To The TRC High School Graduates of 2026
To graduate from high school is to leave behind one phase of life and press forward to something new. Consider two vital truths you must take with you into this next phase.
First, Real Presence
You must intentionally live with a real presence in the world. This requires swimming against the tide. You live in the age of the instant, of the flicker, of the “story” that disappears in 24 hours, and the opinion that disappears even faster. The age of the instant plays out on social media, which transfers an entire ethos to those who become its slaves.
Whether you join social media or not, you must never join the ethos of social media, which is, as I once heard it put, like a person sitting in the back seat of a car going one hundred miles an hour, staring out the side window. The world outside that window is rich, vast, full of trees, faces, sunrises, and the occasional cow. But to this poor passenger, everything is reduced to a blur, a passing color, a shape without substance, a moment without memory.
This person sees so much and understands so little. She confuses motion for meaning. And worst of all, she thinks she’s in control of the car.
Don’t be that person. Instead, have real presence. Don’t be captured by the ethos of the instant. Don’t think that AI is wisdom or that the search engine is a soul.
Life is not meant to be a blur. Real life is not a feed to scroll through, nor a highlight reel to stage. Real life is a pilgrimage, a strange and slow adventure where even the roadside weeds have names, and even the delays have a purpose.
So, don’t live so fast that you miss what is real. Step outside the car. Walk. Stumble, even. But see the world as it is, not with the filter that others put on it. Because in the end, the soul is not nourished by speed, but by wonder. And wonder, as Chesterton said, is the natural state of man when he is sane.
Second, Self-Limitation
You must live with self-limitation in the world. Self-limitation entails salvific revolutions. This requires an explanation, but first, we must reflect on the paradox of how the explosion of knowledge has rendered us stupider.
How so? We live in a time where information flies faster than bullets and often does more damage. Yes, we can split the atom. Yes, we can build a missile that shakes an eight-block radius (designed here in Huntsville, no less). We can hurl a man to the moon with mathematical precision (also work done in Huntsville). Yet we can scarcely tell that man why he’s here on Earth in the first place.
We can invent deadly viruses in a Wuhan laboratory and cover it up.[1] We can connect the globe with the miracle of the Internet. But to what end? So that a man in Kansas can argue with a man in Kosovo about a cat video. The point is that for all these technological advances, man has lost the one knowledge most necessary to him: the knowledge of his limits.
That is the great irony you must avoid. The more omnipotent our machinery and knowledge, the more you forget that you are not God. You need to learn the lesson of Babel. You need to discover the lesson of Job. You need to memorize Psalm 131. The lesson you are learning, discovering, and memorizing is this: You are not God.
When people begin to see themselves as infinite, they see nothing at all. They are blinded not by darkness, but by the glare of a thousand artificial lights. When these technological breakthroughs convince man that he has no limits to knowledge, he ends up in a place where he knows less about reality than before.
That’s why self-limitation entails salvific revolution. It’s the sin of hubris to think there is nothing that we shouldn’t know; nothing that we couldn’t know. Today, you and I walk around demanding rights, demanding answers, and explanations from God. We put God on trial as if we are god, as if we are in charge, as if we know. And this is the greatest sin of the modern world.
Job experimented with this sort of hubris. When Job went down the path of demanding knowledge from God, God said this to Job:
Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me.
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements--surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
At the end of this discomfiting exchange, Job learns wisdom and says:
I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know...therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.
That is the salvific revolution that you need.
Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of the books The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.
[1] Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton University Press, 2025).
First, Real Presence
You must intentionally live with a real presence in the world. This requires swimming against the tide. You live in the age of the instant, of the flicker, of the “story” that disappears in 24 hours, and the opinion that disappears even faster. The age of the instant plays out on social media, which transfers an entire ethos to those who become its slaves.
Whether you join social media or not, you must never join the ethos of social media, which is, as I once heard it put, like a person sitting in the back seat of a car going one hundred miles an hour, staring out the side window. The world outside that window is rich, vast, full of trees, faces, sunrises, and the occasional cow. But to this poor passenger, everything is reduced to a blur, a passing color, a shape without substance, a moment without memory.
This person sees so much and understands so little. She confuses motion for meaning. And worst of all, she thinks she’s in control of the car.
Don’t be that person. Instead, have real presence. Don’t be captured by the ethos of the instant. Don’t think that AI is wisdom or that the search engine is a soul.
Life is not meant to be a blur. Real life is not a feed to scroll through, nor a highlight reel to stage. Real life is a pilgrimage, a strange and slow adventure where even the roadside weeds have names, and even the delays have a purpose.
So, don’t live so fast that you miss what is real. Step outside the car. Walk. Stumble, even. But see the world as it is, not with the filter that others put on it. Because in the end, the soul is not nourished by speed, but by wonder. And wonder, as Chesterton said, is the natural state of man when he is sane.
Second, Self-Limitation
You must live with self-limitation in the world. Self-limitation entails salvific revolutions. This requires an explanation, but first, we must reflect on the paradox of how the explosion of knowledge has rendered us stupider.
How so? We live in a time where information flies faster than bullets and often does more damage. Yes, we can split the atom. Yes, we can build a missile that shakes an eight-block radius (designed here in Huntsville, no less). We can hurl a man to the moon with mathematical precision (also work done in Huntsville). Yet we can scarcely tell that man why he’s here on Earth in the first place.
We can invent deadly viruses in a Wuhan laboratory and cover it up.[1] We can connect the globe with the miracle of the Internet. But to what end? So that a man in Kansas can argue with a man in Kosovo about a cat video. The point is that for all these technological advances, man has lost the one knowledge most necessary to him: the knowledge of his limits.
That is the great irony you must avoid. The more omnipotent our machinery and knowledge, the more you forget that you are not God. You need to learn the lesson of Babel. You need to discover the lesson of Job. You need to memorize Psalm 131. The lesson you are learning, discovering, and memorizing is this: You are not God.
When people begin to see themselves as infinite, they see nothing at all. They are blinded not by darkness, but by the glare of a thousand artificial lights. When these technological breakthroughs convince man that he has no limits to knowledge, he ends up in a place where he knows less about reality than before.
That’s why self-limitation entails salvific revolution. It’s the sin of hubris to think there is nothing that we shouldn’t know; nothing that we couldn’t know. Today, you and I walk around demanding rights, demanding answers, and explanations from God. We put God on trial as if we are god, as if we are in charge, as if we know. And this is the greatest sin of the modern world.
Job experimented with this sort of hubris. When Job went down the path of demanding knowledge from God, God said this to Job:
Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me.
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements--surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
At the end of this discomfiting exchange, Job learns wisdom and says:
I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know...therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.
That is the salvific revolution that you need.
Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of the books The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.
[1] Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton University Press, 2025).
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