Lead kindly light: moving forward with faith

This week has been a stressful one at our house. For months, February 20 has been circled on our calendar—a looming deadline to accept or decline a job offer. This week was the time for my husband and me to decide where we will go and what we will do when he graduates with his PhD this fall. Trying to predict the best outcome for the future is nerve-racking. Our three children aged 5 and under further complicated the process by interrupting us each time we began an important conversation. There were pros and cons to consider, budgets to estimate, and negotiations to make.

After much prayer, deciding and re-deciding, the papers are signed. Come August we will be moving to Boston. I should feel a weight off my back, instead, a part of me feels like I’m at the bottom of another mountain looking up. The to-do list seems miles long: we need to buy a new car, find a place to rent, actually finish the PhD program and move, get our daughter enrolled in school, get library cards, set up our internet, find the nearest grocery store and re-learn where they stock the raisins, etc. etc.

Perhaps the scariest thing for me is that I will be moving to a brand new city and I won’t know a soul there. No friends to come over when the afternoon gets unbearably long, no potential babysitters on call, and no couples to join us for game night on a Saturday.

Moving is HARD. As a child I lived in the same house on Palmer Fishhook Road for almost 19 years, sandwiched between my grandparents and my aunt and uncle. But as an adult, I am preparing to live in my fifth state. Every move comes with a feeling of loss, even if it was from a place I thought I didn’t like the entire time I lived there.

In her book, “Becoming,” Michelle Obama wrote that moving away means experiencing “what it means to be dislodged, a cork floating on the ocean of another place.” I hate that dislodged feeling. And as an extrovert with a high social need, I like having friends, but not necessarily having to make them.

Managing my own emotions will be difficult, but guiding my four- and five-year-old children through the process of moving away from the only friends and home they can remember will require even more fortitude.

With all my previous moves, however, I have been blessed to find a church congregation waiting with open arms. A literal community of Christ has helped us unpack U-Hauls, brought us meals and even donated their unneeded furniture to help us get settled. Inevitably, since I see them at least once a week, our fellow church-goers become our first and often our closest friends.

While I am grateful for the love and support I know I will get from a group of strangers in Boston, as of now, they are still strangers. Their existence helps to lessen, but not erase, my anxiety.

Contemplating the future has led me to reflect on the past—particularly, our move from Utah to California in 2015. While packing up our apartment, I frequently pondered one of my favorite hymns, “Lead Kindly Light.” Since I was anticipating a future struggle rather than experiencing a current one, the third verse particularly struck me:

“So long thy pow’r hath blest me, sure it still

Will lead me on

O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till

The night is gone.

And with the morn those angel faces smile

Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!”

The lyrics rang true to me because, despite an uncertain future, I realized I was sure of one thing: that God would be with me. Even when things felt hard and I thought I couldn’t see “those angel faces,” they would be there with me.

That move to California was hard. And the move from there to Virginia was hard. But I’ve experienced that unmoored feeling enough times now to know that, eventually, it dissipates, and then disappears. I love many things about Virginia that I will be sad to leave behind when we move to Massachusetts. But I know that the Lord’s “power hath blessed me” in the past, and it will bless me now.

I will take courage, as I face this challenge and many others in my life, from KJV Deuteronomy 31:8 “And the Lord…he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee: fear not, neither be dismayed.”

Rachel Kenley Fry is a third generation Alaskan, mother of three, piano teacher, writer, and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.