Sometimes, life has a way of giving you interesting perspectives. Yesterday, a police officer was killed here in Colorado Springs. What makes this impactful for me isn’t that I know the officer, but that I know the area he was murdered in. In fact, I go by it nearly every day on the way to work, and had been right by that location less than five hours before the officer was killed there.
Anyway, we found out yesterday that there had been a shooting because we got emails at work notifying us that several schools had been locked-down (the emails were for parents who might have kids in one of the schools affected by the lock-down). There weren’t any details at that time about the status of the officer, but when I went home I saw that the entire street was blocked off where the shooting had happened, and there were several police markers around the bus stop and bus bench, along with crime scene detectives there nearly six hours after the shooting. Then, this morning, coming in I noticed that someone had left flowers and painted a cross on the bus bench, and that’s when I figured the officer had died (which was then confirmed by my reading the headlines as I walked by the newspaper vending machines).
Needless to say, having something like that occur in a place you are familiar with does make you ponder life. Not only is it an illustration of how fragile life is, but it also is a sobering reminder that any moment we can suddenly be talking with our Maker. It also makes you wonder, if you knew that today was your last day on Earth would you live differently than you are now? And if so, whether good or bad, why aren’t you living that way now?
Perhaps thinking about our every day lives should be something we do more often.
