I saw a photograph in an old American Heritage magazine once (April/May 2003 p.90) I’ll not soon forget. It was of beautiful twin girls, nearly a year old, sitting in an ornately carved, straight-backed chair. They are wearing little gowns of silk or taffeta that through the sepia-tones, appear to be blue or green. Even for their young age, their hands and feet seem tiny, and to be made of porcelain. Their names, Lucy and Libby Lacey, sound like they were taken from a first grade reader – from a story about pony rides and tea-cakes. The photograph is edged in a brown stain that is not water, or age, but blood.

The girls’ father, Daniel R. Lacey had married Libby Goodman in Niagara Falls NY, in 1861. A year later she gave birth to the twins. Soon after their birth, Daniel left to fight for the Union. In early 1863, stationed outside Petersburg VA, he received a letter from home containing the photograph of his twin girls. While on guard duty one evening, he opened his wallet to look at the faces of his daughters when a Confederate sniper put a mini-ball through his head, splattering blood on the photograph. The girls’ mother never recovered from the shock of her husband’s death, and after a long decline, she died herself, on October 1, 1869 – her eighth anniversary.

Any old photograph is a priceless treasure to a family. But one set apart by blood, as this one has been, is infinitely more so. Lincoln, in the Gettysburg Address, says that any attempts to hallow the ground the battle-dead inhabit are redundant: We can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far beyond our power to add or detract. In fact the items associated with Lincoln’s own bloody death – the few things he had in his pockets at Ford’s Theatre where he was shot, and the Peterson House where he died, are preserved and enshrined by our nation with almost religious devotion.

Blood sanctifies.

Blood sets apart, elevates, values, consecrates.

This is true of keepsakes, burial grounds, photographs – and true of us as well.

We are sanctified by blood. It is blood that redeems us – the blood of a precious, innocent lamb, the Lamb of God (I Peter 1.18-19). We immerse ourselves in the blood through baptism and are raised to walk in “newness of life” (Romans 6.1-4). This new life, purchased by blood, achieved by blood, results in “sanctification, and the outcome – eternal life,” (Romans 6.22).

We, each of us, have within us a soul Jesus shed his blood for. We Christians, each of us, wear that blood, have been immersed in it. This makes us all valuable – inestimably so. Our souls are consecrated by Christ’s blood. Do we treat them as if they are – or do we expose them, day by day, to pollution and neglect?