My niece graduated from high school yesterday. (Of course, it’s impossible that this young woman is old enough to finish high school. It’s a little bit like that famous creepy Wooderson line in Dazed and Confused, in reverse: every year they get older and I stay the saaame age.) Her journey has been very interesting. The family (2 adults, 2 girls, and a variety of pets) decided to leave their home and live in a motor coach for the last several years. This necessitated a remote learning situation, and she received her diploma from a Christian school based in Pensacola, Florida. And in May, they hold an in-person ceremony that looks exactly like every high school graduation looks, except most of the kids have never met each other.

The keynote speaker was the Academy President, who didn’t have to be awesome but was anyway. He gave a message with 3 main points, the first was “Never underestimate the value of daily faithfulness.”

Sunday was Mother’s Day (incidentally, I don’t really believe in participating in these holidays invented to sell product, opportunities to worship at the altar of consumerism, but that’s hardly important) and I mentioned that anyone can be great on Mother’s Day. Anyone can buy a present and call on Mother’s Day. Anyone can honor their mom on Mother’s Day. But we are not anyone. It takes someone different to honor their mom on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon, right?

Jesus commands us to love each other, even our enemies, and it’s mostly the same thing. Everybody can practice love for the people they like, or when they want to, but what about the people we don’t like, or that we disagree with, or don’t agree with, or when we’re tired and don’t feel like it? This works for everything, I suppose. Great marriages aren’t built on airport pickups, anniversaries, or honeymoons – everybody shows up for those things – they’re built on mealtimes and mornings, on kind words and patience. And a high maximum bench press doesn’t happen in a 3 hour workout, it happens through a long, long, long series of boring workouts.

My niece watched lectures, took tests, read textbooks, and wrote essays on a tour bus. She did it at all times of the day, without a desk or a classroom or bells. Most times she did it without teachers, just her and her “daily faithfulness.”

And I’m thinking about why she did that. What got her out of bed to open the books, over and over and over, who and what was she being faithful to? The answer probably isn’t one thing. I’d guess she’d tell you that she was faithful to the God who gave her the gifts she has, and the call she has been given. But I think she was also faithful to the person she is becoming, to a future version of herself, who practices quiet daily faithfulness, discipline and intention.

The hard work of building isn’t ever for today, it’s for a vision of the marriage, the bench press, the person you want to be who does those things, who loves in spite of feelings or convenience. When you see it, it’s inspiring and almost never about motivation. Nobody feels like it all the time, but she probably found that she doesn’t even ask herself how she feels, there’s not an IF in the neighborhood. The graduate that she was working towards – and that she now is – simply gets up and goes to work. We’re all proud of her, it’ll be fantastic to see who she decides to become next.