People are dying. I just received a call from my grandmother asking for my mom. The rest of my family were gone to have dinner at another family's house and my grandmother just said she wanted to let my mom know that her cousin Dale had just died. Now I know that to you reading this and even for myself, having never met Dale before, that it might not mean much to us or seem to have immediate impact on our lives but something about it just floored me. It was something in the weak voice of my strong-willed grandmother as she spoke from a seemingly fragile heart about the death of her cousin whose body is now uninhabited as of three and a half hours ago. It had something to do with the thought of my grandmother feeling so near to death herself that this all has only made her contemplate the idea that she could be next and people in the near future would be calling others with weak voices and tear-filled eyes to tell of her passing from this world. And to my 20-year-old heart, so often concerned with myself, my future, and the pleasures of this world, it melted my prideful wings and sent me hurtling back to the earth where in the quietness of my heart as I was brought to my knees, I realized that I only have maybe 80 years to live and that though so many times I think I can live out the Christian life if I only try hard enough, I can't. The death of my grandmother's cousin is proof of that. All of our sin is proof that. I find that it's always in those tear-and-awe-filled moments where we our brought to the place of humility where we belong, that we are finally in a position to meet Christ and receive the truth he has to speak into our lives. The question Christ asks of me as He looks at my death-cursed body is whether I will remain in this place of humility so that he can keep meeting me and live His perfect life through my imperfect body or whether I will keep taking flight with wings that only tire out and fall short of the heaven that my heart longs for. It is at this moment that I realize that "I" as a Christian will never live the Christian life but Christ is the only one that has ever and will ever live the Christian life; and the mystery that He should choose to live the Christian life through me should be enough to keep holding me in that place of humility where he wants me to remain. People are dying, yes....but Christ is living. When I pick up the phone in the future to hear broken voices confronted with the reality of the curse that lives in all of us, I can be reminded that it is only in this brokenness and this recognition that Christ can live in me. It is only in this mindset of realizing that I am nothing but 80 years of sin in the grand stretch of eternity that the focus can finally be shifted completely to God and I can only be left barely standing, fully aware of my own unworthiness and reviling of God and finally aware of the the ultimate worth of Christ. When He finally lives through and despite of my brokenness, I not only see that God gets all the glory, but I realize that he deserves every bit of it.