There are a few empty boxes starting to pile up in my apartment.
A pile of boxes used to look like panic to me.
For my son Jake’s entire childhood, moving was a constant part of life. We grabbed whatever mismatched boxes we could find, packed up our lives and did our best to build a happy home wherever we landed.
We were never well off. There wasn’t a moving fund or carefully planned timeline. There was just figuring out what needed to happen next and making it work. Through all of it, I tried to make sure Jake felt secure even when so much around us wasn’t.
Moving wasn’t exciting. It was necessary.
That’s probably why staying rooted in this apartment since 2019 has been such a blessing. For seven years, this place has been home. Not temporary. Not somewhere I was already figuring out how to leave. It became a place of rest and quiet healing during years when I desperately needed both.
So seeing boxes gathering again feels completely different.
There isn’t panic attached to them. I’m not fleeing anything or trying to survive. Honestly, I don’t even know exactly when I’ll need them yet. They’re just little cardboard reminders that another season may be coming.
For so much of my life, change happened because it had to. Now I’m learning what it feels like to prepare for change without being afraid of it. To trust that I don’t need every detail yet and to recognize that sometimes God begins preparing our hearts for a new season long before we understand what that season will look like.
That shift, moving beyond the instinct to survive and learning to trust God with whatever comes next, is at the heart of so much of what I write about in Raising a Boaz.
Sometimes preparing for where God might be taking you starts simply by honoring where He’s already brought you from.
These boxes remind me where I’ve been, but they don’t scare me about where I’m going.
For once, they don’t look like instability.
They look a little bit like possibility.