Outside My Comfort Zone
Friday night Mark came home excited about the opportunity to manage a cell-phone project in Vancouver, Canada. The position was a two-and-a-half year contract, with his current company, that would entail uprooting our four children.

Comfortable in my current surroundings I said, “Canada? I don’t want to move.” I enjoyed my community, my church, my walks five days a week with a friend, and my children were happy in their schools. The last thing I wanted was to move. Yet something inside me nudged me to pray before rejecting the idea completely.

Mark left the decision up to me. His work gave us the weekend to decide. My second and fourth grade sons, Connor and Cameron begged, “Can we please move to Canada?” My boys saw how easy the transition was for the neighbor boys who came from Australia with their father’s company.

Over the weekend I begged God to guide me. Sunday morning I went to my bookshelf. I perused the books asking God to lead me. I reached for Experiencing God Day by Day, by Henry Blackaby, a devotional I once read frequently. I turned randomly to a page. There on top of the page was a scripture from Genesis chapter twelve. God told Abraham to leave his country to go to a new nation. 
 
Stunned that I would read this scripture after seeking God for direction, I knew He was talking to me. I continued to read about how God promised to bless Abraham and others through him by his act of obedience.

Clearly God was guiding me to move my family and follow my husband on this adventure to a new country. I surrendered my will to stay in my comfortable lifestyle in order to obey God.

I thought my daughter Kylie, a seventh grader, would be apprehensive about the move. She was in a gifted program with the same group of students for several years. Instead she was eager to move wanting to develop a new circle of friends. However, my oldest daughter, Kayla, was incredibly angry that I would take her away from her friends during her freshmen year of high school. She insisted, “You go. I’ll stay here with Julie’s family.”

How ironic that my daughter would want to move in with a friend around the same age I moved out of the house to live with my friend Lisa. Remembering back to a conversation with my father I realized my grandmother Ola moved out of her home to work as a nanny at age sixteen. The same age when I worked as a nanny during the summer after tenth grade.

Was I capable of allowing my daughter to move out of the house with a friend? It certainly would have been the easy choice instead of doing the battle. If I had not looked back to see our family choices over the generations I may have repeated the same mistakes. Instead I made the choice to change the pattern.

My responsibility as a mom is to raise the children God has given me. That is my focus until they leave the house at eighteen, hopefully to attend college. I pray and hope that I have completed my mission to raise them into responsible adults that will make a difference in our world.

Although Kayla lashed out in anger and made my life extremely uncomfortable, I hung on to the fact that no one would care for my little girl the way I do. She needed her mother. And she needed me to do the battle through her rebellion so that she would know she was loved and worth fighting for. I insisted that we all move to Canada as a family.