beautiful thoughts...

Loved this article about the Baccalaureate celebration at Stanford this weekend. I pulled out a couple of my fav. parts.

"If you demand a mate who is a perfect person, you'll be single," she said. "If you wed expecting a perfect marriage, you’ll be sad. And if you try to run a perfect business, nobody will want to eat lunch with you. And if you come to the point when the imperfections of your parents are obvious and unavoidable, let me remind you, 'the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.'"

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In her 12-minute address, Bowman said people cannot predict where their faith – whatever it is – will take them.

"But wherever that is, go, go," she said. "And leave your 'score card' app behind and just relish the experience. Study, shape, find, forgive, struggle, weep when you need to, laugh when you can, love. Hold, please, the knowledge that wherever, whenever, why-ever, whoever, however time and events touch you – or are touched by you – there is yet and always the possibility of Amen."

Bowman asked the graduating students to consider that their life plans may not go as planned, and "that sometimes the things that do not go as planned, the things that are not executed perfectly, have a power all their own."

She said sometimes they will have to "launch a leap too short over a gap too wide," and predicted that what they launch will get completed – somehow.

"Picture in The Matrix, Morpheus launching out of the building, with Neo launching out of a helicopter, closing the gap – you with me?" she said, to appreciative laughter from an audience familiar with the 1999 science-fiction/action movie. "It's messy. It's imperfect. But it works."