Love All

Well, the grass court dust is beginning to settle after Andy Murray’s well-deserved win at Wimbledon on Sunday. Seventy-seven years of the host country not producing a champion has finally been broken, and hopefully British tennis stars will be free to win (or lose) without being defeated by the heavy burden of expectation and the hopes of a nation they have carried.

I’ve been thinking about Andy Murray, who comes from Dunblane in Scotland. Dunblane, where a madman walked into the primary school seventeen years ago, went to the gym and coolly shot and killed sixteen Primary 1 children, aged 5 and 6, and their teacher before killing himself. As the shootings commenced, Murray was a child in a slightly older class, in the hall heading to the gym.

It was a horrific experience which obviously profoundly still affects him, as evidenced in a recent interview in which he broke down, voicing his desire to make Dunblane proud after years of being the place equated with one of the worst mass murders in British history. 

Had he been in the gym that day, at the time the gunman entered and began the shooting spree, and had he been killed, the UK would still be waiting for its tennis star to pick up the championship at Wimbledon. His talents would have never been known, never been developed, never been celebrated.

So what about those wee kids who were in the gym that awful day? What has the world missed out on because they died? What gifts did they have to offer to make this a better world, gifts which were never explored, never developed? What an incalculable loss.

To the credit of the UK, it took only that one schoolroom massacre for the political resolve to develop to ban the private ownership of handguns, and since then there have been no further attacks on schools. 

Solomon wrote a lot of proverbs over two thousand years ago, extolling the virtues of wisdom. It was a wise move to ban handguns in the UK, and may have saved dozens of lives. We’ll never know, thankfully. 

Solomon’s advice to his son was to seek the source of wisdom, who is God. ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,’ he wrote, ‘and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.’ A modern paraphrase of that verse says ‘Skilled living gets its start in the Fear-of-God, insight into life from knowing a Holy God.’ 

Knowledge of the Holy One. Knowing a Holy God. 

Jesus stood in front of Pilate, who asked him ‘what is truth?’ Truth stood before him but Pilate didn’t recognise him. He didn’t know the Holy One.

The truth was and still is this: that God loves the world and every individual so much that he was willing to come down as a man and hang on a cross and die, so that people could find their way into the Kingdom of a Holy God and live there forever.

That is truth. That is love. Not to seek to know Him – that is real foolishness.