1 Corinthians 15:50-58 I declare to you brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and the mortal with the immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”“

Where O Death is your victory? Where O death is your sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. There my brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.

The plight of humanity is that we all come to an end. We all have a measured amount of time to make our life worth something. Some of our lives are long and full and satisfying, and others seem to move from paralyzing moment to paralyzing moment. There is no reason or rhyme to life…or so it seems. Is this why Solomon writes, “Everything is meaningless”? What we do know though, is that there are lives that are lived [better] than others–lives that are marked by a purpose, fullness and joy that are not determined by the conditions of a broken world. More often than not these uncommon lives are walked out in the shadows of the mundane and more often than not die with no fanfare. Perhaps they are only marked out by 4 lines in a Tuesday newspaper. Yet that does not fully describe the weight of their years. All you have to do is look back to the wake of their conversations, their intentional hugs and never missed words of encouragement to see they were plugged into life. These people seem to be more and more of a rarity, but when you intersect one, your existence is marked forever.

For these kingdom commodities, for that is truly what they are, life isn’t something to be stored up and saved till the appropriate time. Life is meant to be spent liberally and poured out over the parched land of the living. These souls know their time is short, heaven is waiting and that hope is in short supply. They give and love and risk as if their very existence hangs in the balance.

These uncommon people do something very uncommon. They fade into the background. They step back so that Someone else can step forward. They will never utter the words “Jesus is #1 in my life” because they know that statement is wholly untrue. Jesus is their life. There are no lines of delineation for they have embraced the fame of Jesus. He is life. His fame, His Name and His glory are the reason for life. This counter-intuitive truth is why they can be forgotten and yet make the greatest impact.