The Commencement Speech You Never Hear

Sharon McMahon, a bestselling author and Builders Movement Partner, was supposed to deliver the commencement address at Utah Valley University yesterday. She was ready to return to the campus that was the site of Charlie Kirk’s assassination just months before, and share a unifying message about the resilience of hope.

But just days before graduation, Sharon learned that UVU had cancelled her speech, based on safety concerns according to the university. It’s vital that we be able to hear those we disagree with, not shut them down, and that we can embrace a diverse set of beliefs in our civic space. We’re proud to call Sharon a partner, today, we’re publishing the speech she would have given.

Durable Hope  — A Commencement Address

By Sharon McMahon

In December of 1776, the American Revolution did not look inevitable.

It looked like cold. It looked like hunger. It looked like men wrapping rags around their feet because their shoes had fallen apart. George Washington’s army was shrinking. Supplies were low. People were dying from contagious illness. The cause that would one day be carved in marble was, in that moment, standing very close to failure.

That is the thing about history: it only looks inevitable after someone survives it.

Before it becomes a chapter in a textbook, history is usually just tired people living inside uncertainty, trying to decide whether the future is still worth the trouble.

Into that moment came Thomas Paine, a philosopher and revolutionary.

His essay, The American Crisis, was published on December 19, 1776, just days before Washington crossed the Delaware. The story is often told that Paine’s words were read aloud to Washington’s troops before the crossing. Whether or not that scene happened exactly that way, the words endured because they told the truth about the hour:

“These are the times that try men’s souls.”

Not: these are the times that prove everything will be fine.

Not: these are the times when the courageous feel no fear. These are the times that try us.

“Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country,” he said. “All nations and ages have been subject to them.”

Graduates, I will not insult you by pretending you are entering an easy world. You are not. You are graduating into a world that can feel unbearably loud and strangely lonely at the same time; a world where trust is thin, cruelty is profitable, corruption often looks untouchable, and a thousand voices are waiting to tell you that caring is pointless and naive.

But I want you to hear me clearly: 

A hard time is not the same thing as a hopeless time. 

A broken world is not the same thing as a finished one. And a world you cannot fix alone is not the same thing as a world that does not need you.

This is a day for joy. It is a day for photographs, flowers, families, friends, fat pieces of cake and dirty sodas. It’s full of the particular kind of optimism that comes from wearing a hat no one has ever successfully looked normal in. (Is it supposed to cover your eyebrows or your impending bald spot? Hard to say.)

You should celebrate. You should celebrate the exams you survived, the papers you wrote, the group projects that other people made you do all the work on (or perhaps, the opposite?), the late nights, the early mornings, the jobs you worked, the doubts you carried, and the moments when you were not sure you could keep going, but somehow did.

You should celebrate the people who helped you get here: the parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, teachers, mentors, coaches, advisors, and chosen family who believed in this day before it arrived. The ancestors who did not know of your existence, but whose efforts paved the way — across wilderness and sea — for you to be sitting in this room today. 

Some of the people you have to thank are sitting here right now with full hearts and phones at 4% battery because they have taken 900 photos already, and they are currently trying to upload them to Facebook, despite the lack of cell reception in this building. Some of them are not here, but you carry them in your hearts. Their love, their labor, their sacrifices, their prayers, their expectations, their memories — all of it is part of this day.

So yes, celebrate. Let this day be beautiful. Let it be joyful. Let it be loud.

But commencement is not only a celebration of what you have completed. It is also a ceremony of being sent – sent out into the world to do what only you can. And I want to send you with something stronger than an easy optimism that the road ahead is wide and flat and full of blue skies. Because easy optimism will not last.

Easy optimism collapses the first time life is unfair. It disappears the first time the plan falls apart, the institution fails, the job falls through, the diagnosis comes, the person you trusted disappoints you, or the world reveals itself to be more fragile than you wanted to believe.

You do not need easy optimism.

What you need is something better: durable hope.

Durable hope is not the belief that everything will work out. Durable hope is the decision to keep working when you don’t yet know how things will turn out, when the outcome is not yet assured. Durable hope doesn’t ask you not to pretend the wounds of the world are not real. Durable hope looks directly at what is broken and says: I will not let this be the whole story.

That is what Paine was asking of people in 1776. Not certainty. Not comfort. Not applause. He was asking them to keep going when hope was nothing more than a hand in the dark. 

We look at the Revolution and call it “a ragtag volunteer army in need of a shower somehow defeating a global superpower.”  But the people living through it experienced it as hunger, fear, debt, mud, and doubt.

We look at other moments in history, like the abolition of enslavement and say, “of course slavery had to end.” But the people who fought it did not have the luxury of the phrase “of course.” They lived in a country where human beings were bought and sold in public, where the law protected the auction block, where newspapers defended the indefensible, where churches found Bible verses for bondage, and where telling the truth about evil could get you beaten, jailed, or killed.

We remember women’s suffrage as if the Nineteenth Amendment had just been waiting politely in line for its turn. But the women (and yes, men!) who fought for the vote were not walking toward what they believed was an inevitability. They were mocked in newspapers, denounced from pulpits, arrested outside the White House, imprisoned, and force-fed when they went on hunger strike. They were told they were asking for too much, moving too fast, threatening traditional family values, ruining the country, and embarrassing themselves in public.

None of them — not the patriots of the revolution or the abolitionists or the suffrage workers — had any assurance of their success. They had to live with the possibility that courage would cost them everything and still not be enough. That they could be right and still lose. That they could be faithful and still be forgotten. That they could give the future their best and never know whether it mattered. They had no easy optimism. What they reached for, during the times that tried their souls, was a durable hope that what they would do would matter, someday, and that none of their work for liberty would be lost.

Your lives are clearly not the same as theirs. This moment is not the same as any that came before it. But every generation, yours included, is faced with a future it cannot predict. And every generation must answer the same question: what shall we contribute to the future? 

And you know what? That may not be fair. 

But history has never waited for fairness before asking people to have courage. 

No one who came before you got a neat beginning or a world in perfect condition. No one gets to say, “Please come back when the problems are smaller, the stakes are lower, the facts are clearer, the institutions are healthier, and I have had a little more time to do some personal development and some extra leg days to become the kind of person this moment requires.”

You do not get to choose the world you inherit, but you do get to choose what the world inherits from you.

That is the question I want to ask you today.

What will the world inherit from you?

I need you to know something else: it’s not your job to fix everything. And that’s good news. The weight of the world is not on your shoulders. Other people share in your responsibility. You can’t do everything, but you shouldn’t let that stop you from doing all you can, where you are, with the resources available to you. 

What does this look like in practice? What the world will inherit from you lies in a million small moments: it’s in the ballots you cast, in the questions you ask, in the people you apologize to, in the power you refuse to abuse. It’s in the people you decline to treat as disposable, and who you choose to lift up instead of putting down. It’s in the moment that someone says, “That’s just how things are,” and you reply, “Maybe. But it is not how they have to stay.”

What will matter most are not the moments where everyone is watching. They aren’t the commencement addresses you may one day give or the viral social media posts you may one day write, but in the moments you choose to do the next needed thing with no promise of a payoff, with no assurance of success. 

I am going to be honest: This is not glamorous work. The people who came before us — the patriots, the abolitionists, the suffrage workers, the ones who crossed seas and walked the wilderness and carried impossible things — were not living inside a future museum exhibit. They were living inside the daily cost of believing something better was possible.

The same is true for you. What you do with your power, despite any lie that tries to whisper otherwise, still counts.

And you do have power. Not always the kind that gets a title, a platform, or a parking space with your name on it. But real power. You have the power to refuse contempt when contempt would get a laugh, to pay attention when distraction would be more comfortable, to be the first person in the room to say, “That is not okay.” You have the power to become someone the future can trust.

That is no small thing. Because the world does not only need your talents and achievements. It does not only need your perfect one page resume or your LinkedIn post. 

It needs your character. It needs you to keep going, to keep doing the next needed thing, when hope feels like little more than a hand in the dark.

That is what I mean when I say you do not get to choose the world you inherit, but you do get to choose what the world inherits from you. 

The world will inherit what you practice. 

So practice love.
Practice joy.
Practice peace.
Practice forbearance.
Practice kindness, and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self control.
Practice the kind of durable hope that does not look away from what is broken, but also refuses to let brokenness have the final word.

Because someday, someone will live inside the world your choices helped make. They may never recognize your name on a family tree. They may never know what you risked, the burdens you bore, what you repaired, who you helped, or what you kept alive when it would have been easier to let it die. But they will inherit it anyway.

So no, I am not asking you to save the world.

I am asking you not to give up on it. I am asking you to understand that we don’t know the future. But we do get to help write how it ends. 

And that brings us back to Thomas Paine, and to those soldiers in the cold that December. In 1776, Washington’s soldiers did not know how the story would end. They did not know that, generations later, students would memorize the names and dates and crossings and battles.

They did not know they were living inside a story that would seem to future generations to be inevitable.

They only knew that the times were trying their souls. 

Graduates, these are times that will try yours  too.

But a hard time is not the same as a hopeless time.

A broken world is not the same as a finished one.

And the fact that you cannot do everything does not release you from the sacred work of doing something.

So go build lives that are worthy of the people who helped you get here. 

Go make art. Build companies. Teach children. Defend clients. Heal bodies. Write books. Plant gardens. Run for office. Start families. Start over. Feed people. Make things. Fix things. Ask better questions. Tell fewer lies. Keep your heart open. Keep your mind awake. Keep your hands ready for the work that is yours to do. Practice joy in the face of incredible adversity. 

Do not let anyone make you feel foolish for loving a world that is still worth saving.

Do not wait for history to become inevitable before deciding where you stand.

And when the room gets quiet because everyone is waiting for someone else to have courage, I hope you remember this day. I hope you remember that you were never promised an easy world. 

You were given a life in a moment in history that needs witnesses, builders, repairers, truth-tellers, and courageous, upstanding people who know they may never get the assurance of their success. 

Be one of them.

Yes, these are the times that try us.

So let the times find you faithful. Let them find you truthful. Let them find you tender without being fragile, brave without being cruel, hopeful without needing certainty.

A hard time is not the same thing as a hopeless time. A broken world is not the same thing as a finished one. And a world you cannot fix alone is not the same thing as a world that does not need you. 

Graduates: Do not reach for easy optimism. Take the hand of a more durable hope. 

And go help write what comes next.