When God Says Move
When God whispers "go," the faithful must choose between comfortable disobedience and the uncertain path of surrender. This is the story of Julie, a woman who traded her desert dream home for an uncharted spiritual expedition, guided by the Holy Spirit's audible voice and strengthened by glimpses beyond the veil that separates heaven and earth. Through devastating loss and unexpected discovery, she learned that divine purpose rarely reveals itself all at once—but always unfolds with perfect timing for those willing to follow.
The Arizona sun warmed Julie's skin as she floated peacefully in her pool. It was June 2022, a perfect day before the desert heat became unbearable. The breeze rustled through the trees as she reclined in the water, savoring the moment in her dream home—the one-story house with the perfect layout, a pool, and mountains nearby for sunrise hikes with Lexi, her beloved dog. Everything about Arizona felt right: the friends, the weather, the life she had built. She had no desire to leave.
But for nearly a year, there had been that persistent voice—that gentle but relentless picking at her spirit. The Holy Spirit had been nudging her, as Julie describes it: "Pick, pick, pick." Her daughter Casi had been asking her to move to Tennessee too, and something within Julie kept whispering that it was time to go, despite her resistance.
Then it happened. As Julie relaxed in her pool that perfect June day, surrounded by the beauty of her dream life, the voice became unmistakable.
"Go! It's time for the next adventure."
The words came with such clarity that they seemed audible. It was God speaking directly to her. Julie opened her eyes, startled. "What was that?" she wondered at first, followed immediately by, "Yes, I heard that." She recognized in that moment her own disobedience to what the Holy Spirit had been trying to tell her for months, and there wasn’t any more time to lose. Now was the time to move.
With tears streaming down her face, Julie called her real estate agent friend, Lori, that Saturday. "I have to sell the house," she sobbed. Lori wasn't surprised; they had discussed this possibility before.
The Holy Spirit had spoken, and now the physical world rushed to align with the heavenly directive. Events unfolded with breathtaking speed. Pictures were posted online Thursday as "coming soon." The house officially went on the market Friday. By Saturday's open house, two offers had arrived, and by Sunday, Julie had accepted one—a cash offer with no contingencies, no inspections, and a 30-day closing window.
The next month was a whirlwind of stress and faith. Julie had to downsize dramatically, giving away or selling two-thirds of her possessions, and manage the organization of moving her non-profit business.. She held a garage sale where she didn't even price items, just put out a cardboard box labeled "Julie & Lexi's Grand Adventure" for people to drop in whatever they wanted to pay.
As the departure date approached, the urgency intensified. Julie sensed God saying, "Get out, get out, get out." Though she didn't fully understand, she obeyed, packing her remaining belongings into storage cubes, loading her car, and beginning the journey to Tennessee—to a rental that hadn't even been secured until she was almost on her way. The Holy Spirit was leading her into the unknown, asking her to trust in divine provision rather than human certainty.
Faith often requires action without complete understanding. "I gave up control a while ago," she explains, "because, ultimately, I don't have any control. Not if I want things to go right. We might as well just be obedient and do what He wants. When we try to do things ourselves, a lot of times, they don't work out."
Julie's obedience brought her to Tennessee, where she was reunited with her beloved daughter Casi. What seemed like a new beginning would soon become a journey through the valley of grief. Not long after Julie's move, less than three months, the unthinkable happened—Casi passed away, leaving Julie to navigate the darkest waters of loss a mother could ever face.
"I was so mad at God," Julie remembers of the day after Casi passed. She had paced the house in anguish, her footsteps echoing her racing heart as rage mixed with grief. Finding herself before a life-sized picture of Jesus hanging on the wall, she unleashed her raw pain: "How could you?" she cried out, her voice breaking. "How could you take my baby girl? How could you let this happen?"
The questions hung in the air, seeming to reverberate off the walls of her empty house. Then, in the midst of her anger—in that sacred, terrible space between accusation and surrender—she heard God saying, "I had to give up my own Son."
"I'm so sorry," she said, her voice instantly transformed from rage to reverence. "You gave up your son for what we've done, and we didn't deserve it, but because you gave up Your Son, we will be together for eternity."
Her rage dissolved into humility as she recognized the parallel that transcended time. "We're such stupid humans," she whispered, tears streaming down her face. "You had to give up Your son, Your only son, to let us be reconciled with You."
Where there had been only anger, now there was a glimpse of understanding—not an answer that erased her grief, but a perspective that allowed her to hold her pain alongside a deeper spiritual truth. Julie's faith hadn't spared her from suffering, but it had given her a framework to begin processing the unbearable.
As her friend later reminded her, "He was gracious enough that he took Casi because she couldn't handle what she was going through. So she’s free of her earthly sins and chains and in a better place." Julie was able to handle each day because God had anchored her heart in a place of solid peace. It made no sense with what she was going through, but she understood the correlation of the verse “the peace that surpasses understanding”. She felt it. She was living it.
Yet the human heart doesn't release its attachments easily, even when faith provides answers. "It’s hard to keep in perspective when my heart is aching," Julie acknowledges, "because she’s not here."
The pain cuts especially deep when Julie witnesses the life milestones that Casi will never experience. "I have a really hard time seeing people with kids getting married, having babies," she admits. "Casi wanted to be a mom so badly. She would have been such a good mom. She even had a nickname for what her kids were going to call me."
These are the future memories forever uncreated, the roles never fulfilled. "It's such a loss from here," Julie reflects. "Having to realize that I'll never get to experience that... the sadness is deep from a human perspective."
In these moments, Julie holds two truths simultaneously: "I know she's in a better place. I know she's happier. I know I get to see her again. But it's still a loss."
Even in her deepest grief, Julie sometimes feels Casi's presence. She tells the story of a large patchwork dinosaur that belonged to Casi, which now sits on Julie's armoire. "It just sits up there. It doesn't go anywhere," she explains. One day when Julie was feeling particularly upset and sad, the dinosaur fell off the armoire for no apparent reason. "Oh, come on, Cas, I know you're here right now," Julie said. "That is totally you because that thing can’t move. It's on all fours on top of a flat surface. There was no earthquake. There was nothing else. I know that was you."
Julie often shared a key piece of wisdom with her daughters: "It doesn't matter what cards life deals you, it's how you play the game. You're going to get what you get. How are you going to deal with it? What are you going to do? You can either approach positively or negatively.”
In life's most difficult moments, she believes there are only three paths forward: "You can either survive, die, or thrive. It totally depends on what you do with it."
She reflects on the nature of love itself as perhaps the hardest part of human existence. "Love is so real," she says. "God's love is pure love. We try and love people the best we can from a godly perspective, but then we have the human piece stuck in there. So we never get to give that absolute pure love because I don't think it's possible; we're fallen human beings. We don't have that chance."
After Casi's passing, Julie had to reconcile her move to Tennessee with this devastating loss. "Is that why you brought me here, God?" she wondered, recognizing that the time they had together, however brief, was precious and irreplaceable. She asked Him, “where do I go now?” And the Holy Spirit said, “settle in”.
As the months passed, new dimensions of her calling in Tennessee began to emerge. "A lot of it's been with my nonprofit, Freedom Healthcare," Julie notes, mentioning the connections that developed. “My book, ‘Twas the Night Before Christ’s Birth, wouldn't have happened if I wasn't here," she reflects. "Everything was here. All the people that had a hand in the book. No one was anywhere else."
She sees how all the pieces came together in Tennessee—getting connected to the church through friends, meeting the right people at the right time. "Everything was here," she emphasizes with wonder. “There's so many of us that got brought here and we don't know why. It was a leap of faith for all of us."
This is the essence of walking by faith—stepping forward in obedience without seeing the full picture, trusting that the One who issues the call sees beyond what we can comprehend.
"I don't think it's finished," Julie says about understanding God's plan. "I think it just keeps going. I don't know what He's doing. I don't even know what's coming next."
The willingness to surrender has shaped Julie's entire approach to life, particularly in the face of difficult circumstances. "You have to have the faith to get through this," she says, "because you're either going to get through or these hard experiences are going to kill you. So you have to have that faith to keep going."
Throughout her life, Julie has experienced what she calls "seeing through the veil"—moments when the spiritual realm seems separated from our physical world by only the most delicate boundary. She knows these encounters aren't imagination but glimpses into reality beyond our limited perception.
"I just know that we can literally touch the other side," Julie explains. "I think it's that close."
A life-changing experience came after her mother's death. Growing up, Julie and her mother made a pact: whoever died first would come back to visit the other. When her mother passed away, Julie was hesitant about the promised visitation.
One night in Oregon, with her sister visiting and sleeping nearby, Julie mentally gave permission: "If you're going to come visit, Mom, I'm okay, 'cause somebody's here."
In the middle of the night, the phone rang. As Julie reached to answer it, brilliant white light poured from the receiver, filling the room and gathering in the corner above the bathroom. There, in the light, was her mother.
"Mom and Dad are important up here and they're letting me do this," her mother told her, referring to Julie's grandparents. She said a few other things but her message concluded with: "Don't ever have any regrets."
What struck Julie most was the quality of the light—"God's light" as she described it—"absolute pure love in every possible form." The experience transformed her perspective on death. "I am not afraid to die. I will never be afraid to die because I know exactly what that feels like, and I want it."
The next morning, Julie’s sister mentioned getting up in the middle of the night because "I thought it was daytime." The light Julie had seen was visible to her sister too, confirming this wasn't merely a dream or imagination.
The key to accessing these deeper dimensions, Julie believes, is slowing down enough to notice. "We're all moving too fast; we don't get to see it," she observes. “Our hurried pace blinds us to the spiritual realities constantly surrounding us. We need to be intentional in our day to see what God is doing right in front of us.”
This is the essence of living by faith: recognizing that our physical reality is just one layer of a much richer existence. Like Julie, we're all being invited into a story larger than what we can see—one that requires trust, obedience, and a willingness to let go of what we think we need to hold onto.
