Graduation season is upon us, and with it comes thoughts of endings and beginnings, finishing one season of life and starting another. It’s been five years since our youngest graduated from college, but I still remember these times well. There’s a lot of reflection that goes on, thoughts filled with different emotions, walking over this threshold and into something new. For our Sixth-Grade Graduation here at Christ Church last week, the theme of the evening was Dr. Seuss’s, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” It’s a sweet book about these new seasons in life and the excitement and challenges that come with taking a step into a new place, many times an unknown place. It’s a popular gift at graduation, although Seuss wrote it with a little wider audience in mind. It was the final book he published before his death in 1991, and in interviews, he said he intended it to address what he called “The great balancing act of life” at many different milestone points.

The Bible addresses this same balancing act of life over and over again. If there’s one overarching theme in God’s Word about the places we’ll go, it’s this: God goes with us. As we travel through life, walking through open doors or discovering locked ones, making decisions about whether to turn left or turn right, climbing steep mountains or coasting down hills, wandering through unknown territory or comfortably strolling through familiar ground, we are assured that we are not alone. God told Moses, “I will be with you” (Ex. 3:12); he told Joshua, “Be strong and courageous, do not be afraid, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go” (Josh. 1:9); he told David, “I have been with you wherever you have gone” (2 Sam. 7:9); he told Israel, “Fear not, for I am with you” (Is. 41:10); he told the disciples, “And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20); and he told the Christians in Jerusalem, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Heb. 13:5). Time and time again we are reminded of God’s presence with us every step of the way.

And so, as you send your graduate into all the places he or she will go, into the balancing act that is our world, don’t ever forget that God is with them and they (and you) are never alone!