I Feel Alive

After I washed the gravel out of my bloody palms, I reflected on something that’s been working on me for a while now.

I don’t hate the aches of age.

Tuesday was a beautiful morning. I was out walking, learning the streets and trees of this city that is slowly becoming ours. Early morning air has always been intoxicating to me, wherever I’ve lived. I was strolling along, taking it all in, when I kicked a tiny pothole. Hard. That’s how I ended up with gravel in my palms and a toe that’s still talking.

I’m 71. My body tells on me more than it used to. But when my toe throbs or my knees complain on the stairs, mostly I don’t feel sorry for myself. I feel alive. The ache is evidence. I have been here. I’ve been out there. The world and I made contact.

I’m not romanticizing suffering. I’ve spent too many years at hospital bedsides and gravesides to do that, and Diane will tell you I keep her up to date with my own body’s “notifications.” There is pain that diminishes people, pain that comes from neglect and cruelty and systems that treat some bodies as disposable. That pain is not a gift. It’s an injustice, and it should be fought. But there’s another kind of ache — the ache of simply being present in your own body, at your own age, in your own one life. That one I’ve stopped fighting.

James Baldwin said people pay for what they do, and pay still more for what they allow themselves to become. (If you’ve been reading here, you also know I have been thinking about judgment and reckoning). I’d add this: you also pay, gladly, for a life fully lived — and the currency is a sore toe, tired knees, a body that remembers every mile it has walked. That’s not a debt I resent. That’s a receipt I’m keeping.

I’ve buried people I love. I’ve sat with folks who would have given anything for one more sore toe, one more morning walk, one more pothole to be surprised by. So when my body aches now, I try to receive it as a gift dressed up as an inconvenience. Proof of life. Proof that I got up, put on my shoes, and went out to meet a new city.

Let me go one step further, because I need to — I’m a preacher.

So much of the religion many of us grew up with treated the body like a problem. Something to deny, discipline, and get past on the way to a reward somewhere else. I don’t believe that anymore, and I’m not sure I ever really did. I believe God is in the pothole. In the sore toe. In the gravel washed from my palms. The incarnation isn’t just a doctrine about Jesus two thousand years ago — it’s a claim about flesh itself. That bodies matter. All of them.

And if bodies matter, then they all matter — Black bodies, disabled bodies, poor bodies, bodies waiting in detention, bodies in Gaza and Sudan and Haiti trying to make it to morning. A faith that shrugs at what happens to bodies was never really about the God who chose to have one. You can’t love the incarnation and ignore the flesh in front of you. That conviction started, for me, in small places — including the simple, stubborn decision to feel my own life instead of apologizing for it.

If you’ve been hurt by religion that taught you your body was something to escape rather than something to inhabit, hear this: you’re allowed to feel your life. The ache and the joy both. God isn’t waiting for you somewhere else. God is here, in the body you woke up in this morning.

At 71, walking a new city on a new continent with the woman I’ve loved for 48 years — five grown children and grandkids back in California, a whole new chapter still unfolding — I’ll take the sore toe. It means I showed up.

Go outside today if you can. Watch for the potholes. But don’t be afraid of what your body tells you when you kick one anyway.

Grace and peace,

David

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