Over the course of that first semester of Junior year, I developed a pretty strong interest in a particular girl. She had been in half my classes as a freshman, and we used to take the same bus home. Junior year, she was hanging out with my friends in Thunderpaw a lot, specifically waiting for a ride home after school from one of them on a daily basis. Anyone who knew us could probably identify her from this story, but I don't think anyone in my current audience fits into that category. Regardless, for the sake of some semblance of anonymity, I will refer to her simply as W.
In an amusing story, as a prequel of sorts, she is one of two girls that one of my friends ended up asking to the Fall Homecoming Dance that year. (The situations that people get themselves into in High School;) I would have been happy to help him out of his predicament by taking her off his hands, but I had never done anything in that social realm before, so I never even suggested it, although I listened to him labor over the situation for quite a while. He did end up going with her, and I don't know what happened to the other girl.
For that entire fall semester, she hung out with my friends in the Multimedia lab after school. She was by no means hanging out with ME, but we did talk occasionally during those times, and I got to know her a bit. (Probably more than any other girl I knew at the time, but that's not saying much) When we returned from Christmas break, she had gotten her own car, and no longer hung out waiting for a ride everyday, so I saw her a lot less.
It is interesting looking back to see what other events affected my emotional state at that point. I sustained two separate injuries the day after New Years, a good knock to the head fromm falling down the stairs, and then a slide tackle during indoor soccer that night that basically burned the flesh off my right hip. Those two events were the first time I had cried out in pain in seven years. I didn't all out "cry," but I definitely let myself have a vocal reaction to sudden unexpected pain. I believe those physical events had some effect on the magnitude of my emotions over the following weeks, like the first splashes of water that start eroding a dam at its breaking point.
Not seeing W as much when we got back to school, I definitely "missed" her more than I would have expected. All of the feelings related to that, got a whole lot stronger all of a sudden. A few more outside factors combined to give me an added "push" in that direction, around my 17th birthday. I used to sit next to the quarterback for the football team in Calculus. My birthday fell about a week and a half before the Winter Homecoming dance, so that led to a conversation about how I had never asked a girl on a date. So his solution was, "you are going to find a girl, and ask her to the dance." Well, there wasn't any question in my mind about who that would be; it was only a matter of "could I actually do that?" And if so, "how?" Of course, he was half teasing me about this, and as the QB, he had a slightly different perception of girls, and interacting with them, than I did. But something I heard a few years later, that I have observed to be true, is that "talking about things makes them more real" than when you are just thinking about them. So I am sure that conversation had an impact on transitioning from just thinking about it, to actually doing something.
So I prayed about it that night, and decided to try to do it, if the opportunity arose. I don’t think I even saw W the next day, let alone in a situation where I could talk to her. I realized when praying about it again that following night, that there was only one way that I could imagine actually being able to make it happen. In order to actually do something like that, I would need the time to summon up the courage and prepare, in a situation that I was familiar with. W frequently sat on a table outside my 6th block class right after lunch, and the classroom had mirrored windows, so you couldn't see inside. So my prayer that night was: "God, if this is something I should do, then I need her to be sitting out there after lunch tomorrow, for long enough for me to prepare and do it."
This begs the question: "why would God care about making that happen?" Well God created relationships, intimacy, and marriage, among many other things. Now regardless of how significant it may seem at the time, who you go with to a high school dance isn't that important in the grand scheme of things. But who you develop relationships with will have a significant impact on your growth in every different aspect of life, and I do believe God is pretty interested in who we are growing into being. So I will keep praying to God for guidance in regards to developing relationships.
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