Naked and Unashamed

I woke up at 4:30 last Thursday morning, drove almost 7 hours to Grand Rapids to surprise Maria, and ended up with just as big of a surprise as she did.

My two favorite bands, Relient K and Switchfoot, are on tour right now and the closest they were coming to Steubenville was a three hour drive.

They were going to be playing in Grand Rapids the following night, which was only another four hours away and since Maria lives there I thought it’d be fun to go to the concert with her.
Going to the concert and surprising her meant skipping two days worth of classes so I did give it a lot of thought to make sure that I could afford to miss my classes. I decided that this is something that I would always remember, so I packed my things Wednesday night and went to bed early so that I would be well rested.

I was excited about the concert, but I was even more excited about surprising Maria. She had no idea that I was coming up to go to the concert, let alone to see her. I formulated all kinds of plans and back up plans for how I was going to meet up with her. I had directions to all the different places I thought she might be at and I even had maps on my computer of Grand Rapids so I could find any other location that I needed to.

I knew she went to noon Mass on Thursdays since she has work off that day and I thought that would be the perfect place to meet up with her. I called around 11 to see how her day was going I found out that she had already gone to Mass and that she was going to be around her parents house for the next couple of hours. At the time, she was waiting for her dad to get out of the shower so that she could get in.

I waited half an hour to be sure that she would be in the shower and wouldn’t answer the phone, and then called her house in hopes of reaching her dad so that he could let me in. I explained the situation to him and he agreed to let me in as long as I could get there in the next five minutes. He had an appointment that he had to get too and there wasn’t anyone else home to let me in. Thankfully, I was only a block away when I talked to him so I hurried over and knocked on the door.

He let me in and I went into the living room to sit down and wait for Maria to get out of the shower. Meanwhile, her dad said goodbye to her and left the house. I had spent a lot of time thinking about how she was going to react when she first saw me. I had a million scenarios running through my head, both good and bad, and I was getting more and more nervous as the seconds ticked away.

Eventually I heard the door open and I was preparing myself for her to come around the corner and see me. A few moments later her head appeared and my brain kicked into gear to start to say something clever. As she rounded the corner and saw me for the first time, the following thoughts went through her head:

1) There’s someone in my house!
2) It’s Jonathan, I must be imagining him because I was just thinking of him.
3) No, it really IS Jonathan!
4) Oh my gosh, I’m completely NAKED

And that’s about the time that she screamed "Oh my God! Jonathan! What are you doing here?!" as she ran down the hallway and slammed the door shut to her parents room and locked herself inside.

That, my friends, is how memories are made.