Why did you move?

A cardstock print sits propped against the lamp on my desk: a taupe watercolor swipe outlining a peakside Saguaro, the sun a tiny ring above. Beneath this minimalist illustration are these words in typeface: “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”

I happened upon this notecard-sized print on the way out of a shop last weekend, after already having completed another purchase. It was the last print of its kind in the pile. I had to have it. I returned to the cashier: “This one, too.”

You see, this verse has been a thread weaving through my story, simple words spoken by a prophet long dead, a passage of comfort I’ve returned to again and again since my pilgrimage to the desert four years ago, when I inked a cactus on my wrist.

This cactat was a memorial to a desert season I had walked through in my early twenties. Because it was there, in the desert, that I really began to know God as an active, personal being who — get this! — actually cared about every facet of my life: from the most mundane naivetes of 22-year-old me to the shame-soaked inner critic that soundtracked my mind in those years.

That desert season shaped me.

Because it was there, in the desert — both metaphorically, in my life, and literally, in the Sonoran — that I learned that bright, blossoming life could exist, even in a space that, on the surface, might seem inhospitable to growth, to life.

And now I happen to live in the desert — literally, not metaphorically.

“Why did you move to Phoenix?” people ask me.

“For fun.”

or

“I felt like it was time to try something new.”

or

“I was too comfortable in Nashville, and so I wasn’t growing.”

or

“So many of my friends moved away from Nashville, I would need to rebuild my community anyways. Why not try it in a new city?”

or

“Just because.”

I carry a quiver of canned responses to offer — quick, clean, not untrue answers.

But why did I really move to Phoenix?

It’s harder to provide a watertight, rational explanation. It requires story, and story requires an openness to mystery, a willingness to remove the idea of “coincidence” from your vocabulary. Story requires a suspension of disbelief, an intentional choice of trust in things unseen.

“I don’t know why you moved to Phoenix, but it’s clear you are meant to be there,” a friend told me recently.

I don’t really know why, either — other than I knew — the gut feeling, inner knowing, God-within-me — that rerouting my life to Phoenix was the right choice, despite the rational reasons to the contrary: I knew no one here, it was going to be extraordinarily expensive (ask me what I pay in rent lol), and I was scared as hell to leave Nashville behind.

Although I don’t have a tidy answer to the “what brought you to Phoenix?” question, I do know that I’m in the middle of a story, one that requires an openness to mystery, a willingness to say “yes” to decisions that carry little rational weight.

Author Madeleine L’Engle writes, "All of life is story, story unraveling and revealing meaning."

So I ask you…

What story are you living?

What meaning is it seeking to reveal?

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