King's Corner: You'll Be Back

Most of us can point to a moment when life asked us a difficult question.

Sometimes it comes in adolescence. Sometimes much later. We suddenly find ourselves standing between the life we know and a future we cannot yet see.

I think God often uses those moments to reveal who we are becoming.

By the time he returned to New Jersey at age 12, my father, Mark “Bobbie” King, had already begun changing. The Wisconsin farm had taught him responsibility. He had learned to hunt, work, and carry himself with confidence. He had walked miles to school through every season, earned the trust of adults, and discovered a freedom he had never known.

The problem was not that New Jersey was a bad place.

The problem was that Bobbie was no longer the same boy who had left it.

Sometimes God changes us before He changes our circumstances. I suspect that was happening here. The friendships, responsibilities, and freedoms Bobbie had discovered in Wisconsin were shaping him in ways neither he nor his mother fully understood.

The move back to New Jersey made sense to Julia. Life there was familiar and work easier to find. After years of uncertainty, she was trying to build stability for the two of them. Julia was sacrificing more than he realized. She was trying to give her son the safest future she knew.

Bobbie appreciated that.

He loved his mother deeply. The two of them had survived difficult years together. She had sacrificed much for him. In many ways they had grown up together. Yet as the months passed, he found himself increasingly restless. Even before Wisconsin there had been signs. Bobbie always seemed drawn toward whatever lay beyond the next horizon. The farm had not created that restlessness. It had simply given it room to grow.

Part of that restlessness came from school. At his Catholic school in Morristown, New Jersey, Father Stone and other teachers had challenged him to learn and grow. In Wisconsin he had battled snow, distance, and hard work, but those struggles had produced confidence and responsibility. Madison Monroe Grade School in Elizabeth felt different. Fights were common. Bobbie found himself in them regularly and usually won, but that was not the point. In Morristown he had been learning. In Wisconsin he had been learning. Here he often felt as though he was simply surviving.

After the wide-open spaces of Wisconsin, the apartment felt small and the city crowded. The life Julia had worked so hard to rebuild felt to Bobbie like a life he had already outgrown.

That realization troubled him because he knew how much it had cost her.

Underneath their growing disagreements were two different visions of the future. Julia was looking for stability while Bobbie was looking for possibility. Neither was wrong. That is often what makes life’s hardest decisions so painful. Most of us eventually discover that the people we love do not always want the future we want. The conflict is not a lack of love. Sometimes it exists because of love.

Looking back, I wonder if adolescence is when our values become our own. Childhood is largely spent living within the decisions of others. Then comes a season when we begin deciding who we will become.

Without saying much about it, Bobbie had already begun preparing. The money in his pocket did not come from his mother. He had earned it himself and carefully saved it. He wasn’t saving for a destination. He was saving for the freedom to choose one.

Wisconsin had taught him discipline. Now it was quietly becoming independence. A child waits for someone else to decide. A young man begins preparing to decide for himself.

As his 13th birthday approached, the tension between those two worlds became harder to ignore.

One day another argument erupted. It was not the first. Leaving home had become something of a ritual. Bobbie would pack a bag, announce his departure, and disappear for a few hours before eventually returning. Julia knew the routine. So did he.

This time felt different.

He packed a suitcase.

At his request, Julia helped him pack it.

That detail says more about their relationship than any argument ever could.

There was anger, certainly.

But there was also love.

Then came the moment he never forgot.

Standing outside the apartment with his suitcase beside him, he hesitated. The anger was fading. The future was uncertain. The apartment door was only a few steps away. He was already thinking about turning around, already imagining walking back inside, already wondering if perhaps he should stay after all.

The familiar has a powerful pull, even when we have outgrown it.

The apartment door opened.

Julia stepped out.

She kissed him goodbye.

Then she smiled and said four words.

“You’ll be back.”

Years later, my father still remembered that moment. Not because it made him angry.

Because it forced a choice.

Looking back, I think God brings all of us to moments like this. The details differ, but the question remains the same.

Will we trust Him with a future we cannot yet see?

And will we have the courage to take the next step?

Standing there with his suitcase in his hand, Bobbie was about to take the first one.

Jeff Headley is pastor of the Dayton Valley Community Church, and a storyteller who blends humor, honesty, and hope. His weekly column reflects on resilience, grace, and the surprising ways faith shows up in ordinary life.