I used to think moving to another town or city or state would be great. In fact, I’ve really wanted to move to North Carolina for a few years now, just because I’d love to attend and serve at Elevation Church at the Ballantyne Campus in Charlotte. Of course that’s my long term goal, but for now I am in Oklahoma, the state I grew up in and learned to love. However, the older I get the more I realize that moving is for the birds.

I was born in Oklahoma City and lived in Yukon until right before my fifth birthday when my family moved to the Pierce area, about 15 miles west of Checotah. My grandparents on my father’s side had bought a farm at the foot of Tiger Mountain and we stayed with them while we built our childhood home that somehow survived my two ornery brothers and I, but didn’t survive our huge 150-year-old tree falling on it in June of this year. But we will get to that story of moving in a minute. Right now, I’ve only moved once from our little home on Glenda Drive in Yukon. However, being so young I don’t remember being too stressed over it. I did miss my two little girlfriends, Sheryl and Jennifer Jones, who I had grown up with because our mothers were best friends, but I would visit my grandparents on the mother’s side during the summer so I got to keep up with them for a while. So, Move #1 wasn’t too bad.

I guess technically Move #2 would have been when we finished building our home about three miles away from my grandparent’s home and moved in. Again, I only have a few select memories from living with my grandparents, sleeping on the couch with my first puppy ever, a Chihuahua named Smokey Joe that lived 21 years, to going to my own bedroom in a 2,400 sq. ft. house on 20 acres that seemed huge to what we had been in prior. Again Move #2 was not so bad.

However, Move #3 was a little harder because now I had lived in my childhood home for 13 years and this was my first time away from home. I had only moved an hour away to McAlester and had actually moved in with my older brother and his wife because I had started my first real job, waitressing at Western Sizzlin. Yet it seemed like home was still so far away. However, it wasn’t even a year before I would have to move back in with my parents, making this Move #4 because I was expecting my firstborn and my new husband was expecting to go to prison, which he did.

Almost two years later, about a month before my husband got out, I purchased five acres with a single wide trailer, down a dead-end road off of Fountainhead. This would be Move #5 and that home would be where I started a family, but sadly divorced my first husband because he refused to change. However, I had changed and now I had a two-year-old daughter that I had to look after. I would end up remarrying and a few years later I would have a son and this would bring on Move #6, moving into a doublewide trailer in the middle of December and a snow storm. Why I thought we had to be in this place by Christmas or else is beside me. But we did it and then laughed at all the stuff we left until spring. My husband even back asked me “If we haven’t needed it in the past four months, why do we need it now?” To which I had no answer but I stored it away for the possibility.

I would raise my children in this home until Move #7 when I left my husband and moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas. This move was more stressful than any move before and was extremely hard on me and my children. My daughter would come live with me and my son stayed with his father. Though we would still co-parent as we always had before, this move changed my life and turned my world upside down. It would also make me become more independent in a lot of ways and Move #8 would be moving to Siloam Springs. Oh my goodness, how I remember those winding back roads and being so tired from moving furniture that I never wanted to move again.

But fate would change all that after several years away with Move #9, I returned home to finish raising my children and help with the care of my father until he passed and my grandmother. After that Move #10 would be only a few miles away to a pretty little brick home with my mother and my son as he went into his senior year of high school that flew by way too fast.

So after he left for college, I felt the ache of the empty nest and I went back and forth between Oklahoma and Arkansas, trying to figure out where home really was anymore. Siloam had become my home away from home, and had taught me a lot. But eventually I would move two more times and end up here in Muskogee and have to call this place home. I’m not really sure this place has ever felt like my childhood home or my children’s childhood home. It’s been a difficult move, kind of like being between a rock and a hard place; you just keep adjusting as best as you can. We had also moved my daughter a couple times while she was married but the last time was here with us when she also suffered the pain of divorce.

However, nothing could ever prepare me for a whole month or more of moving. Yes now, we can backtrack to June when the tree fell on my childhood home and we had to move stuff for nearly a month while still working a full-time job and rescuing pound pups. Then our office in Eufaula had to move and so we moved furniture and things over another weekend. Finally, we moved my son out of his apartment in Tulsa this past weekend and I know one thing for sure – I’m getting too old for all this … moving. Moving is definitely for the birds and nobody enjoys packing up all their belongings, breaking their backs and leaving behind the familiar and all the memories made in that place you called home whether for a year, a decade, or a lifetime.

Now as I stare at what seems to be a billion boxes that I still need to sort through and sort out, I realize why moving is so hard. Because there will always be a part of you that you leave behind in the childhood home you grew up in, and in the house you made a home with your own family, or in that apartment where you were finally on your own after college. Yes, there will also be a part of you left in the houses you made a home with the help of a friend and where you maybe grew up a little more and hopefully changed for the better.

Then finally when you move into that one last house that you work so hard to make it a home. You literally pour your whole life into making your house a home for your husband, your children and possibly even your best friend, only to realize it’s not the house that makes the home, it’s who you have in it. After all, we are all just moving on day by day, and moving really is for the birds.