Interactions with God #5

I am not a good student, never was. I have an innate problem with the concept of homework. I struggle with the idea that I should have to take school work home to work on it there. Stupid, I know, but at 51, I still don’t like homework.

To be honest, Jennifer was a huge help to me in school. I did pretty well at WVU while I was dating her, she had motivated me to do the work and study as I needed to do.

UT, however, was definitely a harder school. My first semester at UT went OK. Jennifer was there to push me to do better in my classes. That lasted through the fall semester in 1983. However, during that time, friction grew between Jennifer and John.

I think John didn’t like how Jennifer could influence me, it seemed controlling to him. Maybe so, but I was doing better in school. As the tension arose, I began to believe that maybe she was not good for me. John also met a girl, who he was now dating, that also believed Jennifer was a problem. With the two of them talking to me, I started to question my future with Jennifer. I eventually decided to break up with Jennifer just after Christmas break.

She was upset, but still stayed in Austin as she had a job and other friends as well. It was a hard experience as it was the first time I had ever broken up with anyone. Well to be fair, she was pretty much the only girl I dated longer than a couple of months up to that point.

Once Jennifer was basically out of the picture, I went back to my old school habits, even worse; Many times I didn’t even go to class. These habits don’t bode well for good grades. So, the troubles began.

By the end of the second semester, May of 1984, both John and I ended up on academic probation. My GPA was below 2.0 while John’s was even worse. Now we had additional pressure from our parents. Things were coming to a head and I didn’t even know it yet.

One night during that time, while at home in our apartment, I had a strange feeling of being in great danger, the life threatening kind. There was no reason to believe that, but the fear or concern was there, and palpable, none the less.

Somehow, I really became convinced that something or someone was going to kill me that night. I tried to shrug it off as nothing and just go to sleep, but I couldn’t. After a while, I couldn’t even close my eyes.

I still was not living right, but I had gone to God quite a few times before, so I reached out to him and asked for two angels to watch over me. Much like the Eight Ball demon (minus the fear), I felt two presences directly behind me up on the wall. I turned around in my bed and though I could not see them with my eyes, in my mind as vivid as can be, I saw two men sitting against the wall, one on my right and the other on the left. They were sitting mid air with their backs to the wall. The one on the right, nodded to me and in my mind I heard “it is safe now, you can go to sleep”.

Strangely enough, the feeling of danger was gone and I rolled over and fell asleep.