Flowers

After the trip to Spain, Mellen and I essentially became pen-pals for the time being.  With her still being over there, until later this month, there was little we could do other than write each other letters and Skype.  Unlike myself, Mellen's days are full of activities and true to the Spanish culture sometimes she is out until about the time I wake up to start my day!  But she has always found sometime to talk.

 

We talk about all sorts of things, such as what I had to get Brittany for her birthday, and how what I wanted to get her was all wrong.  She also has the tendency to find 20 things I am doing wrong, and 100 ways on how to improve myself.  Haha, I always like guessing what new thing she's going find that I need to do.  Like how I need to go to Mass more, or pray more, or read more, or play less video games.  She even got me to change my brand of milk!  But it is all enjoyable.  And we talk a lot about our future plans and God's will for us, and how He is calling her to the religious life.

Oh my.

On March 20th, she let me know that we can no longer date because she felt a strong internal push towards the religious life and that she needed to explore this.  We decided that we would talk again on Father's Day to see how things were going, but until then communication was "illegal".  I lasted a good two days.  But then I got quiet, and nearly a month later we came to Father's Day.

On Father's Day she said that she was still feeling a strong calling to the religious life.  But the conversation was good and not too awkward.  Or at least I felt I did a good job not being tremendously awkward, just my typical really uncomfortable awkward.  We planned our next conversation to be a little sooner.  This time we decided to talk on July 5th.  Actually, she planned to talk on July 4th, but because I couldn't stop laughing about the idea of us "celebrating our independence day", she made me wait another day which brought us to the 5th.  And that is today!

The first span of quiet time, that part leading up to Father's Day, wasn't too bad.  The night I received the news, I felt the only appropriate thing to do was to go get a carton of ice-cream.  I brought it home, and was looking at it, but then decided the most appropriate thing to do was not have it.  So I gave up ice-cream and pop, and still haven't had any since.  I felt this would also allow me to have an excuse against any particularly obscene flair ups that I might have at completely inappropriate times, such as at Brittany's upcoming birthday 5 days later.  Fortunately however, I did not have any flair ups, and the month went by alright.

The second time span, even though it was only around 2 weeks was much more difficult.  Haha, I even started learning Herb Alpert's "This Guy's In Love" on the piano.  Actually I'm still practicing it, but wow am I tone deaf.  You may not see it posted up here anytime soon.  This goes beyond vanity and is more out of charity to your ears.  A part of the difficulty is that for various reasons I strongly believed that Mellen and I were supposed to be in the relationship.  So if she is really meant to join the religious life, then that means I am mistaken.  So I had to re-evaluate some things and pray.  Eventually I finally (finally because I've known about them for a long time but never took the time to bother looking them up) came across St. Teresa of Avila and St. Therese of Lisieux.  They fixed me right up.  Actually if you ever wonder what Mellen sounds like to talk to, just read St. Therese of Lisieux's autobiography.  Mellen sounds identical (in engineering, 'identical' is how we say something with 5 exclamation marks) to St. Therese of Lisieux.  So these readings and others were comforting and helped me at least get my mind rightly oriented which is to say focused on God rather than on "poor poor pitiful me".

Which brings us to today's conversation.  Today, she told me that now she absolutely believes she is not called to be married.  And so now it is a matter of her determining what sort of religious life is meant for her.  This naturally means that our story has likely come to a close.