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Agents of Change

Kathryn Aggen's Commencement Speech for Elim School Graduates

Jul 10, 2008

imageThe following was presented at the Elim High School Graduation in early June, 2008

It is a great honor and privilege to address you my fellow Elim staff, our families and friends, and most of all our graduates.

Let me begin by asking, How did you and I come to this place this evening? What path did each of us take that led us to share this moment together? Some came as students. Some sat in a guidance counselor’s office and were encouraged to pursue a degree in special education. Some of us knew at the moment we gave birth, that God had given us very different infant than the one we had expected. Others gave birth to a child that was healthy and thriving only to be diagnosed with autism several years down the road. Some of you heeded the call out of a birthed compassion based on a family member or neighbor with a disability that you’ve come to love and admire. Some of us aren’t sure why we are here. I know of one who is here because he married an art teacher! Some of us came willingly into this world of special education … others of us came kicking and screaming and asking, “Why me?” Few of us would have guessed that this place would’ve become so special in our hearts. But it has. And here we are converged into this world we know as Elim.

As we will read together in the litany this evening, it bears witness to the fact that we are all heroes at Elim, with the students being the biggest of all. But, what exactly defines them as heroes? I submit for consideration that a hero is basically an agent of change. An individual or a group with a common call to bring about a change. A hero can come into a situation and elevate the status of an event or person to a better place. A hero can intervene at any time … bringing a crisis situation to a calm, an adequate situation to a better fit. Or even enable someone in a good place to reach a higher level of excellence.

In a Christian context, we are called to be God’s agents of change every minute of every day. We are called to allow Him to do extraordinary things through our ordinary lives. God has placed within each of us a desire to be significant – to have a purpose. We miss the boat when we see ourselves not as heroes but plodders. Plodding along not having an impact because so often we don’t see the power in the small, less dramatic accomplishments. We approach parenting, teaching, and serving expecting to have incredible impact on the students, but the truth is we often fail, the children, our students will always have far more impact on us. Their strength of character, their purity, their humility, their humor, their raw humanity shines brightly into our so-called together, neatly packaged lives illuminating our own weaknesses. Elim students are agents of change.

To you parents and families, you have surpassed what it takes to get your Ph.D. in parenting. Your children have taught you more about patience, perseverance, faith and unconditional love than you ever imagined possible. It may have come with strife, hard work, and exhaustion, but God has given you not hearts of stone, but has continued to kneed and keep your hearts soft, tender, and close to His all through the intervention 0 your child – an agent of change.

I’ve seen this demonstrated by many of our parents, but one comes to mind, Mary Burke. It has been four years since God called her daughter Megan home to Him, but Mary continues to work feverishly volunteering her time and wisdom here at Elim and in her community. Some outside our world would see this as a time for Mary to “reclaim” her life. Oh, how they don’t get it! What they fail to see is that Megan was a powerful agent of change not only in her mother’s life, but continuing through Mary, her legacy keeps on changing the lives of others. That is a hero.

Many of you know that Elim has a partnership program with Marist High School in which seniors can choose to opt out of a forth year religion class and instead come to an Elim classroom everyday as a student assistant. Each fall they enter Elim’s doors thinking, at best, they are ready to make a difference. More likely, they see it as a great opportunity to get off Marist campus, snag a quick smoke, drink coffee and hang with friends on their way to and from Elim.

The first few weeks you see the shock on their faces when they realize the reality of what they have signed up for. This is no piece of cake – No walk in the park, and a fourth year of religion looks pretty good! As the weeks go by and they begin to forge relationships with the students in their assigned class, you begin to see the transformation. Not so much in the Elim kids, although, our kids LOVE having peers, or a big sister or brother role model to look forward to each day, but the change is unmistakably more so seen in the Marist students. By the end of the year that look of shock has been replaced with tears of understanding and love that they could never have learned through a book or lecture. No doubt in a short nine months they have been impacted for a lifetime. What better way to prepare future parents and teachers Our Elim students are the agents of change.

To the teachers and staff, we also need to be reminded how our students have worked on us. My own revelation came when my mother suffered a severe stroke several years ago. She lost her speech, and communication became difficult at best. From the beginning of her ordeal to present, I am consistently one of only a few that can handle her disability with understanding, serving her with grace and dignity. Others become frustrated by her inability to communicate, they stay clear because they don’t know what to say. They don’t know how to include her in conversation, they shout, they even talk baby talk! For me it seemed second nature to talk to her on a normal basis. I didn’t think twice how to adapt to her lack of language. It came so natural. In her limited speech, we once were talking about how others approach her. In her shaky voice, she slowly and deliberately said “You are the only one.” Am I some sort of stroke whisperer? Not at all! But I realize that when I see the students at Elim, I rarely know the details of their disability. I interact with them no different than I would anyone else. We joke, we tease, we cry, we laugh, I scold, I encourage. I have been desensitized to any stigma that the world sees. The agents of change here at Elim have enabled me to be a hero to my own mother.

These have all been examples of how our Elim kids change those of us in direct contact with them, but I’d like to also suggest how they are change agents beyond our community.
Last Spring a friend of mine whose son is serving in the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan asked friends to send a post card to her son in hopes of having one for every man in his platoon. Usually the classroom assistants know that my #1 rule is to let the students de as much of the artwork by themselves as possible. But this time, I decided to make it a group endeavor and I chose two classrooms where each student requires a 1:1 assistant. The student, alongside their assistant, would be a team to make the cards. They spent an afternoon collageing and writing messages to the young soldiers. The students enjoyed watching their assistants become so animated and excited to do the project, that they in fact, got more involved than usual.
They took plain postcards and transformed them into beautiful works of art. As they worked on the postcards they displayed a good mixture of emotions – there was a patriotic, serious tone mixed with light-hearted banter. Many reflected their underlying faith that ultimately we serve a God that has each of us in his capable hand.

I had to chuckle overhearing the conversations during the art activity. Our students have taught us not to ever take ourselves too seriously. In that light, along with the assistant’s conversations regarding the prayers to God for the troop’s protection, came offers to send along their phone numbers in hopes that one of the men might be their future husband! Proving that in the trenches, whether it is in combat or in classrooms, human nature expresses itself in poignancy and humor!

When I presented the bundle – one for each man in the platoon, my friend was stunned at how beautiful they were. She was rendered speechless and moved to tears. She was changed. I later realized when I received a thank you from her son, that I had unknowingly paired students with assistants roughly falling into the same age range as the soldiers. All three groups sharing similar birth years, but with very different abilities and callings, yet all rallying to be heroes to one another. L found out that some of these young men clung to these postcards (as they were all they had to look at) in their hot, dry dusty holes. Sadly, three of the recipients have gone on to make the ultimate sacrifice for us: heroes of a different kind. But it doesn’t minimize our students as agents of change not only in our homes, and in our classrooms, but halfway around the world in a horrid foxhole in the midst of war.

To this year’s graduates … I am proud to have had a part in providing a framework in which you could learn, be loved, and then in return, ready to give back ten fold to a world that in spite of its big brains, big muscles and accomplishments desperately needs the humility and message that only you can bring. You may be a small group and obstacles assuredly will come your way. But, our prayer for you as you leave Elim, is that you take the uniqueness of your personalities, your gifts – even if it is only a bright smile, a simple hello, and go out and be the hero God intends you to be.

Our mission is to be the change agents to a needy world that most often doesn’t even know it needs changing. Isn’t that how many of us came into this world known as Elim? Not knowing how much we needed a touch to soften our edges. Isn’t that really why we all are here tonight? By God making us more aware of His simple truths, and Him being our ultimate agent of change. Ultimately, he has privileged us with experiencing a little slice of heaven right here on earth.