Too old to pioneer? Part 2
Having arrived in Scotland (see my previous blog, ‘Too old to pioneer?’) my thoughts turned to Abraham and the journey he took to the Promised Land. I could see similarities with our journey. His was not a single move from Ur to the Promised Land, because en route he settled in Haran for some time. In our case, the first leg of the journey was from Romford to the Yorkshire Dales. Julie and I, and the friends who travelled north with us, fell in love with the Dales and had no intention of moving on again.
In my last article I cited Covid and our inability to meet together as the primary reason for setting out for Scotland, but I didn’t fully share how the Lord’s hand had been at work in that decision in a specific and remarkable way. So I’ll do that now.
Whilst in the Dales, I discovered that I may have ‘Reiver’ ancestry. Reivers were warring clans on both sides of the Scottish/English border back in the 14th to 16th centuries. They murdered, raped and stole cattle, so much so that in 1525 the Bishop of Glasgow issued a written curse against them and their offspring. You can read the curse on the Cursing Stone near Carlisle Castle. You can also tramp across the surnames etched in the path of the major Reiver clans including ‘Taylor’ and ‘Tailor’. These two clans were located in Cumbria and Northumberland.
On hearing that people were finding release through prayer after breaking the curse off of their families, Julie and I visited a Christian couple with Reiver history to pray into ours. We met in the chapel of Rose Castle, the former home of the Bishop of Carlisle, and as we prayed we were given a prophetic word that we would ‘take flight in a hot air balloon and resettle in Rheged’. We later discovered that Rheged was an ancient kingdom covering Cumbria and some parts of south-west Scotland.
This was the first indication we had that the Lord intended to move us on from the Dales - the timing of which was eventually determined by the arrival of Covid! We’re not told why Abraham stopped at Haran, but we do know that whilst there he accumulated considerable possessions and it seems that the death of his father was the key event that spurred him to move again.
When we made the decision to move however, it was Covid and not the prophecy concerning Rheged that was uppermost in our minds. And so it was that as we were about to sign the contract on a property in Northumberland, the Lord stepped in and closed the door. It was only later when we arrived in Canonbie, in what was once ancient Rheged and steeped in Reiver history, that we began to realise that the Lord had orchestrated the eventual location to coincide with the word he’d given to us!
A short time after arriving in Canonbie the Lord also gave me a dream in which a man and his wife were standing on our land telling me that this was their land. Even though I explained that I’d bought the land legally and asked them to leave, my heart was saddened when he told me that the land had been stolen from them. On waking I realised that he was referring to the Reiver period when the land was taken from them. The dream strengthened our conviction that I did indeed have Reiver ancestry. Since we’re surrounded by numerous families with a Reiver past, we’ve begun to wonder if the Lord brought us to Canonbie to right an ancient wrong in some way. But where to start?
The Bible affirms that the sins of idolatry, bloodshed, sexual immorality and broken covenants spiritually pollute the land. And to date we’ve been able to identify with and repent of the past sins of our Reiver family and to call for the healing of the land, much like Nehemiah, who identified with the sins of his Jewish forefathers and cried out to the Lord for forgiveness.
The other thing we discovered on arriving in Canonbie was that it was the site of a medieval Augustinian Priory and so whilst evil had been sown into the land by the Reivers, so too had Christian love and service, since monasteries provided teaching, refuge, shelter and places for Christians to gather together with purpose. And so the Lord also spoke to us about sowing spiritual fruit back into the land, the result of which was the opening of Canonbie Christian Retreat Centre!
Posted by Paul Taylor
