+Home Stretch

Well, Lent is heading into its final trajectory, and I thought I’d update a bit on my entry before last.

I finally caught up to Chris.  Turns out his problem wasn’t skittishness, just his usual extremely scatterbrained nature.  Also, as I told him frankly, I don’t think he has an idea of how rude he comes across when handling appointments and so on.

We had a long talk about how next term is going to go (basically, he admits he needs to reorient his priorities toward school), and I also got the chance to have a long talk with him about the Lord.  The good news is that he’s dropping a lot of his excuses about his living situation and facing the issue squarely.  He’s also praying about what to do next.  But acting on it all looks VERY hard, and he hasn’t screwed himself up to that point as yet.  I can definitely understand.  He knows I’m in his corner and praying for him.

Finally caught up with Alex, too!  Basically, I haven’t heard from the guy in a year and a half – and something like six months before that, either!  When I last heard from him, he apologized for being so absent, and said he was going through lot of rough emotional issues (a breakup with his fiancee, among others) that he needed to work out on his own.  And he said not to give up on him if he was unresponsive for a while.

So I didn’t.  Every little bit I’ve called him and left a message or sent him an email – none of which has ever been responded to.  But after a year and a half…  that starts to get really old.  I started to feel like I was almost stalking him or something, or that I’d offended him in some way, because it just seemed excessively long.  I called him more and more seldom.

By last week, I was starting to reach the point of being willing to give up, but thought I’d give him another try or two.  I nearly dropped the phone when he actually answered it!  He seemed friendly and open as ever, and we worked out a time to go out for dinner like we used to.

Sure enough, he showed up.  Turns out that he ran up a bill on his cell phone and it got turned off.  He got my messages but couldn’t respond.  (And he admitted he hadn’t looked at his university email in quite a long time.)  He only just managed to get it paid off, now that he’s back in town.  I didn’t know he’d even been *out* of town, but turns out he’d transferred to another university for several terms!  He only just got back here last week – he’s going to finish out his degree here.  And yes, he wants me to tutor him this coming term.

Sheesh. 🙂  As he said himself at our dinner, it’s like we haven’t even been apart;  he said it’s like we were picking up right where we left off.  I felt kind of the same way.

Interesting thing is, I’d received a word a few days previous that I would be receiving ‘a sign of hope’ in the coming week.  I took it with a grain of salt, because when my words make predictions, they’re usually wrong – my subconscious apparently asserts itself too much.  (That’s what made me think originally that they couldn’t really be from God, but Fr. Gerald – and Chris from the PoP – assured me this is a very common thing.)  But this one certainly seems to have panned out!