Tears flowed down his cheeks every time he preached.

His voice wavered, but the words remained articulate, the message strong. Yet, at some point during his sermon or within his prayer, that old voice cracked and his eyes leaked.

He was the church’s elder minister. Its minister emeritus, really, if there is such a thing. He had once, many years before, been the church’s full-time preacher, but by the 1970s, other preachers wore the full vestments behind the church’s pulpit, but he gave a short talk usually followed by a prayer as part of each week’s service.

He was surrounded by tales and legends. He was the preacher who married my parents, which to my boyhood mind, made him ancient just by association to that ceremony. And he was old, at least to me, squirming in the pew and my childhood impatience.

He’d nearly died once. He had an out-of-body experience where he felt his spirit rising to a light.

There, God told him he had more to do on Earth and told him a number of remaining years he would have to accomplish these tasks. He awakened and fully recovered from his illness. Though retired, he asked the church if he could speak on occasion and that occasion turned into a near weekly visit to the pulpit.

And each week, he wept.

It was as if he couldn’t help it. As if he couldn’t stop it. He’d lead a prayer and he was overcome by emotion. Such was the depth of his feeling for church and prayer that it filled him with such emotion that it leaked from his eyes and ran down his cheeks.

To a boy raised on the premise that men do not cry, seeing a grown man cry each week was a strange thing.

After all, if a kid at school cried because he scraped his knee playing on the swing set, wasn’t he called a crybaby? How could an old man crying be viewed as anything but a weakness?{

Yet, looking back now, as years stretch by and life marches on, when emotions such as excitement, happiness, sadness and disappointment are all tempered by the dulling edge of time and experience, the tears of emotion of that old preacher seem more and more like a strength rather than a weakness.

He remembered the secret to feeling something on a spiritual level, on an emotional level, like a small child who beams at the sight of his mother, or a young man deeply moved by a song, or the thrill of sunshine on one’s face after a long winter.

As we age, we all feel things physically, from aches to agonies, but often we lose touch with those deeper feelings that tingle along our nervous systems, that make the hairs rise on the backs of our necks, that make us swallow a lump in our throats.

We may grow apathetic or stony. We lose sight of compassion, curiosity and dreams. We misplace the wonder of sensation.

But this old preacher had not lost them or, at least by the time I knew him, he had become re-acquainted with them. Though he wept, he also smiled wide and laughed long. He had managed to remain sensitive to the world around him and it had not destroyed him. Instead, he was richer for it.

He lived and preached for the same number of years that God had promised when he had nearly died. And when he did die, he cried no more, though many cried for him.

Dean Poling is The Valdosta Daily Times executive editor and The Tifton Gazette editor.