One of the biggest risks I ever took was leaving behind a familiar life and moving to Jacksonville in my late forties to begin again.
At that point, most people are supposed to be settled. Careers are established. Routines are locked in. People know where the grocery store is without thinking about it, know which roads flood when it rains, know who they are in relation to everyone around them. I stepped away from all of that and moved to a city where almost everything important had to be rebuilt from scratch.
That included work. I went from a life shaped largely around writing and communication into teaching — which sounds noble until you realize it also means discovering that thirty teenagers can drain your soul before lunch and still somehow need you to explain the same instruction three times before the bell rings.
It also meant building a new church life, new friendships, a new rhythm, and a new sense of home. None of that happens overnight. People sometimes talk as if bold decisions come with immediate clarity, but usually they come with long stretches where you quietly wonder if you’ve completely lost your mind.
But I don’t regret it.
Because some risks do not simply change your location — they change what your life becomes. Jacksonville became the place where I built a marriage that matters deeply to me, where I found work that unexpectedly fit parts of me I didn’t fully understand before, and where life eventually stopped feeling borrowed and started feeling real again.
That doesn’t mean every part was easy. It just means some risks are worth the discomfort because the alternative would have been staying still out of fear.
And in hindsight, staying still would have been the bigger mistake.
Yeah, rebuilding a church oriented community usually takes several years. It took me about a year and my wife about 3 when we changed churches back in ’17.
It is not an experience I want to repeat often.