themselves. In place of life they experienced death, God’s final limit on all our independence. The greatest and the least of us will be humbled in death. So long as we live and breathe we are scarcely able to take this fact in. The difference between life and death is absolute; it is shattering. Yet we have been so desensitized that we are almost blind to its inevitability. We struggle to avoid contemplating the end of life to which we are daily and irreversibly heading. The New Testament has a