Difficulties

Today has been a strange day.

This morning I had a meeting with my dissertation supervisor, which was over by half past ten. Now Daily Mass isn't until 12.15 but I went to the church anyway to pray. We have a beautiful chapel to Our Lady so I went and knelt there and prayed every prayer I know to Our Lady (with the help of my lovely little prayer book), including a rosary. I got so engrossed in my prayers that I hardly realised the time passing and before I knew it, it was Mass. Again, my calling was so strong and so powerful I was almost crying, my eyes welling up. The rest of the day I was in this state of joy, thinking 'I'm going to become a nun'.

A few nights ago me and my housemates went to our old housemate's new flat to watch a movie and play a drinking game to it. Clarification: I'm very sneaky. I go along but mix my drinks with so little alcohol I might as well be drinking just cola. And nobody notices. Anyway. I love this movie and we've played the game before and I've always loved it. But this time it left me cold. It wasn't that it was an unenjoyable night, it was just that I got this sense that there must be something more than this, this can't be all there is in life. Things that my friends enjoyed and laughed about didn't move me at all. Things that I once enjoyed seemed empty. All I could think about was consecrated life and I desperately desired to be there instead of where I was.

I still feel that way. There is still an emptiness to what the world is offering me. But then today I had an evening in with my housemates. They're lovely people and I care about them a lot, though I do see we want different things in life and care about different things. But we had a really nice evening in, we watched a movie and one has just bought the game Skyrim and we were watching him play that. It was a really nice evening, just really relaxed and it made me realise that even though there are times when the world just leaves me cold, there are also moments like that, those are the ones I feel sad about when I think about giving them up. I know that if my calling is truly to religious life and I entrust myself to God then it will be wonderful and I know that the blessings of that life would far outweigh what I would be sacrificing. It's difficult, I feel so drawn and so sure of my vocation but at the same time I do feel a sorrow for the life I would be giving up.