12th Grade Senior Chapel Speech

(Retrospection)

Introduction
I've mentioned this once before, but at the end of my Senior year, I was asked by the Chapel committee to be one of the speakers at the end of the year Senior Chapel.

I didn't ask for this, but once I was approached with it I thought it was too big an honor to turn down. And yet, being a shy introverted person, the idea of getting up infront of the whole student body terrified me. Besides which I had no idea what I was going to say.

I put off writing this speech as long as I could, and then the weekend before I finally locked myself in my room for a while to stress over it. I had various half starts and crumbled up notes before I had eventually worked myself up into a state where I really couldn't think straight. (I guess in these situations they say best thing to do is to tell yourself to relax and not worry, but I didn't know that at the time).When I eventually wrote the speech below I was so stressed out I felt like I had lost all critical faculty and couldn't tell if my own writing was any good or not.

Getting up to speak that Tuesday was perhaps the most nervous I had ever been in my entire life. My sister (who was in the audience at the time) says my hands were visibly shaking, and I don't doubt it.

Fortunately the audience was very generous. Everyone in first chapel laughed at the jokes. By second second chapel the audience was more awake and warmed up and I was getting really rich long laughter at all the jokes. (For four years I had listened to chapel speakers say things like "Wow, you guys at second chapel are a lot more awake than the first bunch." But it really was true).

I got plenty of compliments on this speech. In fact sometimes even two or three years later I would meet a Christian High alum at Calvin who was a year or two behind me, and the first thing they would say was: "You were the guy who did that chapel speech, right? That was the funniest thing I ever heard." (In fact Bosch, who had been a year behind me at Christian High, said this to me when we met for the first time in the Boer-Bennick Dorms).

Re-reading this speech now though, 10 + years later, is a rather painful experience. The whole thing just makes me want to cringe. Not only the corny jokes, but also the corny sentimentality, and perhaps worst of all the style. (And I used to wonder why I got such bad grades on English papers). Also some of the opinions and content seem incredibly naive to me now.

When I first thought of posting this, I wrote up a huge introduction which was just one long apology for the content of this. But in the end I decided to delete that. Hopefully it goes without saying that this represents me at 18, and if I had to re-write it today it would be completely different. Other than that, I'm just going to let it stand on it's own.

The Speech
When I was asked to speak here today, I had a hard time coming up with something to say. I decided to look in my Freshman yearbook, at what people had wrote in it, to see if I could try to find some inspiration, or some sense of unity for these four years. Well, I couldn't read most of the signatures. I had given all my friends a pencil to sign the yearbook with. So my advice to Freshman is when you get your yearbook this Friday, give your friends a pen to sign it with.

That failing, I thought about other senior chapels I had attended in the past, and what was said there. A popular thing to do was to give advice to the underclassman, so I made a list of all the things I had learned over the four years I've been here, so that underclassman could benefit from my vast wisdom and experience. I put down things like: get involved in a lot of activities, be as nice as you can to everyone, don't wait till the last minute on those English papers because they always take twice as long as you think they will, work hard in whatever you do, follow your interests, think for yourself, and so on.

I looked at the list, and it was all commonsense. It was stuff everybody knew, and when I thought about it, I knew most of these things back in Middle school. Yet I sure didn't do a lot of these things as a Freshman. I guess during my time in high school I didn't learn very many new things, as much as I learned how to apply what I already knew. All those things I knew I was supposed to do, but I didn't do them. Then, as time passed, I began doing them, and practiced on them. Right now I still don't do most of these things all the time, but I'm a lot better than I was.

I remember one of the first times I entered this school. I didn't have any older brothers or sisters, so one of the first times I set foot in the building was to buy my books Freshman year. The whole place seemed unbelievably huge to me. my mom was with me. I was a little embarrassed to be seen with her, but I really didn't have another ride, and I needed someone to pay for the books. After I got my schedule, my mom suggested to me that I find out where all my class rooms were in order to make the first day a little easier. I thought the idea was pointless. Even if I did locate all my classrooms, the building was so big I'd never remember where they were.

The first day of school came, and I was greatly relieved to find out that all the rooms were numbered in order, so I could find everything easily. Gradually, the building didn't seem so large anymore. I remember I was always late to my fifth hour classroom. No matter how fast I went, I just could not get from my fourth hour, to my locker, to fifth hour. Then, about halfway through the semester, I discovered a hallway I didn't even know about. Using it, I was able to cut my trip by a quarter, and was never late since.

The time I've been here has really gone quickly. Looking back, it seems like I've spent a lot of the time confused. I was confused about what was expected of me, I was confused about math assignments, I was confused about what other people thought of me, I was confused about where to go to college, I was confused about school policies. I was confused about a lot of things, and about a lot of things I still am, but as I moved through the years, it seemed like a lot of things got clearer.

This year, I've heard a lot of things said about Christian High students from fellow students. I've heard that most people at Christian High only want to be your friend if there is something they can gain from it. If they aren't your friend, they don't really care about you, and wouldn't help you out unless there was something in it for them. I've heard that most of them don't really care about what's right or wrong, but only care about themselves. I don't know everything these people have been through, but it certainly hasn't been my experience.

There are a lot of things I'm thankful for here. I'm thankful for people who gave me rides in their cars when I needed one. I'm thankful for people who shared their lunch with me when I forgot mine. I'm thankful for people who took time to explain my homework to me when I didn't get it. I'm thankful for people who loaned me money when I needed it. I'm thankful for people who took the time to talk to me when I was feeling down. I'm thankful for people who gave me advice when I needed it, and I'm thankful for people who were just good friends. I'm going to miss a lot of you next year.

Link of the Day
This Modern World has a blog posting on the Michael Moore/ CNN debates. I don't like to spend a lot of time on these pundit debates because I believe they're the equivalent of counter productive energy for politicos, but I thought this made a good point

This other bit from Gupta, attempting to trash France’s heathcare system, is laughably bad :

GUPTA: I also think the whole idea, Michael, of just calling it a free system I think is a little bit nebulous to people who don’t fully understand what you mean by that. Yes, you’ve got to raise taxes significantly. I mean France is drowning in taxes. They’re running a $15.6 billion debt.

$15.6 billion! That would be scary if we weren’t spending that much money every month in Iraq. In France, they’re willing to go into debt to keep their citizens from dying of preventable diseases and injuries. Here in America, we save our debt for wars and tax cuts.