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.

Good Strife / Bad Strife

While I ironed the sheets, I watched a program about Greece. There were a few surprises the presenter wanted to relay. For instance, the pure white Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens wasn’t pure white a couple of thousand years ago, but was painted in vibrant colours. Egyptian Blue. Other colours made from stones near and far. 

Olympia, the original venue for the Olympic Games, was a place of pilgrimage, as the games were part of a religious festival held every four years. The Games were nothing like our resurrected version of the Olympics, because in ancient Greece the striving to win was sometimes so fierce that it culminated in severe injury – loss of an eye, for instance – or even death. That was all part of it, and the ancient Greeks thought it was ok.

They termed such athletic competitions as an example of ‘good strife’. People contended with everything they had, but the striving was thought to be healthy and even virtuous. ‘Bad strife’ I suppose was treachery in war.

The writer to the Hebrews in the Bible compares the Christian life with a race: “...throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus...” (Hebrews 12:1 & 2)

St Paul, too, writes to the church in Corinth in similar vein: “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Therefore I do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air.” (1 Corinthians 9:24-26)

Good strife. 

The Christian life isn’t easy. It’s rich, and there’s no other life I would want to live. But when hard things happen, things which may make sense eternally but sure don’t on our own level, it can be a challenge to keep running with perseverance. 

Things happen every day that break people’s hearts, that break people’s lives. We hear about bad strife in the news. We see it in our communities. We experience it in our homes.

Something happened this week within my circle of friends. An untimely, tragic death. Inexplicable. Apparently meaningless. 

It could make us wobble. It could distract us from the race. It could divert attention from Jesus.

But I find that when the bad things happen, I just want to be like one of our cats, who always looks for a place to tuck herself into, to make herself invisible, to make herself safe. And that place is always under the wings of Jesus, tucked in, tearful perhaps but trusting that though I don’t get it, He does. 

Bad strife. Good strife. One day heaven will totally invade earth, and it’ll all be good. 

Meanwhile, we need to keep our eyes on the prize, on Jesus, and keep running, even staggering, forward. Or at least, curling up in his protective embrace until we’ve recovered enough to rejoin the race.

God bless you.

Lightning strikes

As I turned to walk back with Dusty this afternoon, I noticed what they call the television ‘mast’ at Durris, a spike stretching into the sky across the Dee Valley from us which transmits the television signals. 

Thirty years ago a lightning strike took out the Durris mast, and it took three months to restore tv reception to the area. With two small children at the time, I found it a fun time of playing more board games and freeing the children from the tyranny of the box.

That Durris mast looked so vulnerable today. And it made me think.

When we put our spiritual aerials up, we make ourselves vulnerable. Vulnerable to the mockery of the world. Just yesterday I heard a four-minute monologue by an atheist who equated religion with ignorance. Basically he asserted that you have to be stupid to believe in God.

It also makes us vulnerable to attack from forces which resist God. Unseen forces. The enemy of Christians – the devil.

Peter warns that the devil prowls around looking for someone to devour. Evil is real, and his aim is to destroy faith in a God who loves his creatures so much that he died to save them. 

So if you’ve put your spiritual antennae up, however tentatively, don’t be surprised when you get interference - when your mind is assailed with doubts, or when others tease or ridicule you. 

Don’t be surprised; be ready. Put on the armour of God mentioned in Ephesians 6. Stand in the strength of Jesus.

Don’t let a lightning strike take out your connection to God. 

Oh, and in case you think I'd forgotten: Happy 4th of July!

Unconditional love - and Tennis

It’s Wimbledon Fortnight here in the UK – a two week stretch in June/July which I always enjoy. Grass court tennis championship which occasions a riot of patriotic fervour. 

It’s been forever since the UK has produced a Wimbledon Champion, either male or female, and so year on year the pressure mounts on the top-seeded British player. 

For a few years it was Tim Henman, and so many people wanted to see him play that they opened up a section outside of the tournament grounds and erected a viewing screen, so that folk could cluster on ‘Henman Hill’ and watch their favourite play. He got close a few times but, as my dad would have said, no cigar.

Now of course it is the Scottish player Andy Murray who is in with a good chance to sweep to victory. Henman Hill is Murray Mount. Britain loves him ... because he’s winning. 

That’s human nature. We love to love a winner. 

It’s not God’s nature, though. He loves unconditionally: winning or losing, God loves you. It’s  incredible how vulnerable he is prepared to be because of his pure and true love for humanity.

All he asks, is that we love him back, with that same vulnerability, that same unconditional love.

It’s a big ask. I know I’m not alone when I confess that sometimes, when things are going badly, I’ve stood in the field and shaken my fist at the sky. ‘Give us a break,’ I probably moaned. My imperfect love is kind of linked with performance.

Not God’s.

A big reason to be grateful.

Parental Control

I just noticed an icon on my laptop called Parental Control. Hmm. That elusive aspiration. 

I remember those days when toddlers begin to test their independence, when behaviour became a battle of wills which I did not always win. One child, who shall remain nameless, once started kicking me in the shins when he’d had enough of a grown-ups meeting. Soothing words, scolding words, bribery, threats – nothing worked and we had to leave before he broke my legs.

I remember those days when teens really began pushing the boundaries. Parental Control? We may have tried to exert it, but our power was met with an equal and opposite force. 

My sympathies are with today’s parents, who have to establish some sort of Parental Control over internet use and telly viewing, because there is such a lot of rubbish out there that you don’t want influencing your young person’s mind. 

But not all parents seek to control. I’ve been reading a book suggesting a new theory for raising kids – a theory which I’ve watched a young family implement so far to good effect. It embraces the idea of empowering children from an early age by teaching them that they have choices, but that every choice has a consequence of some kind, be it for good or for bad. 

So, if a child’s shrieks reach ear-splitting levels, the dad might call for a pause and then tell the child that his choice to scream has robbed his dad of peace by giving him a headache and hurting his ears. I haven’t seen what the next step would be if the kid went on shrieking. What I saw was the awakening of the kid’s compassion and understanding and his choosing to stop his screaming. 

The parents are eager to reinforce their children’s understanding that they have power, and they have choices of how to use that power. So far it seems to be enabling these tiny kids to exercise compassion and understanding, and to make good choices when the issue is presented to them.

It’s a Biblical pattern, of course. God put his children, Adam and Eve, in a garden. Everything in it was beautiful and good, and there were very few rules. But there was one rule, and as long as they resisted breaking it, the garden remained a heavenly place in which to live. Good food, good company, stimulating conversation during long walks with the Almighty God. 

But on that fateful day when first Eve, then Adam, made a bad choice, the consequences were inevitable and they were cataclysmic, not just for those two people but for the whole world. God knew that would happen. He had a plan from the beginning, of how to restore things. But in order to succeed, someone needed to pay the price for that first bad choice, and all the ensuing wrong choices that we all make. Jesus stepped up and volunteered to take the rap for us.

Not so different from what most loving parents would do for their kids, then. Even though a kid has made a bad choice, a loving parent would rather pay the price himself than have the kid live with the consequences.

God the Father still gives us a choice. We can choose to believe in and love Jesus, and enjoy a higher quality of life starting from right now and extending on into forever, or we can choose to turn our back on him. 

It’s our choice. We have the power to choose right, or not. God doesn’t have a Parental Control app or icon. All he has is everlasting love.