At Thirty-Three Years Old, I Could Be Brave

the last time I'll share a chronological age with Jesus

I wake in the night and feel my way to the bathroom. I don’t know whether to blame it on the rain or the red wine from dinner, but my joints ache and I can hardly bend my fingers. My knees feel it too.

I don’t even turn on a light; I’ve worn the carpet thin between my side of the bed and the bathroom, having sighed and put my feet to the floor in the dark every night for the last 8 years. I know where to take wide turns around those sharp wooden corners of the bed (my bruised thighs have learned that lesson the hard way), and in my own little corner of the world, these quirks have become as familiar as 2+2 or maybe my lasagna recipe: rote, imprinted on my hippocampus, something I know without a bathroom light to show me.

Even now, I stand before the mirror and don’t need the incandescence to see who is looking back. She, too, is imprinted there—there in the vision places that don’t require sight. I know that at the place where her hair parts, silver strands have begun to weave their way in—imposters, little reminders of mortality. They are the baby hairs that’ve turn luminescent, the postpartum regrowth. She lets them stay, let’s them teach her: Some of your life has seeped into another’s, and that’s okay.

As I climb back into bed, I remember that Jesus was thirty-three once too, and I realize now that he never got older than this.

I wonder if he too woke in the night, running his hands along worn wood as he rose in the dark. What did he think about when he woke up at 2 a.m., looking up at the tent above his head, hearing the sounds of night things? Did he begin to talk to God in his subconscious too, murmuring his holy incantations: Watch over my friends help me be with me what do I do?

After feasting with the tax collectors, did he notice how even one glass of red wine felt harder to shake the next day? Did his joints feel stiff after all those nights outside on the ground? Did he have to move more slowly in the morning so he didn’t get lightheaded, didn’t throw out his back? Had his beard started to sprout grays, and had he been surprised by this too? What lines had already worn their way across his face and stayed?

Had Jesus started to feel his age and known? Known it was time to do what he’d come for. Maybe his aching joints and new gray hairs had signaled a cosmic shift, and just like the geese know in their bellies when it’s time to fly South, some whisper from the deep had sighed at him too: Do the thing. Do the thing, then come home.

Having just teetered over the precipice of thirty-three myself, I sense this shift too.

I am no longer a child; I have birthed children and held dying hands and screamed at God and boxed my way toward some understanding of him that keeps me afloat and now my swollen knuckles and silver wisps whisper, You are getting older. Remember your otherworldly address.

I hope to see 43, and 63, and maybe even 93 (though that’s not for the faint-hearted), but right now at this very age, it is the last time Jesus will be my chronological contemporary. I would like to sit with the thirty-three year-old Jesus and ask him how he was brave enough to be misunderstood, how he could bear being spat upon by the people he was trying to love. I’d ask him what it feels like to die but even more so how it feels to come back to life, and if I could just see the sincerity in his eyes as he told me, “It’s all going to be okay,” I swear I could be brave too.

At thirty-three years old, I could be brave.

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