I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you once again to the commencement of the Bethlehem Catholic class of 2015. This time, though, I think it may be the last welcome you'll hear from us, this being a farewell address. In any case, there are a number of people who are due thanks for not only my being here, but also for all of us being here. To the Most Reverend John Barres bishop of the Allentown Diocese, our principal, Mr. John Petruzzelli, and all other distinguished guests, I thank you for your presence here tonight. To the teachers, faculty and staff who, for the past four years have not only been our instructors but also our friends and mentors, I say thank you. To the coaches I have had the honor to run under and even with, I thank you for your dedication, guidance and friendship. To my family, without whom I would not be here, both literally and metaphorically, I love you more than I can put to words, thank you for everything. Last but certainly not least, I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to the friends who have always been there for me, in the good times and the bad. You are the best friends a person could have ever asked for. Though things may come and things may go, I know our friendship will carry on through the ages.

And now for something completely different, and, no, I'm not talking Monty Python here, I'm talking fear. The ever wise Jerry Seinfeld once stated, "People's number one fear is public speaking... Death is number two…This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy." For me, at least, this strikes painfully close to home. With my speech impediment, there was a time where I'd honestly rather be, as Mr. Seinfeld so eloquently put it, in the casket.

I think the very fact that public speaking is more feared than death says a lot about our society. We live in a world where embarrassment, feeling bad about yourself, is accounted more terrifying – more intimidating – than actual, physical pain. We grant what others think of us a higher value than what we think of ourselves. I'll be honest; it took me a long time to come to terms with that idea myself. For nearly three or four years, I refused to believe that I stuttered, yet all the while, my speech grew progressively worse and worse. I could barely speak in complete sentences or even say my own name on account of my almost painful disfluency. I didn't want to admit to the world that I was different, and that my difference might make me less valuable. In the end, my own internalized fears came to cut me deeper than any harsh words or opinions ever could. What's more, when I finally began to accept that I had a problem, those harsh words never came. I was afraid of a valueless, meaningless nothing-something that only had power over me because I gave it sanction to direct my life. And, so it did; I regret every moment that I spent cowering in my own fear, beholden to nothing more than myself.

As a Catholic, though, my fears were truly unfounded, made baseless by our beliefs. I simply never made the connection. You see, as Catholics, we place our hope not in the things of this world, not in our perishable institutions, but in something greater. We seek a higher hope, and this is what I failed to see, failed to connect to the struggles of my own life. I placed my hope, my happiness, if you will, in the unwitting hands of others, who, in my fraudulently calculated estimations, would never see me as anything more than my disfluent speech. I failed to see that I placed my hope, not in the wrong people, for I can never fully thank my friends for all they've done for me, but merely in the wrong idea of myself. I forgot that I wasn't looking for happiness here on this world, but for eternal happiness in the next.

And that, I think, is what so many people today forget. We make our lives miserable trying to please others, fearing, in the end, nothing more than embarrassment, an embarrassment that has no foundation outside of our minds. That is no way to live, in fact that's barely surviving. So, I suppose what I'm trying to say with this whole, long, drawn out address is that in running around trying to please others, we lose ourselves and we lose sight of any inkling of who we really are. In the end, God wants nothing more from us than the best of who we can be, who He made us to be.

This graduation is as much a new beginning as it is an end. It is the chance to remake ourselves into the people we want to be, not what society or any counter-culture hopes of us. The past does not define us, because the past is not today. So in closing, if you take nothing else away from this valediction, take this : Life is what you make of it, so why not make the world you want to live in.

Thank you all. I'd wish you good luck, but, according to my good friend John Spirk, that would be a pagan concept. So instead, I'll simply say this, seize your every waking moment, and live that you are not afraid to die.

Thank you, God Bless, and stay beautiful Becahi.