I was invited to speak at the baccalaureate ceremony at my high school, Central Bucks East in Buckingham, a suburb of Philadelphia. I had spoken to their football team in the Fall of that year and it went well enough that the principal asked me to come back for a different audience.
But I kept my message much the same. “Live, love, learn and leave a legacy" was the title of my talk. I shared with those in attendance that night about my diagnosis and prognosis, and that usually gets people’s attention right off the bat. It doesn’t actually make anything I have to say more true, but it does cause people to sit a little straighter and listen more intently, expecting me to have some wisdom that the next guy without a terminal illness might not.
Then, to try and lighten the moment, and given my football background, I like to share that my favorite quarterback is Joe Montana, and that I am a Bruce Springsteen cult fan since high school. And I also disclosed that my hero, my mentor, my counselor is a man that lived and died 2015 years ago and who still lives in me and in all of us today. Then I proceed to share some thoughts on what it means to live, love, learn and the resulting legacy.
- To live, truly alive and to sing the song with your life that you were meant to sing.
- To love freely, deeply and with a whole heart not only with your family, but also your friends and ultimately the Lord.
- And to spend every day in the posture of a life-long student, ready, willing and able to learn something new every day. That is an exciting posture to wake up with every day.
- And if you do those three things, LIVE, LOVE, and LEARN, you will not only leave a legacy, but it will be a good one that will impact others in a positive way.
People seem to have resonated with that talk and I have shared it often at speaking events.
I also told the audience at CB East that night how important that era and season of my life was and how much it has become part of the man I am today. That place was the birth place of my dreams, athletically and beyond. It was within those walls and with people in that school that I first envisioned the future I wanted to pursue and it is where I first imagined the “me” I wanted to become. We all start somewhere, and for me, it was CB East High school. I am proud to be a Patriot, class of 1980.
There are a few specific people in my high school years who stood next to me and listened to my extraordinary dreams for my future and smiled and said "I believe in you." The senior cheerleader when I was a sophomore, the co-captains of our football and basketball championship teams, my JV basketball coach who said I could be as good as I wanted to be, and I believed him. The gal who introduced me to the music of Bruce Springsteen and the E street band, and the young man who ran all those sprints and lifted all those weights with me until we threw up some days. I wrote to one of them in our yearbook "If I ever make it in this world, it will be for you, because I wouldn’t have made it without you." I should have written that to all of those people, because it is true.
Standing on that stage and speaking to hundreds of people, I realized that everything had come full circle. It was a humbling experience filled with reminiscing and joy. Those people know who they are to me. And I just want to say thank you for believing in me, supporting and encouraging me and standing by me, then and now.
Amen and AMEN.