At an intersection in life, you look at the roads and wonder where they lead, and what will come of beginnings and changings, how the doings of a day or a week or a month will direct and dictate all that follows.
Like the little boy so far away, my grandson, a new kindergartner today, with his clothes laid out and his lunch packed and a grand adventure awaiting the dawning of his day. While he is away, his mother will be at the doctor’s office, under the sonographer’s wand, and tonight after dinner there will be cupcakes, either pink or blue, and from across the country various will look in to learn and celebrate. And by night we will know if it is a boy or a girl who will come to join this clan of two lads and a big dog and a mom and dad.
A dad who will, in a week, graduate from a big-city police academy and begin, in all likelihood, some two decades and more of daily and dangerous service with a badge and a gun.
They’ve already had three combat deployments. He overseas and she at home, with babies or a belly, keeping the home fires burning. Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria, and years of humping a ruck and sleeping on the ground.
And now this new turn.
Where the duty tour is home, and the rules have all changed. Where Officer Friendly is the bad guy and a political philosophy is arrayed against the police.
It is a time of hard beginnings.
Where a baby born has an uncertain future, where a classroom entered will serve an uncertain purpose, and where a badge worn is an uncertain honor, and perhaps a target.
These are the days and these are the challenges. Maybe the most daunting in America’s history.
But this is the day that the Lord has made, and this is the day we are called to embrace. New beginnings are dawnings and commencements, paths to glory and joy, and the wise course is to set out with gusto, with faith and hope, and with the certitude that by force of will and nature of man tomorrow will be a better day.
Dad was a paratrooper, and when the light goes green, you jump. You don’t dawdle and fret, you don’t reassess and withdraw, you don’t discuss and dissect, you jump. You get out the door, and you do what you came to do.
With your first breath of life, your first day at school, or your first day with a badge.
Or your new day as the lover and protector of them all, the mother who bears the baby and bolsters the boy and backs the man. Who, amidst her own talents and aspirations, is the matrix within which they all can grow and succeed. The vital element essential to the highest progress of each and all. Each to bloom on his own, each reliant on the whole, a family growing forward and outward and upward.
With the challenges of tomorrow and the tears of yesterday, stronger for then and better for now.
Life is a climb. It’s all uphill. It may briefly level off, or you may sometimes enjoy the view, but it is always upward and onward, through storm and sun, to a better place, becoming better people, as individuals and as a family. There may come terrors of height, looking down or up, the brief vertigo of confusion and panic. But you brace yourself, and get your orientation, and remember which way is up, and how far you’ve come, and why you’ve come, and you resume your climb.
So set out. In new directions and beginnings. Recognizing that the start of one journey is the culmination of another. That you didn’t get to today by accident, that this is not a windfall unexpectedly thrown in your way, it is a prize and an opportunity for which you have worked and sacrificed, and which you have truly earned.
It is a precedent of success, which augurs well for the future. If you climbed this peak, you can climb the next. If you earned this opportunity, you can earn the next. Your personal heritage, as an individual and as a family, is success. You are winners, because you have won before, together, and you will, if you continue as you have come, win again, together. This day, and every day.
This is not about the state of America, it is about the nature of you. And the promise and potential of your new beginning.
In school, in life, on the streets.
And in the sacred confines of your own home and family.