By James Hanlon
Leader Staff Writer
“It’s an honor to be at a baccalaureate service, a Christian service for our graduates,” said Oakwood Community Church Pastor Don Jackson, the keynote speaker at an event held at Legacy 925 on Sunday evening. “In more and more communities, this is becoming not possible. So we want to keep this alive.”
The Baccalaureate Service for Oxford High School graduates is sponsored each year by a cooperative effort of area churches. This year’s event was planned by members of Oakwood Community Church and St. Joseph Catholic Church.
“I want to be the first to say to the class of 2021, congratulations,” said Shane Stec, who gave a reflection as a parent of a 2021 graduate. “You guys had a senior year like no other. You know, 2020, that class thought they had it bad, but they only had to deal with Covid for two months. You guys had a whole year of cancelations, uncertainty, constant changes.”
Stec encouraged the seniors to celebrate their accomplishments. “Whether you finished strong, or you barely finished, you finished! I’m so proud of you. This is not the end for you guys, it’s really the beginning.”
He went on to talk about how to define success. “Success, in God’s opinion, is to focus on faithfulness,” he said.
2021 graduate Hutton Gordon spoke about hope and trust amid suffering, using an analogy from the Star Wars films “when the Empire takes over and there’s no hope and it just seems like everything’s gone.”
“But in every movie, the Rebellion is able to keep going, even when it is like a million to one. They do this because they know what they are doing is right, and just. And if they gave up, if they surrender, then there’s really no hope. I’ve seen this analogy in our lives too much.”
What Christians understand, Gordon said, is that they can put their hope and trust in Jesus Christ.
Bryce Clark, an alumnus from the class of 2014, felt pressured to go to college after high school. “I knew for me, I wanted to do something different for myself,” he said, so he made the risky decision to become an entrepreneur.
Almost right away, he was able to make a living selling t-shirts online. He reinvested his earnings into the business, but the business plan was weak, and it eventually fell apart along with his entrepreneurial identity, sending him into a depression.
He reached out to a mentor who taught him that his identity shouldn’t be his financial success. “My identity, and who I am in God is so much more than the number in my bank account or my success in a particular area of life and that really got me thinking.”
He couldn’t bring himself to apply for a job because he was so attached to his identity as self-employed. Because he got over that idea, he was able to continue working through the pandemic as an operations manager for a cleaning company, despite losing other side jobs.
“Having an identity as foundation that is unchanging, unwavering that is God and Christ, I can lose everything in my life, and I’m still not going to lose who I am, my identity, because I know I am a child of God. I’m created in His image and I was saved by Grace.”
Pastor Jackson quoted 1 Corinthians 10:31 “When you eat or drink or do anything else, do it all for the glory of God.”
“Do it all for the glory of God,” he said. “God will not let you down.”
Jackson told the riveting childhood story of how he tried to out-jump his friend’s new mountain bike with his skinny-tire ten-speed. They built “an awesome ramp” and he hit it as hard as he could. It wasn’t until he was eight feet in the air that he realized, “I gotta land this thing.”
He came down hard. Both pedals snapped off and he crashed. “You’ve got one life to live. Do it all for the glory of God and realize this one thing that I learned: that everything you do, you gotta land this thing called life. . . every choice you make, everything that you do, you gotta land that thing. So do it in a way that will bring glory and honor to God.”