The last time I’d been at a college graduation was fall 1991 at my husband’s at Minnesota State University Moorhead, a semester after my spring 1991 baccalaureate. The first of our children to graduate college did so during the pandemic in the spring of 2020, which meant watching her big moment on TV at home.
That made the 2025 North Dakota State University graduation on May 17 at the Fargodome the first we’d seen in person in 34 years, and it was twice the size. Searching for seats in the massive facility that morning, I began to wonder if we would even find our middle son in the throng.
We finally landed seats in a section above floor level. Unfortunately, we ended up on the opposite side of our graduate. At one point, he texted, asking if we’d spotted him. “No,” I responded, so he offered to wave. Great, except everyone else had the same idea! He finally called me and stood up briefly so I could locate him. For a brief moment, I did, but a second later, he’d already blended back into the sea of green robes, mortarboards and tassels.
A light panic set in. Finding our children at their high-school graduations was a breeze compared to this. We had gone through so much work to prepare for this day, and now, the reason that we had seemed almost unreachable.
Like everyone, we settled in to sit through the speeches and hundreds of names that would be read. Without alphabetization of the names, we couldn’t really prepare much for the moment our guy would appear on stage. I knew my chances of getting a quick picture from afar — along with a short video of him walking across the platform to receive his diploma — would require attentiveness and precision.
His name wasn’t called until about 95 percent of the way through. I nearly missed it, but when I noticed a figure that, faintly, looked like it could be him, I readied my phone, and seconds later, his name was announced. I’m so grateful I caught it. As any parent of a graduate knows, these moments are rare and precious.
All this got me thinking about God, who does not have to scan the crowds to find us because he knows exactly where we are at every moment. And like each parent and loved one at the Dome that day, God eagerly — and with much more patience — awaits our appearance before him. When we do show up, his heart swells.
It grieves me how many don’t believe they are seen from heaven, feeling they are no more special than a smattering of dirt. Instead, I’m with one writer who said that though we are dust, we are precious dust to the One who made heaven and earth.
Though each of us is just a speck in the vastness, no matter how hard we are to spot in a crowd, we are all sought after, and cherished, by our good God.
[For the sake of having a repository for my newspaper columns and articles, I reprint them here, with permission, a week after their run date. The preceding ran in The Forum newspaper on Month, Day, 2025.]
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