By Rochelle Lloyd

The law of relativity teaches that nothing is inherently good or bad—it all depends on the value we place on it. Let me illustrate with the story of our family’s move.

For most of my young life, I lived in what you might call a medium-sized town in Wyoming. It was just big enough to have four elementary schools, two middle schools, and one high school with around 1,200 students. But it was small enough that whatever nickname or identity you were given in kindergarten tended to stick. There were the bullies, the flirts, the goof-offs, the geeks, the good kids—and then there were kids like me, the ones no one really knew what to do with. I never quite understood most of my peers, and they didn’t understand me either.

When I was 13, life seemed to take a sharp turn for the worse. My dad was laid off just before Thanksgiving, and my mom was in a horrific accident that left her in a Utah hospital and rehab center for three months. Then, when I was 14—just two weeks before my sophomore year—we moved to Henderson, Nevada, a rapidly growing city just outside Las Vegas. I had no idea what that move would mean for me.

Trying to start fresh, our family was juggling a lot—moving into a new house, enrolling four of the five kids in new schools, and adjusting to a completely different way of life. Everything felt unfamiliar. I remember one day running outside barefoot like I always had in Wyoming. I barely made it four steps before I ran back inside. I had never imagined pavement could be that hot. In that moment, I seriously wondered if my parents had moved us to hell.

And the changes kept coming. I hadn’t had any close friendships in Wyoming, so I didn’t know what to expect in Nevada. My mom encouraged me to go to a back-to-school seminary social. It was held at someone’s home—an actual house with a yard, a volleyball net, a pool (wait, regular people have those?), and even a hot tub. There were plenty of kids there, but I still felt out of place—like the outsider I had always been.

I was sitting alone in the hot tub, trying to figure out why I had come and how I could get a ride home, when a guy slid in next to me. He smiled and said, “Hi, my name is Dave, what’s yours?” I remember being so thrown off that I thought he said something else entirely and awkwardly asked if he knew someone from Wyoming. He looked at me and said slowly, “Nnnooo,” and I wanted to disappear from embarrassment. But to my surprise, he stayed and talked. I thought maybe, just maybe, I’d made a friend.

School started soon after, and it felt huge. My old school had 1,200 students total—this one had more than that just in the upper grades. My graduating class alone had nearly 700 students. I had barely started to find my footing when, one morning, I showed up to school to find metal detectors at the doors. That day, we learned that a group of skinheads traveling to California had threatened to attack the school during lunch. I thought, What have my parents gotten me into? Now I really wondered if we’d moved to hell.

But then—remember Dave?—he became one of my best friends. Through him, I met others who became close friends too. I don’t think I’d ever had that before, and while that might not sound like much, to me it was everything. Dave later married one of those friends, and they ended up moving to Idaho—where my husband and I had settled with our kids. Our families got to raise our children together, and our kids became close friends as well.

What felt like a painful season in Wyoming... and what at first seemed like it could be a disaster in Henderson... turned out to be one of the greatest blessings of my life. And it didn’t stop there—it became a blessing in my children’s lives too.

So, was Wyoming good or bad? Was my mom’s accident good or bad? My dad’s layoff? Was Henderson really hell? The truth is—it depends. The answer shifts based on how we choose to look at it... and the bigger picture God has in mind.

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