Peace in Liddesdale, Cross at Milnholm

Despite a difficult Sunday, preaching twice with a cold and gravelly throat, I decided to honour a previous commitment to cross our northern border with a ministerial friend the day following. If there is one thing ‘harder’ than a virus or infection, it is pure, Scottish air. Despite a night of weird, hallucination-like dreams and my body alternating between sweats and shivers, I was feeling remarkably better on the morrow. I know people have been praying, and I am grateful, for the Lord responded. So through Roxburghshire, Selkirkshire and Peeblesshire, right along the Tweed Valley we went, till we came to Midlothian. I often forget just how beautiful those southern counties are, despite being overshadowed by their more famous, northerly neighbours.

While enjoying the countryside around Newcastleton in Liddesdale in the said county of Roxburghshire, a strange, misshapen cross we espied just above the roadside. It is called Milnholm Cross, and is thought to have been erected in remembrance of an Armstrong laird who was murdered by a rival in about 1320. Despite the attractiveness of the rolling hills and verdant woodlands, this was a place once known for lawlessness and brutality. And neither, as an Englishman, can I snootily dismiss such bloody rivalries, seeing as my own family I can trace back to Elliots, Armstrongs and Hetheringtons of the Borders, who violently and tediously spent the best part of 500 years massacring each other.

If this planet has been wrecked and compromised, it is we who are to blame. Ask not “Why does God allow suffering?”, but rather “Why does God allow us to continue existing?” when we are the cause of so much ill: ecological vandalism, moral delinquency, social stupidity, governmental inadequacy. Well might we erect misshapen crosses for our murders and statues to our wars. One day, this world will be liberated of human mismanagement and misrule; Christ shall come again, to dispense justice to the wronged and to remove all those unredeemed, unrestrained and unrepentant sinful natures. Liddesdale might be more peaceful today than it was 500 years ago, but the best is still to come.