I just wanted to let everyone know that I will not be allowed to update my xanga until after October 1st. I won’t be allowed to write, call, or email either so I just want to let everyone know that I still love them and still think about and pray for them. I’ll just be… quiet for a while. Take care!

Tomorrow I leave for the Jesuit Novitiate. Shortly after 2p.m. on Saturday, my life isn’t mine any more. And it is wonderful.

One way that is good, I feel, to describe the reality of my life hereafter is like this:

Say you take me aside on the street and stand me up against a wall. You pull some random guy off the street as well and stand him next to me. Then, you steal everything in our pockets, and then the clothes off our backs and the shoes off our feet. You also send your criminal buddies to our rooms/houses and steal all of our things, then burn down the place where we live. You take everything.

The difference between me and this random man, though we both have nothing, is that he has his life and his soul. I have only my soul.

You see when I do this, when I enter the Jesuits, I’m not only doing what I feel called to do, but I’m doing this because I love you. You, the person reading this right now. My life is my gift to the world, and the Jesuits will help me learn to give it as fully as possible. You may not ever meet me, and I may never do anything for you but I am completely willing to do so. My life is yours now, is theirs now, is the church’s now, is God’s now. I keep for myself only my soul, that I might someday be good enough to lay it on the threshold of Heaven and say, “Father! I’m home! Look what I have brought You!”

Not everyone in the world will accept my life, some might even seek to injure it or end it altogether. But God gifted us with free will, and I realize that not everyone will see my life as a gift they want. But to others, my life might be the gift they have waited for their entire lives to receive, and I pray that I will be able to bring to those people more than just a man, but also hope and joy and peace, among many other things.

I may not die a Jesuit. I may enter and be a part of their family for a few years and feel called elsewhere, but from them I will learn how to live my life in a way that gives me purpose, and it is purpose that most people, unbeknownst to many, desire. What use is life without meaning? Waking up every morning does not mean that you are alive, it merely means that you have yet another chance to live. This is my chance to wake up and live every day alive and ready to help others do the same. To live, not simply exist. Rocks exist, too. Isn’t it strange that some rocks seem to have more of a purpose than some people?

I am tired of existing. It is with the Jesuits and through this call to serve God that I have tasted what it is to live and grow and thrive and love all of it, even when my heart is breaking. If I ignore this call, I will continue breaking again and again until I am nothing but broken, existing without purpose or meaning, pretending to be alive. I want to give myself to something greater than myself, and by following the footsteps of Christ one will discover that the world is greater than the self, and well worth giving yourself to, for “God so loved the world He gave His only Son.” Well, it is time for me to give back.

I love all of you dearly, and I miss many of you. I will do my best to keep in touch when I am able. Please keep me in your thoughts and prayers, and let me know if there is any way that I can serve any of you. May God bless and keep you always.

I have given nearly all of my things away. I have only the clothes I need, a few books, some scrapbook items to put into a scrapbook when I have what I need, some framed pictures, and a very large, very strange looking but beloved poinsettia. My CD collection is still, for the most part, present but it is earmarked for people that have not yet received the remainder of it. So far, everything I have offered people has been accepted. First I offered my life to the Jesuits, and was accepted. My material wealth has been offered and accepted. The most treasured of all my earthly gifts, my last kiss, was offered and initially accepted near the end of spring. The kiss was not given at the time, but it was promised that sometime over the summer, the exchange would occur.

Today I awoke to find a letter from the intended, and immidiately I knew that I would be refused. Today, it was reaffirmed that every woman I had ever fallen in love with, regardless of how heavily or lightly, has turned me away.

Though she will always be dearest to me, I am deeply heartbroken over the matter. I cannot remember what a kiss is like, a real kiss, and the last woman I kissed did not, in fact, love me at all. I can only remember the lack of love, but cannot remember the last kiss. It is probably extremely childish and perhaps ridiculous to be this upset over something as simple as a kiss, but it is a kiss I dreamed about all summer and was the one gift I yearned to give away. Material things can be left with family or thrown away but a final kiss… is either given, or it isn’t.