Regime Change ... Again

Three years ago, my first true confessor left our parish for a new assignment. At the time, I wrote of my own anxieties about starting over with someone new.

I was getting ready to transfer colleges and live on my own for the first time. Everything around me was changing, and this was the last straw: the steady presence of my spiritual community was shaken.

Soon after Father left, I started talking with great reluctance to a "baby priest" who was given his first assignment here. The last thing I wanted to do was open my soul again for someone else to dig through unwelcome.

God, in His great mercy, knew what He was doing putting that one into my life.

The first few months were hard. At school, I struggled with homesickness and turned to both my vices and my faith to cope. By midterms, I left a long-term, long-distance relationship. My grandmother was fresh out of the hospital from another exacerbation of lung disease, and my love for her fostered a resentment toward God that flirted dangerously with atheism.

There were a lot of frantic emails and calls home to my new confessor that first year. But to his credit, he helped me through it. For the most part, it was just through listening and prayer, but that was what I needed most.

Now, three years later, it seems we've come full circle: I graduated college and moved on into the unknown of adulthood. I'm relearning how to love in this new relationship. The merger that began in my parish when my new confessor arrived three years ago is now complete, and he moved to his new assignment yesterday morning.

I'm moving on. So is he.

But you know what? This time, I was ready for it.

The other thing I learned from Father is to always strive first and foremost after God, for the sake of my own spiritual independence.

While there's still a lot going on in my soul that I need help working through, I'm probably in the healthiest place I've ever been. I'm learning to let God show me where to go. And that's why, as much as I'll miss him, I know I'll be OK.

God has always provided. He will again.