This past year, our family made the radical decision to return to Texas. This decision did not come lightly. In many ways, Alaska felt like my forever home. I felt whole and alive amid the raw landscape. We were part of a parish and school community that fostered warmth and growth while providing anyone who crossed its threshold a sense of belonging. I could look around the church, the elementary school, or the high school, and bask in the familiarity of not just the space, but the souls around me. I knew the names of almost every student and parent, and most of their stories. This knowledge expanded the inner chambers of my heart and slowed me to a new steady walk of listening, watching, and trusting the slow work of the Holy Spirit. Each day I showed up to work with a simple prayer, inviting the Lord to help me tend my garden, and then a myriad of familiar tasks would unfold in front of me. Challenges came, but grace always showed up to light the next step. I loved the stability and the comfort of the spaces and community that I was able to move within every day.
Then everything unraveled at once. I was hit with an onslaught of health challenges that augmented the harshness of the Alaskan winter. We lost the stability of Peter’s income. Work that once felt light and natural suddenly felt like a crushing weight. It seemed as though the buoys and docks that had been my refuge were all sinking along with me. I kept looking to Christ to provide a steady foothold. I wanted to make Alaska work. I wanted to cling to the life we had built there. Then this scripture kept breaking through my prayer:
“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the gospel will save it.” (Mark 8:34037)
In that scripture, I recognized I had to let go and allow God to do a new thing. To truly direct. My prayer shifted to contain a wider openness. Slowly, as Peter and I talked through the future, we allowed our gaze to shift home to Texas. A longing for family and a different sort of warmth began to take root. A move back seemed fraught with complications and a different sort of loss, but it became a viable path. Throughout our discernment, while in consolation, I felt a heavenly freedom. I felt God would bless either decision, even though each decision carried its own risks and trials. Either way, we would have to take a step in complete trust, not knowing what the future would hold.
Piece by piece, our path back to Texas began to take shape. John and I visited Peter’s alma mater and found a place John could continue to grow and flourish. Peter was offered a job alongside an old friend doing work he truly loved. Our Texas family jumped in with all sorts of support. Amid a chaotic year, we were given a place to land. Within the Easter season, a decision was made as a family, together in prayer, and a course set. Everything moved fast. Goodbyes were said, and plans carried out.
Letting go of our life in Alaska continues to be difficult, but I must remember that Christ's call to lose our life is not an empty letting go; it opens us up to embrace new life in Him. There will be a million small deaths on this side of heaven, but each death can, through the help of grace, prepare us for our final homecoming. I do not know yet what this chapter will look like, but I do know Christ is here too. Right now, it is a strange mix of shade in once-known spaces and vast unknown. I have basked in the comfort of my sister's home, reconnected with extended family and rekindled old friendships. And yet, I come back to this landscape changed by the places that helped shape my family and me. I am at once coming home and stepping into something entirely new. So now I wait and let Christ reset my rhythm. Familiarity will come. I will get to know the souls around me, and in doing so, my heart will once again expand. In the meantime, he has given me the blessed chance to refocus my energy on the small garden of my family.