Regime Change

My 100th post here comes in the middle of changes, some of them expected, and some of them that came by surprise.

My regular confessor and unofficial spiritual director is leaving my parish next month. It will be an extremely difficult adjustment for me to make, as this priest is both the one who heard my first confession upon reversion, and the first I allowed myself to be vulnerable before. The thought of losing that relationship and trust when I am still trying to reform myself is a bit frightening, honestly. I'm left to try to cultivate that relationship with someone else.

My pastor is a good man, and very wise, but in some ways I'm not sure if he and I are on the same page. He is very different from my confessor in both the way he advises me and what he sees as crucial issues in my formation. It will take some time to get used to, but I'm not going to close my mind and heart to him. I can't. We are also going to have the addition of a newly ordained priest who served his year in the diaconate at my parish here as parochial vicar beginning in two weeks. This all comes in the midst of a merger with a nearby parish that will be completed within the next two years or so, which will shake up not only who attends Mass, but who celebrates, and who gives the Sacraments.

~*~*~

In three months, I'm leaving home for the first time. After graduating with my Associate's Degree this past Thursday, I'm continuing on to a 4-year university to finish up my Bachelor's. I'm going to be living on campus, and as ready as I thought I was, I now find myself full of anxiousness and doubts. I won't have my family to come home to at night, and will have to make a new name for myself in a sea of 10,000 people.

That's weird.

It doesn't help that while I'm going through this upheaval, my church, always consistent and dependable, is changing, too.

The verse in the alleluia, and echoed in my current confessor's homily tonight was an almost prophetic reassurance for me:

I will not leave you as orphans.

Yes, things are changing, and I'm obviously being called to a greater sense of independence...but that doesn't mean that God is going to lead me out into the desert and then leave me there to fend for myself. "I will be with you always," we're told.

But what if I stumble?

That, too, is part of the learning process...I hope that I can accept this change in direction gracefully, and with humility. I can hope, and I can trust. That's what the Divine Mercy is all about, after all, being able to say "Jesus, I trust in You!" and believe it.

I do.