My New Motto: “Go Scared”

Going Scared

My twin brother and I remember the day we left Northern Ireland. We were not quite six years old. We took a boat over to London, and from there a flight to the moon.

Well, not the moon exactly, but that’s what it felt like going to the other side of the world. Perth felt like the moon. And was just as sandy.

The abiding memory was my mother sobbing and sobbing in the arms of her own mother (a woman who was not that much of a mother to her). So to the moon it would be!  My father standing stoic in his Ulster way, waiting for the tears to settle (they never did).

I’m a migrant and my wife is a migrant (from South Africa) and it takes a few generations for your family to be encrusted in a place. To become barnacled enough that it feels you have more than a mere tenuous connection. Mum only recently stopped calling Northern Ireland “home”. She’s eighty next month. She was 29 when we left.

Which is perhaps why the move we made this past weekend (my wife and son and I) to live in Sydney for the foreseeable future, feels like a scary move.  It might dredge up those latent feelings of displacement that are ingrained in so many migrants.

Now, granted, I have criss-crossed Australia the past couple of years like nobody’s business. You know you travel too much when the air hostess, upon greeting you as you board, says “You again!”  Now there are a couple of tones you can say those words. I like to think there was an upward inflection.

But yes, me again! Australia is huge. Often I would sit and look out the window (extra legroom row, window seat, either 4A or 14A) and just watch the vast, toffee-brown landscape of Australia’s heartland hurtle underneath. And imagine doing the travel without a hurtle. Hours would be weeks.

But there’s been a cost.  And for the work I do, staying in Western Australia has just proven a bit difficult. We’ve decided to move to Sydney. Though not our daughter. That’s been hard. A bit of a wrench. Though not as much as in the past. The technology of aircraft and the technology of WhatsApp and FaceTime make life a little easier.

But I still felt scared – and do a little even now. It’s a big move.

Another Northern Irish pastor friend of mine, also Steve, when I mentioned that I felt scared with the thought of moving said “Go scared!”   Gee, I wish I’d said that. Then again I listen to Steve say a lot of things and wish I’d said them!

And when it comes to “Go scared”, he’s got form. He and his young family have moved across the globe and now call Perth home in a way that’s different to how people born and bred in Perth call Perth home. If you know you know.

But he is right. Jill and I have felt that there was wisdom – and godly wisdom at that – in moving to Sydney. Sure it is an adventure (and it helps to be living close to the city), but in light of how much time we’ve spent apart the last few years it felt wise.

And our son Declan was keen too. I realise too that he’s around the age that I was when my dad was no longer around, and I want to be there. Be “here”.

And so we go scared.

And that’s not the same as going terrified, or horrified or whatever. What my friend Steve meant was that God wouldn’t be lining up every duck in a row, every decision sorted or even every friendship ready and waiting. It certainly didn’t mean that we wouldn’t have hardships.

What Steve meant is this: Go scared” is a biblical pattern for God’s people. It starts right out there in Genesis 12 when Abram is called to leave all he knows and follow a God who has basically just introduced himself for the first time with “Go!”

And that’s not to say that we are Abraham and commencing a salvation journey for the nations. But it is to say that we should not worry about our worry. If we trust in a sovereign God then going scared means that whatever happens he has our best interests at heart.

Whatever happens.

Eighteen years ago next month Jill and I – and Sophie our only child at the time – travelled to the UK to explore church planting with The Crowded House network of churches. To say that it was a delicious and difficult experience at one and the same time would be an understatement.

The subsequent fall-out over the next few years that saw us burned badly by it, and The Crowded House eventually fall because of a series of allegations against it, were complex and difficult times.

Should we have gone to the UK? It was pretty horrendous in the end. Yet we went believing God had called us to go. And we still believe that. In spite of the pain it caused, God did many good things in our lives there. God shaped us through the pain of it. God gave us some friendships that will last to the final day.

And, ironically, we didn’t go scared. We went excited.

But that was eighteen years ago. Here I am at 57, and the older one becomes, the more settled one becomes. Just being around my stuff, my life, my neighbourhood, all of that is the fine sand of life that makes life a little easier.

And today? In Sydney? It’s boxes being unpacked. It’s finding out that our pans won’t work on the induction stove. It’s getting Uber eats late at night (first time I’ve ever done Uber eats and the guilt made the food taste like ash in my mouth!).

But as Jill and I discussed: Imagine going scared when you are already really scared. Imagine a DV wife fleeing with her kids and a couple of suitcases, and a teddy bear. Nothing else. Imagine a refugee fleeing a war-torn country. That’s going scared at a whole new level.

First world “go scared” is just a little different.

Yet it’s still an upheaval. And working for myself – and Jill running her own practice – means it’s on you. On you – that is – if the God of the universe were not in control.

It helps too, to think of Abraham’s descendent, Joseph. He ends up in Egypt not of his own volition. He goes scared. He ends up in charge of the country’s food program and averting a famine. He ends up in charge of the brothers who wished him dead, and helping his whole family move to Egypt and safety.  He ends up starting an Egyptian relocation program that will result in the slavery of his people before their eventual release through the works of God via Moses.

So was it a good plan? Or was it a bad plan? Neither, it was a God plan.  The variables of the situation did not counter the fact that God has ordained that those things should be. The up and down results did not mean that there was not godly wisdom in the mix of it all.

After all, this is the God who, when humans meant something for evil, God can turn it around for good. That’s the point of the Joseph narrative (Genesis 50:20-21). And that’s the ultimate point of all of the Bible story as we see when the apostles are proclaiming the risen Christ who is Jesus:

…for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel,  to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. (Acts 4:27-28)

In the end that is going to have to be enough for us. If God can turn around that situation, he can cope with any variable in life.

Which means that Sydney might work out spectacularly for us. Or it might not.  Or, more likely, as is the case in our everyday lives, in which we as a family are just another family of Christians eking our way out in this world, and seeking God’s will for our lives, it will be a mix.

Eking and seeking. Seems to sum it up for us as pilgrims in this age.

And it probably helps my mindset that we used the removals company Grace to transport our belongings across the country.  Every box I unpack this week has grace written all over it!

So I might make “Go Scared” my new motto. Go scared and in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. And that’s enough!