Heart of Murder

There’s a lot of killing going on. Our schools have had to recognize this fact because it’s not just the adults doing it anymore. Our children are not even safe in school. Recently, Larry King was killed and by every report I read—it was because he was gay. But is this the real reason? Can anyone say that the murderer would not have become a murderer anyway? Did the murderer really murder because of hatred against homosexuals or did he murder because of his own dark and twisted mind?
Of course, I cannot say unequivocally that the 17-year old who murdered Larry King would have definitely become a murderer anyway but I believe there is a good chance. Why? I believe that the murderer had a heart full of hate and that his hate had to be directed at someone sooner or later. His hate was not something that grew in his heart because of anti-homosexual slurs he had heard. Larry King was someone he chose to latch his hate-filled heart onto.
Women and girls are murdered every day by ex-boyfriends, lovers and husbands at an alarmingly high rate. Sure, women are portrayed as sex objects and not respected by some. Sure, women have been degraded. But the degradation is not what caused the hate. Degradation and murder are the results of hate.
Hate has roots that go deep. Sometimes hate starts when a child lives in a household where he is constantly an object of abuse. His heart becomes a breeding ground for hate. Like a garden where seeds are nurtured by the sun and rain, the seeds of violence and abuse are planted in a person’s heart and nurtured by how is raised, his environment and the choices and lifestyle he makes as he grows.
As he grows, he learns to focus the hate he has in his heart. He calls other children names because he is called names. He bullies others because he is bullied. Or his hate grows behind the façade of silence where his deadly intentions smolder waiting to erupt like a volcano.
It is a terrible, horrible thing that Larry King was murdered but he was not murdered because he was a homosexual. He was murdered because the person who held the gun sought someone on whom to focus his hate. It could just as well have been a girlfriend who jilted him—in fact, statistics show that much more often to be the case.
I believe that people like Ellen Degeneres and others who want this killing to stop have wonderful intentions. I want the murder of homosexuals to stop too. I also want the murder of women by angry men to stop and the murder of Christians in countries where to proclaim Christ means risking your life, to stop too. I do not focus on any type of murder as being more horrendous than the other because it suits my agenda, though I do have one.
As long as children are taught that they are worthless by the neglect and abuse of parents and the society around them, there will be murderers. As long as we as adults allow jealousy, selfishness and anger to grow in our hearts there will be murderers.
Every victim that was murdered had the precious gift of life taken from them. When we stop to say that one’s murder is especially abhorrent because they were a Christian, or a woman or because they were homosexual, we have wronged them because in a small way, we are using their deaths to help make their murders part of the story we want to tell. We are demeaning “who they were” as human beings of value no matter what their sex or beliefs to make “what they did” during their lives become our focal point so we can use them to support our own opinions. We have misunderstood and focused on the symptom instead of the root of the problem.
Until we learn how to help those poor hating souls, the killings will continue. Until we learn how to keep from fostering hate in our children’s hearts, the killings will continue. Until we choose to make our hearts places where love for each other is nourished more than hate, the killings will continue.
Maybe we will cause a little of the focus for hate to change sometimes by societal preferences but the hating heart will always be able to find a way to express itself—will always find a way to murder, whatever our politics or standards. If we ignore that fact to use the murdered as our own poster boys to further our own causes we have not helped the murdered. We have only helped our own cause.