No Lasting City: Life Is About to Change for the McAlpines

Life Is About to Change

The last year has been a fairly tumultuous one for me.  A lot has changed. And today another step for me – and our family – that marks the end of a season and the start of another.

Having lost a job in August last year – a job I’d really only just started – I found myself having to fulfil all of the speaking commitments around Australia that I had garnered in that role, only I had to do it on my own without the administrative support of the organisation I had been working for.

That it had ended poorly was one thing, but to then have to pick up the pieces and try to patch together a “gig economy” which entailed a lot of interstate travel to earn enough to survive, was probably the toughest thing of all. My whole life the past year has been criss-crossing Australia. It’s been exhausting.

That means a lot of flights. A lot. I boarded yet another plane one time last year and the stewardess looked up and said “You again!”  I think she meant it kindly, but roll those words around in your mind and come up with the ways it may have been intended!

But life simply meant long stretches of time away from home, weeks on end (three months most recently), and a sense that we couldn’t keep that up.  If you know anything about Australia, the population base is on the eastern seaboard.  I live on the western seaboard. Most of my work ends up being on the east.

Australia is big. You probably know that. Very big. And it feels huge when you fly over it dozens of times in a year.  I find the Australian landscape fascinating.  While many people will read or watch media on a flight, so often across Australia I put on my headphones with some chill music and just watch.

Watch the landscape below. One of the blessings of so many flights is that Platinum status gets you your preferred seat for free (for me on a regular flight that means exit row 14, seat A, next to the window).

And I watch. I watch the vast swathes of landscape – supposedly empty, but not completely – pass underneath me. As you fly from Sydney and then over Victoria and then on to South Australia, the greens become lighter before shifting to brownish reds. If you follow the coast there are great, sweeping inlets and then a long coastline of unbroken sand and water.

And then you come to Western Australia, and it is huge. I often watch amazed from 37,000 feet, following the straight, long road east to west, punctuated occasionally by a slim line of road heading to the north. And you try to follow that road to its end, but it simply disappears into the northern distance. Australia is vast.

So what is changing? Today my wife Jill and my son Declan are getting on a plane and moving across the country to join me in Sydney. And that is joyful. It will mean less time apart. It will mean me coming home to my family and life together rather than being away from each other weeks on end.

It will mean being in church together far more frequently. That’s been a hard thing the last year and a half – the little amount of time Jill and I have sat next to each other in church.  We love being in church together and sitting together (and that’s been great since not being in full time pastoral ministry).

We’ve done ministry life together for so many decades that we hadn’t figured out what it might look like to not be involved in church-based pastoral ministry. Until we weren’t. It’s been discombobulating actually.

In the past year we haven’t had the chance to be in church together all that often. And that has sucked.

We hold hands in church. All the time apparently. Our pastor in Perth said it was encouraging for younger folk to see that. An older couple just wanting to be with each other and, and, well, okay, a slight PDA (public display of affection). I’m not sitting rubbing her back!

And of course we’re looking forward to going to an encouraging, gospel-centred church community somewhere in this city. And that’s one huge difference between Perth and Sydney. In Perth the evangelical dots are smaller and further apart. In Sydney it often feels like “take your pick”. Which of course, comes with its own set of problems.

Someone Is Not Coming With Us

For all the thrill of the move, there are some downsides. We have ageing parents whom we love, and assorted brothers and sisters-in-law in Perth and we are leaving them.

But honestly the most painful leave is that our daughter – at 23 years of age – is not coming with us. I suppose all parents see that coming. She is kinda ready to launch into her own life, has just finished her degree and works part-time for a church. And has a serious boyfriend. Life for her is 4000km away in Perth.

But when her young man posted a lovely photo of her on his Insta yesterday, boy did my heart hurt!  I couldn’t stop looking at that photo and trying to countenance the fact she will be on the other side of the country. I know, I know, lots of people do it. But we’ve been such a tight four-person unit for so long!

People ask us sometimes how Sophie turned out so well.  She’s godly and kind and funny and passionate about life. In light of that, the answer I give them  is “Benign neglect!”.

Now I’m only being half-funny. As a church planter and pastor with some fairly intense church experiences, I often wondered how the “P-K” thing would turn out. Thanks to God, for both my children, quite well!  We never imposed more on them than would be expected of other kids in church, and in turn they never felt it. That’s partly down to how much so many of our church experiences felt like extended family.

And even the tough stuff in church, they have navigated well. Jill and I are grateful to God for it. But boy, are we going to miss Sophie!

It Will Be Fun

It’s not going to be terrible though!  Let me just say that. Jill and I are excited about the move and we’ve rented a place (albeit at eyewatering Sydney prices) in a great suburb with lots to do and access to the city. And we’ve got a great work-from-home set up for both of us. Our son is doing school online to finish off his secondary education.

And that’s how we like it. We just like being together all of the time. And the last year has not been like that. So it feels like the trade-off is worth it. Sydney is my favourite city. You might have gathered that if you follow me on socials. Especially as I take a photograph like this every time I am there.

The Sydney Opera House is my favourite building in the world. And my favourite place to run. There’s something about the natural landscape of Sydney and the manner in which it has been built into that works. When you run around the Opera House in the morning, when you’re at the back end of it, things go quiet.

For being so close to the city at that point, the noise drops off and you can’t see the city from there. You can look out the harbour in the direction of the ocean and it’s kinda still. I like that aspect of the city.

And of course for me, a lot of my work will be there. And if you are on the east coast of Australia and you want to book me to speak, then you can do that from my website too.  Funnily enough – or understandably enough – international travel is less and less appealing to me. It’s been hard enough getting onto so many cross-country flights, never mind a ten or fifteen hour effort.

A Place I Will Show You

The biggest thing though is that just at an age when you feel it might be a bit more settled, things change up. mid-to-late-fifties is supposed to be a time of consolidation (whatever that means), but here we are changing it up. This is where trusting in the sovereignty of God comes in.

While I’ve been a bit of a risk taker in work settings, and while one of my coaches said to me that I thrive in the chaos, the one stable thing that I have always loved is my home and home life.  For a few years there – quite a few – when doing small church settings and church plants, our home was the centre of a lot of church.

As we’ve gotten older, and as I’ve worked in either bigger or more distant settings, home became a haven. An ordered, quiet place. And for those of you who know my design tastes, a place of modernist order. Every time I mow the lawn at my house I post a picture like this on my socials with the words “The Search For Order” on it:

Everyone puts a laugh emoji or points out a blade of grass that is out of order. But I love order. I love a quiet and tidy house and especially a quiet and tidy study. But the term “the search for order” is the title of a theological book by William Dumbrell about eschatology. About the need for something to form order out of chaos.

My post is a cheeky reminder that we DO search for order. We do want things to be in place. We do want to know what is going on and how to control things. And – and this is crucial – that’s not what life is like. Any search for order outside the bounds of trusting God’s sovereign rule, is bound to lead to bad stuff.

For me, moving to Sydney feels chaotic and expensive and life churning, but we worship a God who so often – and most memorably with Abram – calls us to go where He WILL show us.  So we find ourselves in Sydney – 4000km away from our natural ordered life – trusting in God’s goodness and grace.

And of course I have friends who have done the same thing. My daughter’s boyfriend’s parents – after a life in church ministry in Australia – now minister in sub-Saharan Africa. My friend from Perth Mark and his wife shifted after almost three decades to Melbourne (Sydney’s chief rival), to do ministry in another church there. And God is working in their lives in amazing ways.

We go to a place he WILL show us. Cos that’s the life of faith right?

No Lasting City

All of which reminds us that here we have “no lasting city” (Hebrews 13:14-16). That does not mean that we don’t love the cities we are in, and that they are not full of good things and meaning. But it does take away the need to live exactly where I want when I want and with whom I want.

For all of the changes we are making, the biggest change in our lives is yet to come, when that “search for order” ushers in the city that we are longing for, the city of God.  And the longing is not simply for order, or for life in a place that works brilliantly, or for a reuniting with family and the Christian community, but for the God who makes that city the place it is.

God goes with us in every city we travel to across this world, but that city – the renewed creation which is described in Revelation as a garden-city? Well that will be the culmination of everything we have longed for in every city we go to. God himself. It would be terrible to arrive in the new creation city and God not to be there. It wouldn’t be heaven.

All of which means, despite the upheaval of a cross country move – we can hold lightly and confidently to the things of this age. And that is my hope and prayer for us in this next stage of life.

Thanks for all your support, words of encouragement and prayer over the years I have been writing this blog. I’m looking forward to where it all goes from here.