Just Moved, Celina Record

Prosper group helps women acclimate to new home Lisa Ferguson, lferguson@starlocalmedia.com Jan 29, 2016 Jesse Prentiss knows all too well how it feels to be the new girl in town. In the 16 years since she married her corporate-executive husband, Jared, the couple and their two young children have moved seven times, mostly shuttling between cities in Michigan and Ohio. Last spring, the family boxed up their belongings once again and headed south to Texas, where they settled in Prosper. Not long after arriving, Prentiss founded a chapter of Moving On After Moving In, a women’s study group offered in churches, military installations, private homes and other locations around the world. Prentiss calls the chapter Just Moved Prosper, Texas, although membership is open to residents of all neighboring cities. On Tuesday, she will launch a Moving On study session at Ground Up Coffee in Celina. The group will meet weekly through Apr. 26. She hosted a similar study group last fall, when she and a small group of women discussed the personal challenges they’ve faced since moving to Texas. Relocating is “such a traumatic experience,” Prentiss explained. “It’s an identity crisis. It can be a severe loss of things that you loved, and culture shock. There’s loneliness and bitterness if your husband moves on to his job and you’re left to unpack things. So for women, it’s definitely a physical and emotional strain, and it’s good to (process it) in the community versus trying to be an island.” The 12-week study is based on the book “After the Boxes Are Unpacked: Moving On After Moving In” by Susan Miller (Focus on the Family, 1998), who founded the international nonprofit Just Moved Ministry. According to its website, the organization supports “the spiritual growth and emotional well-being of women who are uprooted by a move or any life change.” Prentiss said she recognized a need for a chapter because of the area’s “booming” population. “Every other person you’re meeting has been here less than two years.” The local chapter is similar to one she co-led in 2011 after moving to Stow, Ohio. “That was the move that broke me,” Prentiss recalled. “I had gotten my identity probably a little too wrapped up in what I did versus who I was, and when I moved, I wasn’t those things anymore. I wasn’t the neighbor that everyone loved. I wasn’t the Bible study teacher … and nobody knew me.” Prentiss read a copy of Miller’s book, which someone had given to her before a move years earlier. “It helped me kind of refocus my identity,” she explained. Through the study group, “I saw the benefit of having some sisters that you could walk through a difficult period with,” she said. “Then everybody kind of heals and moves forward in their own lives, but during those times, you can really lean on each other.” Despite being an experienced mover, so to speak, relocating to Prosper “was still hard,” she said. “I got here and saw kind of the loneliness and felt it again for myself as I’m making conversation with total strangers in the grocery store just to talk to somebody. I felt like (the group) needed to happen here, too.” Although the book’s message is delivered through a “Christian lens,” Prentiss said followers of all religions – or none at all – are welcome to attend Just Moved Prosper meetings. “I think the unity is the moving process and how to process that together, versus the unity is the religious factor.” The book serves primarily as a “launching point” for discussions during meetings, she explained. Conversations have covered such topics as the toll that moving can take on a marriage: “Are we growing closer together because it’s just the two of us, or is there a root of bitterness that’s taking hold because he’s gone all the time and you’ve got to run the kids here and there, but you don’t even know how to get here and there? “You can come (to the study) because you’re experiencing these things, even without reading the chapter that week, but it gives you another layer and time for personal reflection if you follow the book,” she said. Friendships have formed as result of the local group, Prentiss said. Some of the women have scheduled