It was November of 1995.

I was sitting in a lunchroom filled with loud and hungry sixth-graders on my first day at a new school.

“Ok, folks! It’s quiet time!”

Coach Perkins’ voice boomed across the cafeteria, commanding obedience . . . or else there was a punishment of written multiplication tables in sets of quadruples.

Honestly, his declaration was a welcomed reprieve to the auditory overwhelm – it offered an opportunity for me to come up for air amidst these unknown waters I was trying to navigate. Sound dramatic? Ever jumped into the middle of middle school as the new kid? Exactly.

Our family had just moved, and everything had changed.

Back in our little Mayberry, I was tiptoeing around the fact that I thought one of my older brother’s friends was cute, but I wasn’t sure I was even okay with feeling that. And the first day at this new school, I was issued an abrupt interrogation and a multiple-choice option that insisted on an answer by car-rider line : “So, who do you want to go with?!”

Oh my goodness, what? “Go with”? What did that really mean, anyway?

Car-rider line did eventually come that day, though not soon enough and with no answer bubbled in by me. I stood under the awning at the front of the school and was relieved to spot Mom’s minivan not too far back in the single-file of cars snaked across the parking lot. I finally got in the car – it was the only place that had felt familiar the past seven hours, and it was all I could muster to get the door shut before I began to sob away the day.

I knew our family was supposed to move. God had used many things to confirm this next step – even a specific song on a cassette tape I listened to before bed was a means of affirmation that “my life is in Your hands; and though I may not see clearly, I trust You, Lord.”

Here I could insert pages upon pages of prayers and tears and journal entries, but I will abstain.

Yet I will say this.

Though everything was new, and everything felt hard . . . I had to be reminded that new and hard do not equate bad.

Feeling peripheral and out of place is definitely not preferred by our human nature, but it can be mightily used by our Kind Father to position us in order to change our perspective.

The setting of my life had changed, but so had my outlook.

I had been taken out of my comfort zone so I could deeply – and maybe for the first time – truly feel the comfort of Christ.

I was now without many of the “securities” in my life up to that point so that I could learn to find my identity in the Lord and my security in Him alone – to acutely taste and see that the Lord is good. Not because of where I was, but because He is with me, wherever I am. Because “it’s not about where you live, but where you dwell”, right?

Up to that point, the spaces in my life that had been filled with giggling slumber parties and imaginative picnic “luncheons” on the lawn after church on Sundays . . . were now empty. Those spaces were now empty of those things, but were now open for more things. As beloved as those little Mayberry memories still are to my heart today, God was making space in my life for bigger moments with Him.

He moved me to a new setting of life – a setting where I felt empty – in order to set me up to receive more of Him than I could ever ask or imagine.

I use this small example from my own life because I know the big picture truth is the same, no matter what the situation.

Obedience to God’s call for your family may be costly for each member of it, but it is the best thing for each one.

Even if things are hard; even if it is lonely; even if there are tears and more tears . . .

Even if all of the sudden your child is not involved in this or invited to that . . .

perhaps God is inviting them to greater depths of intimacy with Him.

Listen to your child’s emotions and feelings and validate them; sit with them there and hold them tight . . . but you do not have to pity them. God may be doing something in them that is exceedingly and abundantly above all you could ask or imagine.

So, maybe it’s a move – across the world, across the state, across town . . .

Maybe it’s pursuing foster care, or maybe not pursuing something everyone else seems to be . . .

I say this from the perspective of a child who has had obedient parents. And I say this from the perspective of a parent who is praying for grace to be obedient to the Lord as we lead our family.

Your obedience to God as parents is the best thing for your kids.

Always. No matter what.