.
Here’s the job I’d most like: I’d like to be the third baseman for the Boston Red Sox. I think
I’m on pretty solid ground when I say that is not, was not, and never could be my calling—a fact
for which Red Sox fans everywhere should be deeply thankful. So much for following my
dreams.

So, if you and I are not supposed to ask what we most want to do, then how do we make these
choices? The best answer I’ve ever heard comes from a conversation I had nine years ago with a
Christian businessman and dear friend named Tom Dunkerton. Tom and I were having lunch
because I wanted his advice. At that time, my family and I were living in Charlottesville,
Virginia; I was teaching at the University of Virginia. I had spent a semester teaching at
Harvard, and much to my surprise, they offered me a job. I loved my job at Virginia, but I also
loved New England. I desperately wanted to make the right choice, but I didn’t know what the
right choice was. I prayed, and I agonized, and I analyzed that decision from every possible
angle—and I still didn’t know what the right choice was. I was driving myself and my family
crazy. I poured all this out to Tom, and he heard me out, and then he said this:

First of all, he said, you’re being really stupid about this. (Here’s a small piece of advice:
cultivate friends who will tell you when you’re being stupid. They turn out to be the best friends

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you have.) Instead of all your agonizing and analyzing, Tom said to me, start by asking this
question: Are the choices before you honorable ones? If not, your decision is easy. If so, take
those choices you face, and pray these two prayers about them: “Father, give my heart the
longings that you want me to have. And redeem the mistakes that I know I’ll make along the
way.” Pray those prayers sincerely, Tom said, and then relax: the God of the universe knows
how to answer those prayers. Ask Him to mold your heart in the way He thinks best—and then
follow that changed heart. You want to make good decisions about courses of study and career
paths? Leave a little room for the Holy Spirit. Let the One who made your heart mold your
heart. And then pour out the love that He pours in. That well never runs dry, and that fire never
burns out.

You are, all of you, very bright men and women with uncommonly well-trained minds, thanks to
the excellent faculty who has taught you well the past few years. That’s all to the good. But as
you develop your intellectual talents—and you should develop them; that’s part of what it means
to be a good steward of the gifts God has given you—remember this: great minds are used best
in service of loving hearts. Remember this too: you were made by a God who made tables, and
Who did so as an act of love. We are called, all of us, whatever our jobs, to go and do likewise.

The advice I’ve just given you offers no guarantee that your paths will be easy ones. Sometimes,
those paths may seem impossibly hard. Some of the paths I’ve walked have seemed that way to
me. But I can promise you this: Allow yourself to be led by the One who alone knows your
future as well as your past, and you can trust that, on hard days and easy days alike, those paths
will be good ones. And always—always!—there will be grace for the journey. In the end, those
are the things that your hearts, and mine, really desire.

A large portion of the society in which we live believes that we were made to buy things, and
made to climb ladders. It is not so. You and I were made for better lives than that. God grant
that we might live those better lives, and God grant that we might be the creative and loving
people He made us to be.

Thank you very much, and congratulations to you all.