Freedom

Today was the day! (The day I wrote about here.)

I had an incredible weekend.

A bunch of my friends from work and I have gotten into playing sand volleyball lately, and there are a couple really cool sand volleyball bars in the area where you can play and get drinks and it's so much fun!! We went on Friday night and shut the place down! (I have the bruises on my forearms to prove it.)

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Vigil Mass and heard an incredible Corpus Christi homily. I decided that I will officially become a parishioner at that Church. It's not the Catholic Church I grew up in, but I feel welcome and accepted there. People wear chapel veils, genuflect to the altar, and pray before and after Mass. At my home parish, I'm seen as absurdly conservative and too zealous. Maybe I am?

Then the rest of my weekend was spent by the pool with a drink in my hand and various groups of friends. Love it.

Tonight as I was leaving a friend's house, I rolled the windows down and turned the radio up and felt almost the same way I feel every year on this day. I kept having flashbacks to summer nights in high school driving around. I knew then that I'd never feel freedom in quite that way ever again. Then the song 17 by Cross Canadian Ragweed came on, which was perfect.

I think I'm more sentimental and nostalgic than most people. I specifically remember times when my friends couldn't wait to graduate high school and I thought there was no way life could get any better, and I would have given much for time to freeze there. God obviously knew what was going on, because it DID get better. Wayyy better. Then again through college I remember wishing I could freeze time. (You can understand how these feelings add to my hatred of my own birthday.) The only other person who I think understands my lamenting of passing time is my friend Raf from college.

This year it was kind of different though, driving around. I feel like I'm in some sort of transition, still, between being a carefree teenager and finding the vocation God planned for me. At one point I started crying because I was thinking of the people who I love so much and miss a lot and I was sad that I couldn't be with them. I think things are better when you have someone, your person, to share them with.

I guess when I graduated college, I thought things couldn't get better, again. And again, they did. I figured this would be a pattern in my life, that God was going to keep asking me to trust that things would get better every time I doubted Him. After graduation, things WERE better... for a little while. And then when I moved to Florida and straight up, life sucked, and I just figured that they'd be better after I left FOCUS. Don't get me wrong, things are MUCH better than when I was in Florida... but I wonder if life will ever get any better than it was in college. Oh, me of little faith.

Every year, I can drive around with my windows down and my radio up loud and try to recreate the feelings I felt when I was 17, but I don't know that I ever, on earth, will be that free again. Things get so much more complicated as you get older. Praise Jesus, in Holy Hour yesterday, I read the verse in St. Paul's second letter to the Corinthians which reads: Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

Heaven is going to be the.real.deal.


Blessed Elisabeth Leseur, pray for us.