������Ƶ

Editor’s Note: Hawaii Baptist Academy’s 60th commencement ceremony was held on June 1 at the Blaisdell Concert Hall. Sheldon Arakawa and Matthew Johnson were named the valedictorians. Below is an excerpt from their address.

There were once two people giving donations at a church. One of them, a rich man who had thousands upon thousands of dollars, gave a couple hundred towards a missionary fund. The other, a poor old woman, gave a single dollar bill. As the people gathered around saw the two donations side by side, they thanked the man dearly and scoffed at the woman silently. Embarrassed, the woman turned to leave, but all of a sudden a voice everyone knew spoke up, saying “don’t look down upon the offering of this old woman. For the man has given but his pocket change, while she has given everything she owns.”

The moral of this story is that it wasn’t fair to judge both donors by the same standard. For though the dollar amounts were apparent, there was so much more to the story than the bottom line. What the people watching failed to consider was the possibility that the circumstances for both donors were vastly different, and they made the mistake of judging both of them only by what they saw.

The same thing can be said for us. That as we have gathered here tonight, it’s all too easy to look upon one another and judge based solely on what we see. That is, as we walk across this stage in a few minutes to receive our diplomas, some of us will be given different honors than others, while some of us will be given no honors at all, and the biting tendency in each of us will be to make judgments based on who receives what.

What we fail to consider, though, are the numerous differences that exist between us. For example, take the idea of natural talent. In every English class I have been in, there has always been the undeniable fact that some students see things better than others. You can make two students with the same background in literature read a novel like Pride and Prejudice, and one of them will understand most everything on his first try while the other understands nothing even on his fifth. It happens every day, in math, in art, in science, and in athletics: some people are simply more gifted than others.

And natural talent is simply one of the infinitely many things that makes each of us different, and that is the reason we are completely and utterly unqualified to pass judgment on one another.

Now when I say judgment, I do not mean the same thing that parents do when they say to their children “exercise your good judgment,” for what they mean then is for their children to analyze the situation at hand before choosing the best option. In a way, this is what colleges do in their application process. They look at the data, analyze it through their knowledge of statistics and patterns, and choose the students they think will be the most beneficial for the college. They do not pass judgment, they simply look at the logistics.

Neither do I suggest that grades are a form of judgment; for they are simply measurements of how well one performs in a class. In fact, grades are the only kind of thing that teachers have the right to report on, for no matter how well a teacher knows a student, there will always be more to the story than the teacher can know.

Rather, when we say judgment, we mean the tendency to impose values on the actions or efforts of someone else. When we see someone making a sincere effort or doing something we consider to be moral, we deem him a good person. And conversely, if we see someone doing something we consider immoral, we deem him a worse person than we originally thought. Yet like the crowd watching the poor woman giving up her single dollar bill, both our notions of effort and performance depend on our understanding of others. No matter how much we try, we can never fully understand someone else.

Our point in explaining judgment to you is this: that no matter who you are or who you associate with, you are ultimately held accountable to two people: yourself and the God who knows you. For besides yourself, only God can understand the inner workings of your heart: all of the motives, the context, the efforts, and the intentions that go into making an action what it really is. To be held accountable means this: that in every choice we make, though people will say things about us, think things about us, or tell us exactly what they believed we should have done, the crux of the matter lies in doing what we know will be right in the eyes of the one who know the full story. To paraphrase the words of C.S. Lewis, mankind sees only the results of the raw material a man has been given, while God judges that man on his courage to do something great with it. That the important thing in any decision is not the final product, but how and why the decision was made in the first place.

So why does this matter? For one, the idea of everyone being accountable to only him or herself and God helps us not to lose ourselves in the crowd around us. For when we constantly judge others by what we see on the surface, we tend to lose sight of what lies beneath. We make excuses for ourselves based on the standards of others, and we deny our own uniqueness by obsessing over how we stack up against the actions of others. The result is that we constantly feel deficient as long as there is someone better than us nearby, and even if we do find the rare opportunity to be considered the best, then we are only left with a feeling of dull complacency. This is not success, this is stagnation.

So rather than trying to match the actions of others, we should view each decision as a chance to either improve or degrade ourselves. To hold ourselves to what we know we’re truly capable of, and to make the effort to change more and more into the people whom we are called to be. This is what we mean by success: to continually improve ourselves as we look towards tomorrow, striving to become better than what we ARE today.

About the authors: Sheldon Arakawa, who will attend UH-Manoa to study biotechnology, and Matthew Johnson, who will travel to Northeastern University in Boston to study scientific research, were chosen co-valedictorians. Rather than delivering separate speeches they took the podium at the same time. They were among 113 HBA graduates, all of them heading to college.

Community Voices aims to encourage broad discussion on many topics of community interest. It’s kind of a cross between Letters to the Editor and op-eds. This is your space to talk about important issues or interesting people who are making a difference in our world. Columns generally run about 800 words (yes, they can be shorter or longer) and we need a photo of the author and a bio. We welcome video commentary and other multimedia formats. Send to news@civilbeat.com.