Photo by Tierra Mallorca on Unsplash
Since moving, Katie and I are often asked by people a few different questions. Things like, “What do you miss the most about Arizona? Would you move again? What was hard for you and the kids?”
We’ve also gotten a lot of questions from people who are moving or considering moving and trying to figure out the road ahead, what might be hard, and if a big move like we did is worth it for them.
Moving, like all things in life, has its ups and downs. When we left Arizona, we knew it would take a lot of effort and be stressful, but there were some surprises along the way.
You have to figure out where your kids’ schools are, your favorite grocery stores, where you will take walks, and what fun things you want to do. One of the exhausting things about moving to a new place is how your brain is always on when you are in the car because you are using GPS and don’t know where anything is. When you know where something is, your brain takes a break in the car and drives there. You have to be alert and keep watching when you don’t know. That is tiring. You also wonder, will I ever “just know” where things are?!
Two of the hardest parts about moving are friendships and traditions.
The most obvious answer to what we miss the most is friendships.
When you live in a place as long as we lived in Arizona (15 years), you build a life there. You build community. When you move, while you do your best to keep those relationships going (and we have), some of them fade away. This is natural because relationships are often about proximity and frequency.
This is a big loss and something we have grieved as we have moved.
And while you grieve the loss of relationships, what is equally challenging is the reality of building new friendships. Because they take time, you must have proximity and frequency with a whole new group of people in a new place. Those people already have relationships.
One of the differences in moving to New England is that many people here are from New England. Someone told me it takes you 5 generations to say you’re from Rhode Island and that if you aren’t born in Maine, you can never say you’re from Maine. This isn’t good or bad about New England; it just is what makes New England who it is.
When our kids started at the local school, there were 3 new kids in their grade (and our kids were 2 of them), and there were 4 new kids at the high school (and our kids were 2 of them). That is hard.
Whereas, if you go to Colorado or Arizona, you rarely meet someone from those places. Most people are from elsewhere, leading to faster friendships because more people need friendships.
If you are considering moving, you have to take this into account.
Something else you must remember if you are a pastor moving to a new church is that the tenure of the previous pastor will affect your relationships coming in, how wary people are of you staying for a long time, or if they gravitate towards you quickly.
The other thing that has been the hardest surprised me: the loss of traditions.
Most family traditions, especially around the holidays, are location-based. You go to this place on your birthday, this place for a celebration, that place on vacation or this place during Thanksgiving, Christmas, or the 4th of July. When you move, that all changes. You don’t go to those places anymore, and the places you do go to don’t feel like a tradition yet because you’ve only done them once or twice.
We’ve had to grieve this and will continue to grieve through the years. This isn’t bad, but it is a reality of moving.
As we do new things, especially around the holidays or birthdays, we say, “This might be the start of a tradition.” It changes how we think about our actions and reminds our family that we are working towards new traditions and seasons.
In the course of these conversations, then, someone inevitably asks us, “Is it worth moving? Would you do it again?” The answer depends, and yes.
It depends because I don’t know their situation and if moving is right for them. For us, it was. Yes, it was hard; yes, we would move again because we knew our time in Arizona was done, and God was moving us to a new place and season.
