The first time I moved from Kansas to Colorado I was 10 years old. Nearly 11. Ten and three-quarters. I had just finished the fifth grade. I remember wanting to walk home from school that final day, enjoy one last slow amble with Joe Mabon and Brad O'Bryhim and whoever else walked with us whose names I have now forgotten, loping down the middle of the street in a town where that was still safe. But it was raining instead. Brad's mom met us at the school offering us all a ride home. I looked out the window of her minivan as the town flashed by us too quickly, chewing up in seconds what we could have stretched to minutes. And then I was home. Alone. Mom and Ty were still at the elementary school, mom wrapping everything up for the year. Tyler causing trouble, undoubtedly.
I came inside our house and slinked out of my jacket and backpack and lay down on the couch and looked out the window and stared up into the gray sky through the branches of a tree that had yet to bloom in the late spring. My life was ending. A new one would begin. And I had no idea what that meant or what it would look like. I only knew I had loved what I had in that little town in that little school with my little group of friends and that I might never have anything so good again.
When you are 10 years old you have no conception of something like The Rest of Your Life. I remember wishing that we could be living in Kansas again in time for me to go to high school with all of my friends. Play football together. Drive to school. Kiss the girls who would allow it. But I was leaving and those dreams of mine were dying in a way I only half-understood.
Fifteen years later I moved back. Not to that little town. But back to Kansas. Chasing a degree and a half-discerned dream, trying to plant a church. Those were the intentions anyway. Mostly, God gave us two kids and the trial by fire that is a Master's program.
And now I stand on the cusp of leaving again. This time I am not stretched out on the couch, feeling nostalgic in the way only a sensitive pre-adolescent can, but as grateful as I am to be returning to Colorado, as much as it feels like answering a call and bringing my dreams to fruition, I would be remiss not to look out of our bay window at our chicken coop and the rabbit picking its way through our Bermuda grass and not feel something. To watch my son run through the yard, shirt covered in sweat from the humidity, laughing and playing and mowing the yard with me. Every time we leave a place we give up something, even if at the time we cannot discern what that may be. For as much as my life in this place wasn't all that I wanted it to be, it was a great life.
This is where I learned how badly I needed to be a parent. How wonderful contentment in the home can be. How true it is that happiness is largely a choice. Leaving a place you don't like very much (Salina, not Kansas itself) is like going to the funeral of someone you didn't like very much: still sad. And no time to be petty. I have great hope for the future, trusting that this is God's will for our family and his vocation for my life. I am not sad in the slightest to be going to Colorado, only sad to be leaving Kansas. And, I trust that is right.
To the next step, my friends, may it be the last for awhile.
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