I Wanna Live More Than Half Alive by Dalton Olive

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, serenely, divinely aware.” — Henry Miller

The ache has shown itself countless times in my 32 years, but one of the clearest moments a while back happened in London. I was there with my family for the first time (at least for me), walking the cobblestone streets and eating copious amounts of fish and chips. As we neared the final days of our stay, my mom and I had the opportunity to see the musical Les Misérables in London’s West End. We filed into the theatre amidst the throng of other people trying to find their seats in undoubtedly the nicest theatre I’d ever been in. After a few minutes, the lights dimmed, the curtain rose, and everyone fell silent as the faint music began to rise. For the next three hours, we were all transported to early 19th-century France. By the end, as the entire cast joined in unison for “Do You Hear the People Sing?” my cheeks were wet, and I couldn’t get to my feet fast enough to applaud what I had just witnessed.

I’m no different from anyone else; I have hopes and dreams I want to see come true in my life. Whether that be small things like seeing a long-awaited movie in theaters with friends, enjoying a good meal I made myself, or finishing a good book. Then there’s the bigger stuff… like wanting to spend an extended time in England for a season, get married, and have kids.  You know, the usual stuff.

However, I’ve noticed something among many people I’ve interacted with over the years and also in myself…

Many of us are not dead.
But we’re not fully alive either.

We wake up, scroll, work, consume, rest, and repeat. We pray, we hope, we feel flickers of longing, but they seem to pass quickly.

We live half alive.

Half alive is not the same as despair. Despair knows it has lost something; there’s the ache of emptiness. Half-aliveness is more subtle, and I’d venture to say more dangerous. It’s the slow acclimation to living a diminished life. And yet, somewhere beneath the routines and the coping mechanisms, there is a yearning in us.

Augustine called it restlessness. C.S. Lewis called it joy, though he meant something far deeper than happiness. Whatever name we give it, the ache is unmistakable.

It shows up when a song suddenly cracks us open. When a line of poetry names something we didn’t know how to say ourselves. When we watch children laugh freely and feel both delight and grief, delight at their aliveness, grief at how much of ours we have misplaced or even surrendered.

Here’s the good news: This ache is not a problem to be solved.

Irenaeus famously wrote, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” Not a man well-behaved. Fully alive.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: if God is glorified by our aliveness, why do so many Christians feel spiritually sedated?

Somewhere along the way, many of us were taught, implicitly if not explicitly, that holiness requires a suspicious posture toward desire. We learned how to avoid sin, but not how to pursue joy.

So we settled into safe lives with safe prayers and safe dreams. We replaced wonder with certainty.

But Jesus did not come to make us less human. He came to make us more so.

“I came that they may have life,” he says, “and have it abundantly.”

Abundant life is not merely life that lasts forever. It is life that begins now, thick with meaning and saturated with love. Fully alive faith demands resurrection. But let's be honest, living half alive often feels safer. 

To live fully alive is to feel deeply and feeling deeply means risking grief. To love deeply is to risk loss. To follow Christ seriously is to risk your reputation, your comfort, and sometimes your carefully curated identity.

So we choose control.

 We lower the volume of our lives. We protect ourselves with irony, distraction, and busyness. Or if you’re more melancholy, cynicism. We stay busy enough not to notice how numb we’ve become.

But numbness is not peace.

Anaïs Nin wrote, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” Shrinking life requires very little courage at all.

Yet Scripture repeatedly insists that fear is not neutral. What we fear shapes what we avoid. What we avoid determines the size of our lives.

The tragedy is not that we feel fear. The tragedy is when fear becomes our spiritual director.

C.S. Lewis put it this way:

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

Christianity does not offer coping mechanisms for half-alive people. It offers resurrection to the dead. Resurrection is not merely something that happens after we die. It is the invasive, disruptive power of God breaking into our present lives, insisting that more is possible.

Paul does not pray that believers would be merely informed, but that “the eyes of your heart may be enlightened.” Enlightened hearts see differently.  They take risks differently.

To be fully alive is not to be perpetually ecstatic; it is to be awake. Awake to sorrow and joy, to beauty and terror, to sin and grace.

Fully alive people grieve honestly. They laugh loudly. Aliveness is not something you stumble into accidentally. It’s cultivated through attention and courage.

It begins by telling the truth: I am not as alive as I was made to be.

It continues by listening to what awakens you rather than dismissing it. The longing you feel when you encounter beauty, goodness, or holiness is not temptation, it's a remembering of Eden. It’s what happened to me in London in that theatre.

Grace is not opposed to effort; it is opposed to earning. And effort, rightly ordered, is simply cooperation with resurrection life already at work within us.

Mary Oliver asks the question that haunts me:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

To live fully alive is to offer God not just your sins, but your desires. Not just your failures, but your hopes. Not just your death, but your life.

And perhaps this is the quiet miracle: that the God who calls us to die with Christ is the same God who refuses to let us stay half alive.

He wants us awake.
He wants us fully, fiercely, resurrectedly alive.

And deep down…we want that too.

 

Dalton Olive is a writer, pastor, and licensed pastoral counselor exploring the intersection of faith, literature, culture, and the human experience. His work reflects a deep love for stories, beauty, theology, and the questions that shape how we live. Through essays, reflections, and creative work, Dalton seeks to help readers see the world with greater wonder and imagination.