Life isn't always easy

By Mikayla Moore

I was eleven years old in fifth grade. At that age my life wasn't really that complicated; it consisted of just two things, school and church. I lived in Tulsa Oklahoma and attended a school called Lincoln Christian School. The church and school were connected and my dad was a pastor there. Everyone knew who I was, I was so popular and was friends with everyone. Everything was perfect. I had two girls that I had gotten to know extremely well, they were like my sisters, or like we called it "BFFL". I didn't know that my life was about to flip.

I had gotten home from school one day to see my mom and dad sitting on the couch, they asked me to sit with them and I knew something was up. It was then that they told me two words that I never in a million years would have expected to hear, "we're moving." Of course there was more to it than that but that was all I heard. When I heard those two dreaded words my eyes welled up with tears, I turned to my mom and just sobbed in her lap.  Soon my sadness turned to anger and I got up to run upstairs to my room. When I got there I fell onto my bed and I couldn't do anything but cry, so that's what I did I  cried... and cried... and cried. I wasn't allowed to tell any of my friends so for a whole school year I had to keep it a secret. I know that it seems like at eleven years old it couldn't have been that big of a deal, but it was. When we moved that summer something inside of me twisted, and I began to feel myself slip into a deep depression.

You may think I was just being a baby but I had already moved once from Indiana, so when we moved to Oklahoma I made it my home. I planted my roots there, and moving to Visalia in California, a town where I knew no one, and I had never even heard of, it completely uprooted me. I didn't want to be involved in school, or church, and I began to get bitter and angry with my parents and my family. My brothers automatically fit in and found friends. I was just there. I was tired of my parents telling me that I had one foot here and one in Oklahoma, they told me to be "all in" here. I didn't want to be here, I wanted to go back home to Oklahoma. I convinced myself that I didn't belong here, that I was simply dragged along by my family. All I would do was lock myself in my room and cry most of the time.
    

Finally I came through, I began to make my way through the fog. And I'm so glad I did. Of course there was a ton of steps between this but now my family has started a church and I know I have a calling for kids church, at least for now. I realize now that if I hadn't moved, I wouldn't have been able to make an impact on the kids I see every Sunday. I love those kids. I still think about what it would be like sometimes if I had stayed in Tulsa. But any time I feel like I wish I was still there, I think about all the little faces I see in kids church. And I know I'm supposed to be here. I'm supposed to be here for all of them. And I know He has even bigger plans in store for me in the future. In three years of living here, I'm just now figuring out why God put me here. Me, Mikayla Moore, not the pastors kid, or the new girl. But me. And I wouldn't trade any of that time for anything, it was all worth it.
    

I may have not known it then, but there was not one second during those three years that God left me. When I was angry with Him, He was sitting right there by me. When I cried, His heart was breaking for me. When I questioned Him, He was chasing my heart. He was walking with me every step of the way. And He still is.

 

Life isn't always easy... but God is always good.

 

 

 

Psalm 27:13

"I would have lost heart, unless I had believed

that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living."