In Oklahoma, we are attempting to come to grips with the senseless murder of Christopher Lane, an East Central University baseball player from Australia.  Lane was out jogging this week, when three teenage men drove up behind him and allegedly shot him in the back.  When questioned by authorities why they had committed such a random act, one of the young men responded, “We were bored.”

This reasoning has sent a chill up-and-down the spines of everyone in our state.  How can boredom be an excuse for committing any sort of crime, especially an act as egregious as murder?  Why did these teens think their boredom was somehow reason enough to shoot a young man in the back who was just out taking a jog in the neighborhood?  It has left us all pondering, “What has come of life?”

When God created life in humans, he did so by using his own image (Genesis 1:27).  Each of us bear that image on our physical and spiritual beings.  We are called “like” creatures of our divine master, as though we were a reflection of him in the water.  What this means is that we are made in his likeness with  God’s presence infused within us.  In the second creation account of Genesis 2, we even witness God breathing his soul into our bodies.  Life is sacred because God himself not only created it, but gave it to us as a manifestation of himself.

Thus, when we choose to regard life as something cheap and to take the life of another, we must understand that we are not only committing a crime against someone else, but we are violating the very presence of God.  We are attacking his image and his presence, thus attempting to circumvent him as God.  We are not God and do not hold the authority to bring death to another.

What has come of life?  Sadly, it continues to be seen as something cheap.  It continues to be understood as something another can take, as though it were a penny laying on the ground.  Life is sacred because God has given it and blessed it with his image.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the Lane family, his teammates, his friends, and his fellow Aussies, as they mourn the loss of a bearer of God’s image.