July 17, 2022, column from the Amarillo Globe-News
Touring some of God's gifts around the world brings gratitude
By Mike Haynes
It started when I Googled “Beatle tour” in 2002, a search that took my wife and I on our first international trip. That guided visit to Liverpool and London still is the most fun Kathy and I have had outside the country.
The most meaningful trip has
been the visit to Israel in 2019 when we joined a church group to walk where
Jesus walked – and where he died outside the Jerusalem walls and rose from the
Mount of Olives.
We’ve been to a few countries now, and this summer’s tour of Scotland confirmed again that the good gifts God gives us come in lots of shapes and sizes, some of them human.
After we got off a train in Stirling, Scotland, we couldn’t see the historic castle there even though it sits high on a hill overlooking the city. We were on a street that felt like it was on a 45-degree angle, so we knew we were going on the right general direction – up – but as first-timers in the country, we still were a little lost.
Kathy asked a young man walking by if he could tell us how to get to Stirling Castle. In a Scottish accent, he said something like, “Aye, just follow me,” and he went out of his way to lead us through a couple of turns until we saw signs pointing to the thousand-year-old structure.
It was the same in Edinburgh, in Inverness and all through the Highlands. We decided that the Scots are friendly and helpful people.
The other gift we weren’t expecting was the overwhelming beauty of the countryside. Not that we thought Scotland would be ugly, but its green mountains, its long, blue lakes such as Loch Lomond and the famous Loch Ness, its yellow gorse shrubs – flowering brightly everywhere in June – its shores and rocky islands put it among the loveliest countries we’ve traveled through.
And animals: sheep everywhere plus cows, including a few Highland cattle, or “hairy coos.”
Add centuries-old castles – some in ruins and some renovated for tourists – to the landscape, and you can’t beat “Scotland the Brave.”
That’s the name of possibly the best-known bagpipe tune, along with “Amazing Grace,” and I truly believe good music also is a gift from God. At Dunrobin Castle, a young girl stood
outside the front gate playing the pipes for tourists. And at a ceilidh (a gathering, pronounced cay-lee) at the Old Smiddy Inn, a brother and sister duo, ages 14 and 12, entertained our group with bagpipe tunes they were preparing for a contest that week. Of course, all the pipers were outfitted in kilts.
We got to stand on the iconic bridge at the St. Andrews Old Course, where The Open (Americans call it the British Open) golf tournament is ending its 150th edition today.
We weren’t fans of everything – such as the infamous national dish of Scotland, haggis, made of sheep’s insides – but the delightful outweighed the yucky by far.
We visited cathedrals in Edinburgh (they say it, “Edinborough”) and Glasgow and a little chapel on one of the Orkney Islands built by Italian prisoners of war in 1943-44 from military huts, which brings to mind the murals done by Italian POWs at the church in the Texas Panhandle town of Umbarger.
Like much of Europe and now the United States, church attendance in Scotland has dropped the past few decades, according to the BBC. The primary denomination is the Church of Scotland, which is Presbyterian, but our bus tour included only two brief mentions of John Knox, considered the founder of that church.
We did see signs for the Free North Church and the Pentecostal Church in Inverness, but another old church building in that “capital of the Highlands” now is the Leake Secondhand Bookshop. A stately stone structure was identified as Stirling Baptist Church.
Attracting more attention from tourists than churches were the standing stones of Scotland, some older than England’s Stonehenge and much less crowded. On that Orkney Island, we visited the Ring of Brodgar, at least 4,000 years old, and the Standing Stones of Stennis, about 5,000 years old. Those stones have been especially popular since 2014, when the TV series “Outlander” featured a similar one that enabled the main character to travel in time from 1945 to 1743. Tourism in Scotland has skyrocketed as a result of the “Outlander” books and series.
We had read up on Scottish history before our trip, so we were appropriately appreciative of two sites that are important to Scots. The beautiful valley of Glencoe was the location of the horrible 1692 massacre of 38 MacDonalds by British government troops led by members of the Campbell clan.
And like visiting the Alamo, we were reverent as we walked on the Culloden battlefield near Inverness. The 1746 battle also is a key plot point in the “Outlander” books and TV show, which explains why Kathy volunteered to take a photo of two women with a memorial stone – and why someone took our picture there.
The government army wiped out the Highlanders, led by “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” at Culloden, and the aftermath was prohibition of Highland clan culture, including tartans, bagpipes, weapons and the local Gaelic language, for more than 100 years.
Learning about other cultures can be fun and richly rewarding, and I believe all that richness and fun is included in “every good gift and every perfect gift” that James says in the New Testament is “from above.”
Kathy and I don’t include haggis.
It started when I Googled “Beatle tour” in 2002, a search that took my wife and I on our first international trip. That guided visit to Liverpool and London still is the most fun Kathy and I have had outside the country.
We’ve been to a few countries now, and this summer’s tour of Scotland confirmed again that the good gifts God gives us come in lots of shapes and sizes, some of them human.
After we got off a train in Stirling, Scotland, we couldn’t see the historic castle there even though it sits high on a hill overlooking the city. We were on a street that felt like it was on a 45-degree angle, so we knew we were going on the right general direction – up – but as first-timers in the country, we still were a little lost.
Kathy asked a young man walking by if he could tell us how to get to Stirling Castle. In a Scottish accent, he said something like, “Aye, just follow me,” and he went out of his way to lead us through a couple of turns until we saw signs pointing to the thousand-year-old structure.
It was the same in Edinburgh, in Inverness and all through the Highlands. We decided that the Scots are friendly and helpful people.
The other gift we weren’t expecting was the overwhelming beauty of the countryside. Not that we thought Scotland would be ugly, but its green mountains, its long, blue lakes such as Loch Lomond and the famous Loch Ness, its yellow gorse shrubs – flowering brightly everywhere in June – its shores and rocky islands put it among the loveliest countries we’ve traveled through.
And animals: sheep everywhere plus cows, including a few Highland cattle, or “hairy coos.”
Add centuries-old castles – some in ruins and some renovated for tourists – to the landscape, and you can’t beat “Scotland the Brave.”
That’s the name of possibly the best-known bagpipe tune, along with “Amazing Grace,” and I truly believe good music also is a gift from God. At Dunrobin Castle, a young girl stood
outside the front gate playing the pipes for tourists. And at a ceilidh (a gathering, pronounced cay-lee) at the Old Smiddy Inn, a brother and sister duo, ages 14 and 12, entertained our group with bagpipe tunes they were preparing for a contest that week. Of course, all the pipers were outfitted in kilts.
We got to stand on the iconic bridge at the St. Andrews Old Course, where The Open (Americans call it the British Open) golf tournament is ending its 150th edition today.
We weren’t fans of everything – such as the infamous national dish of Scotland, haggis, made of sheep’s insides – but the delightful outweighed the yucky by far.
We visited cathedrals in Edinburgh (they say it, “Edinborough”) and Glasgow and a little chapel on one of the Orkney Islands built by Italian prisoners of war in 1943-44 from military huts, which brings to mind the murals done by Italian POWs at the church in the Texas Panhandle town of Umbarger.
Like much of Europe and now the United States, church attendance in Scotland has dropped the past few decades, according to the BBC. The primary denomination is the Church of Scotland, which is Presbyterian, but our bus tour included only two brief mentions of John Knox, considered the founder of that church.
We did see signs for the Free North Church and the Pentecostal Church in Inverness, but another old church building in that “capital of the Highlands” now is the Leake Secondhand Bookshop. A stately stone structure was identified as Stirling Baptist Church.
Attracting more attention from tourists than churches were the standing stones of Scotland, some older than England’s Stonehenge and much less crowded. On that Orkney Island, we visited the Ring of Brodgar, at least 4,000 years old, and the Standing Stones of Stennis, about 5,000 years old. Those stones have been especially popular since 2014, when the TV series “Outlander” featured a similar one that enabled the main character to travel in time from 1945 to 1743. Tourism in Scotland has skyrocketed as a result of the “Outlander” books and series.
We had read up on Scottish history before our trip, so we were appropriately appreciative of two sites that are important to Scots. The beautiful valley of Glencoe was the location of the horrible 1692 massacre of 38 MacDonalds by British government troops led by members of the Campbell clan.
And like visiting the Alamo, we were reverent as we walked on the Culloden battlefield near Inverness. The 1746 battle also is a key plot point in the “Outlander” books and TV show, which explains why Kathy volunteered to take a photo of two women with a memorial stone – and why someone took our picture there.
The government army wiped out the Highlanders, led by “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” at Culloden, and the aftermath was prohibition of Highland clan culture, including tartans, bagpipes, weapons and the local Gaelic language, for more than 100 years.
Learning about other cultures can be fun and richly rewarding, and I believe all that richness and fun is included in “every good gift and every perfect gift” that James says in the New Testament is “from above.”
Kathy and I don’t include haggis.
