FROM BEFORE THE TIME we could walk, we began to feel it. Be extraordinary. Start walking. Crawling is not enough. Hurry along with it or something’s wrong.

And so we stood, wobbled then walked. They worshiped through cameras. We walked to the tune of ohh’s and ahh’s, to approval, a sure testament of our success. We were then on our way to extraordinary.

Now that we were walking, we’d better start talking. Chop, chop. The sooner the better.

It was there before we were, birthed in our conception. Back then before the glory of walking, we were crawling and rolling and being passed around greeted by smiles of wonder and glee. Maybe those looks were really a warm envy, a quiet wish to somehow return to simplicity. The kind of simplicity where most of what matters is right there with you in the moment, not teasing you onward from the distant horizon.

*******

Oh, to be a child at heart again.

To chase dreams as fireflies aglow in the warm dusk twilight. And to be fully alive and valuable now independent of whatever lies ahead.

Mostly, not to take oneself so seriously.

The world isn’t waiting.

*******

Not long ago, while away traveling with my wife, I stood underneath a banner stretched across the main entrance to the Denver Art Museum. “Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.”* It’s message found me at a peculiar time in my life as a young artist. I was still crawling and rolling around. In drawn out dramatic fashion, my shoulders took the position of sadness, drooped over as if weighted. They were, of course. In less than a handful of years, I leapt from being a pastor to a writer. I’d authored a memoir, was already well into my second book, growing as a storyteller and mentoring other writers. Now walking, but that activity wasn’t enough. At least not in my heart. Rather than reveling in the glory of just walking, of chasing my dream as a writer, I was bothered by all that hadn’t yet been done.

C'mon, I was only walking? Why not running? 

My second book should be done and picked up by a doting publisher. I should be more regular with my blog. People should be talking more about my writing, about me as a writer. Maybe it was a fluke? I’m a sad little casualty of a compelling life story. Without grief, I wouldn’t even be a writer. Me. Me. Me. Sad little me pulled down by the weight of trying to be more than I am. More than I even should be. Perhaps more than I ever will be.

What if extraordinary really has nothing to do with us as much as it has to do with everything else? Rather than my life revolving around my value, what if my life was only a droplet added to the cumulative whole? As an artist, what would happen if I diverted my thinking from primarily myself to the world around me – to beauty waiting to be discovered, to the broken in need of love, the marginalized and dejected in need of acceptance and a hug, to others like me wrapped tightly in the safety of low self worth and narcissism?  

I could tell you that thinking of myself lightly awakens me to the vastness of life unfolding all around me and echoes a similar inversion to that which is introduced in the Gospels. Those poor, disappointed, content, peace hungry, kindhearted, harassed folks, what’s the world going to do with them? Jesus called them blessed, extraordinary. Their reward doesn’t translate in the currency of extraordinary as valued by culture in the individual self. No, the blessedness does not hinge on all that can be scraped together and accumulated on their own but all freely given as one who belongs to God’s Kingdom. That is extraordinary.

My, how the world would look so beautifully strange if we turned our gaze to what’s all around rather than the small within ourselves.

*Dokkodo, Miyamoto Musashi

image: baby steps

THERE IS NOT A SINGLE atomic attribute we possess within our humanity able to ensure security. Simply, our ultimate welfare is out of our hands. Our lives sway in the breeze of circumstance. One day we are well, the next bedridden. We tire. Our bodies succumb to sickness. Beyond that, we tangle ourselves in worry until our hearts sag heavy under the weight of life out of our reach. The phone rings and we receive disappointing news. Maybe the news concerns your position at work suddenly gone, your spouse confessing he no longer loves you, a diagnosis set to violate your child’s life. There is an unending myriad of tragedies and difficulties you could attest to. And as quickly as that we find the fragility of life, like that of a dandelion blown by the wind.

All of life is not out of control, of course. There’s a good bit of predictability to our day. This is what we call routine. For the most part, we live by expectations managed by what we’ve scheduled into our phones or computers or family calendars. Days buzz by and pile into weeks and months. Before we know it, we’re quickly celebrating another year’s end and scribbling down goals that aren’t necessarily tied to our reality. Much of life happens as such. But then. Well, difficulty can flood without announcement. Ask the widow. Listen to the grieving parent.

To what specific degree, we rarely know, but one thing is a certainty: life is all but secure.

As one who’s experienced the spiraling depths of loss and the weight of life far too heavy for my own strength to bear, it doesn’t take long for conversations to veer into serious territory. Hushed words and haunted wonderings about the whys of it all. These conversations are shared with friends and newcomers alike who are either in the throes of a difficult stretch of life or reeling in its aftermath. Each of their faces looks the same. Desperate.

Through my own experiences and contemplation, I’ve come to define loss as any occurrence that dislodges us from our held normal. Some losses are small and inconsequential and hardly noticed. Others rattle us so jarringly that we’re never quite the same.

Loss is a universal experience that all of humanity encounters regularly, maybe even daily. For the most part, we can deal, get by with our strength and resilience and recover through our own resourcefulness. It is in those more tragic losses when we find ourselves in a depth far too deep and desperate for life to return to the manageable form and pace we knew that we realize just how helpless we can be. Loved ones die, spouses leave, our healthy bodies are overcome, our sure things fail us.

We are not the captain, only a crewmember. And this is the exact point of indomitable security.

We are not the product of our own doing. Rather, we are part of a narrative much grander than our accumulations of success, achievement and accolade. For there is One Creator – timeless and all-sufficient – who is attentive to each of our days and does not require our given effort in exchange for acceptance. He searches for the lost, those prone to wander off, and dresses the wounds of those bruised and bleeding.

The psalmist invites us to “cast our burdens on the Lord, and He will sustain you.” This regular piling up of all that burdens us is a confession that we are not, in and of ourselves, capable enough to handle all that we encounter in life. But the promise is sure – He will sustain. All you must do is sit across the table from one who has felt life’s sure sting and yet has found the ability to hope again and you will see firsthand God’s ability to sustain.

In God, we discover infinite beginning. Contrarily, when we begin with ourselves as the ultimate source of all we need, we plant ourselves in all that rusts and fades. In loss, we find an ending that is a dead end path if we only focus on inwardly. Every ending needs a restart and must begin with God. 

Each morning I wake to speak words, which center my feet on the path. “Lord, thank you for all this day holds.”

I shall say it again in the hope that you remember, we are not the captain.

image: stormy night

If ever a time does truly exist when suffering finds glorious home in our lives, it is now, here on this Good Friday. The emotion found by a heart slowed to contemplate the time finds darkness before the light. This is distance one travels during Holy Week. The believer quiets her heart to recall the suffering, the sacrifice, the sure death, and yes, death defeated and sin overcome in Jesus' resurrection. If we will see and hear beyond the pageantry, the symbols and rites, we will learn how to suffer and the joy in our joining.

I'm in the midst of slowly writing a devotional with the full intent of capturing my thoughts and experience with suffering and loss. In editing one entry in particular, I thought it fitting to share during this time leading to Easter. So I'd like to share it with you in hopes that in some way these words find good place in your heart. Maybe they bloom among your scars. Yes, that would make the writing a beautiful ministry.

*******

Deeper and more rattling than losing what we love or what shapes us to who we are lies the issue of security. When we suffer loss, past and future time collides with present day to pile into a mercilessly mess of life jumbled. Like ghosts searching for rest, all of the unsettled parts of who we are come to collect answers and demand attention when our lives break open. Loneliness abounds in the heart reeling in loss. As supportive friends and loved ones return to their lives and normality, the isolation in the wake of loss can grow dangerously disproportionate to the amount of strength and faith present. 

Take the middle-aged man shocked by the news of the job he lost. Yesterday, all was well. He was well. Or so he thought. Now, there in the quiet of his heart - a place untuned to his hearing - he can hear voices from the past speak and ask him questions to which he has no answer for. “You’ll never amount to anything.” “No one will love you.” “Who are you?” In the busyness of life undisturbed, before his loss, other than normal minor setbacks and Mondays, he was okay and happy in the day-to-day activity. Then a break, a disturbance in the calm regularity and rhythm of life and the man is undone in suffering. Or what of the married woman who, some years ago, stood at the altar beside all that had grown into the source of her love, devotion and joy. With him, she would make escape into the love she so desperately hoped to find and make a home, have a family and live a good life. And then a break in her marriage, undoing her family, her happiness, her dreams of love and forever acceptance. Then sadness and the thereafter where her heart, too, hears the rattling voices of yesterday and the uncertainty of tomorrow.

Life breaks for us all. That is never in question. How life breaks differs from one person to the next - some tragedies storm in and look like death and disease while others rise like the tide and claim marriages, finances, careers, dreams and so much more - but each heart partakes in suffering when life comes apart. There at the core, isolated by pain and suffering, we find beneath our pain and discomfort an abyss of loneliness and questioning about our situation for which we find no easy solutions or way out. Who can offer respite? More abounding, who can quiet storming waves of suffering and mend broken lives? Where will you go and to what will you turn to? For you indeed must go and you must turn. Sinking there, in life broken undone, you will only find death and shadows.

We have One who knows the way through the worst of suffering. He is strong and capable in all storms of suffering and in all of life come undone quite simply, yet forever profoundly, because He overcame all that life broken could ever force upon humanity. Crushed on account of our iniquities and suffering, we find healing for each of our wounds in Christ. He placed himself there to be broken, not for our escape - there is no need for escape in light of ultimate victory achieved - but so that we would have a way through this life. Through Christ, we find strength for the day now and healing for all behind us and all before us.

The best news is that He is patient and willing.

If we have never sought, we seek Thee now;

Think eyes burn through the dark, our only stars;

We must have sight of thorn-pricks on Thy brow;

We must have Thee, O Jesus of the Scars.

The heavens frighten us; they are too calm;

In all the universe we have no place.

Our wounds are hurting us; where is the balm?

Lord Jesus, by Thy Scars, we claim Thy grace.

If, when the doors are shut, Thou drawest near,

Only reveal those hands, that side of Thine;

We know to-day what wounds are, have no fear,

Show us Thy Scars, we know the countersign.

The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak;

They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;

But to our wounds only God’s wounds speak;

And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.

- Jesus of the Scars, Edward Shillito

(image: crucifiX by Lara, license CC 2.0)

I do not have great aspirations,

or concern myself with things that are beyond me.

Indeed I am composed and quiet

Psalm 131

TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS into another year now and even though my heart rose with annual hopes and expectation for changed routines as a result of talk of resolution(s), not much is different. One full cycle of the moon around the earth in these twenty-eight days and my heart remains churning along in the same rhythmic pattern as before.

My therapist thinks I’m cheating myself. Maybe she was weary of following my meandering thoughts hypothesize on why I feel so despondent at times. “You should give yourself a break. “ In thinking more of her easier-said-than-done instruction, I believe she’s got a point. A really profound one, too.

The world inside of me is a busy one construed in thoughts, attentive to patterns and trends and invested in scenarios. Somehow I should always be better. Everything around me diminishes to ordinary occurrence in my thirst for better. Nothing satisfies. And so my thoughts furiously sound. Accusations that rumble as thunder captivate me to where my thoughts, my actions, my mood, my present, my future, my dreams, my happiness, my plans, my accomplishments, my achievements, my strategies, my knowledge, my failure, my mistakes, my, my, my … oh my, is all that burns in the seat of my heart. This is the yield produced by mechanical thinking.

I wanted the start of this year to be different. Peace is what I promised my heart we’d find. To rediscover the beauty of life for all that it is, just as it is, were the terms. So far, my way has been that of circles.

There’s a scene in Shakespeare’s, King Lear, which captures a similar essence. Glouchester, owned by despair sprouted from his treating of life presumptuously, as if he could control it, as though life was and could be the effect of his cause. Instead, life flattened as did his joy, meaning, insight and understanding. As the drama persists, the despondent old earl asks to be lead to a cliff where he might put end to his life. And that he does try but fails. What does he see but hopelessness? What has eluded him? Miracle.

The son he banished, Edgar, in disguise as a stranger, serves his father as guide back to remembrance: “Thy life's a miracle. Speak yet again. “

Miracle is what we tend to forget. Instead, life is mechanized into a transactional formula of do this, then that. There’s a problem here. We are not machines meant to achieve as our highest order of pursuit and effort. No, we are meant to live, to love, to grow and learn, and ultimately to treasure all of life. In our living we find what our hearts most long for – home. Home is not so much a place as a position of belonging. To be at home within our own skin and not overridden by anxious thought and corresponding reactive behavior is to live according to its intended design. Psalm 131 is a way home for me when I become disoriented by my living as a machine instead of a man. I am reminded to not make too much of my own life and its importance. “I make level and make quiet my soul,” sings the psalmist in his native tongue. Here in the silencing of my soul can I notice the beauty and miracle that life is and leave behind anxieties and troubles which can so easily betwixt, diminish and distract me from truly living.

This is all that I'm aiming to learn in the year ahead and beyond: to be still, satisfied and at home now, hopeful in tomorrow, but not there until there is here now.

(image: Abandoned Farmhouse, Indigo Sky Photography, licensed by CC 2.0)

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]]>A Way Home AgainGuy DelcambreFri, 08 Jan 2016 14:16:16 +0000http://www.guydelcambre.com/blog/2016/1/forthedoughtorise53650885e4b0fc72e8c00458:537550c9e4b0fa0d50236139:568fb51969492ea8356b2062

I. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .

So goes that timeless line long ago penned by good ol’ Mr. Dickens. Fittingly so, I suppose. And so it was for us last year. The good worked into the bad as just a bit extra flour needed in order for the dough to rise just so. I could tell you the things learned; recount mistakes made in the flash of emotion and recollect the failures still hanging in memento, but that would only be the half of it, not the whole. Fact is I’m still wrapping my head around last year.

I know what I’d like you to see – an ever-happy little family in the throes of an adventure, all supporting one another and singing lovely songs as we skip along down the path we’re on. That’s the façade donned over our front door. The type of decorative door piece that alerts you to the sort of people who dwell there in the home, “Here lives a happy, well-adjusted family who’re as loving as they are kind.” Or some expansively general cuteness of the sort.

No one hangs a sign over the door of his house that says, “We’re done.”

Truth be known, last year was as difficult a year as we’ve lived through as a family. This is mostly due to the fact that we’re still blending, not yet blended. As I’m sure you know, making a family work is no easy feat. A blended family, well that’s an exponentially more difficult emotional mine field to cross.

All this – the wrestling of emotions, the dread of failing and the exhaustion thereafter – is how I stumbled into the holidays disoriented and just plain tired. What grew mightily as a result of my nonetheless careless navigation through countless relational difficulties had with our oldest, still grieving daughter, or buffered between her and my wife, the woman now her mom was a prickly discontentment. We simply were in a place I didn't think we should be. We should be happier, was the echo sounding through the months. The allure and luster of being or having something better. That is discontentment. There at the end of the year amidst festivities and family traditions held to, my heart spoiled upon the year in review mental playback of the worst of times.

When life is what you don’t want it to be, you should be careful to attend to the fork present in the road. One may follow the path of the discontented and yield themselves to the circumstances at hand. This is the easy way. Simply follow your heart when adverse conditions find you and there you will be, an unhappy soul fallen victim to life’s decision. And this is the thing so crucial to make yourself aware of when found at a forked path: there is another way to go.

Discontentment is little more than a lustful fantasy of something better. Somewhere else in life we are somehow better off than the moment we are actually alive in now. Mostly this is a farce, for we can only truly be who we are at the present time. We can change but that’s responding positively to discontentment and another thing entirely that we will get to in a moment. Discontentment can be a true realization, but it should serve as just that, a realization that circumstances are awful, not an abandonment of ship to try to swim to another shore where everything appears more lush and inviting. Difficulty will always be present throughout our years. Some parts will be worse than others and maybe, in the end, not everything balances justly. What if the secret to joy in life lie not in the accrual of good alone but in the whole separated from the halves and crumbs? What if your life is more uphill climbing than leisurely strolls that tend to lean gently in your favor? What then?

What does one do when they find themselves stuck in a patterned difficulty?

In these words did I find myself struggling at the end of last year. Would difficulty in parenting a blended family persist? How about my shortcomings as a husband or my despondent frustrations with a lack of clear purpose infusing itself into all areas of life - as a writer, a man, a husband, a dad and all the other important little areas? These were patterns that formed throughout the year, and I leaned toward the easy way.

II. The fork in the path:

Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.

Philippians 4:11-12 (ESV)

Weary I dropped into a seat in the general area our family normally sits for Sunday morning church service. I’d had my fill of good holiday excitement and relegated the remainder of my time off of work to relax. The problem was there was little rest in my thoughts. Something was askew inside. One of our pastors gently began to deliver his thoughts rooted in these words of St. Paul’s letter to the church of Philippi. I was indeed standing before two ways to go. “I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound,” read the apostle’s words. Following along as our pastor read aloud, I too, learned of that secret. Contentment is a sacred acceptance of things as they are, and even may continue to be, where I no longer exist as the ruling centrality of my own life and happiness. In the end, choosing to be content is centering upon God rather than my fickle heart and shifting circumstance. I can rebel against difficult circumstance and elude the fleeting trap of all being good. This you can be sure of: the conditions will constantly be in flux, but you don’t have to.

Come what may in the good year ahead. I know how to go again.

(image: before the rise, Brooke Herman; licensed by CC 2.0)

And if all of heaven came down 

crashing the night through

resplendent resound 

Would it matter much at all 

or whisper too faint a call?

to see angels dance around 

detached but heavenbound

void of pain and fear

free of struggle and toil

absent death and spear

Is that Then even the point at all?

Or another long moment

clung to creation's breast

still shaking from the fall?

the kind that drains me dry

gloriously wrung of all I could be

and of everfailing try

holy ended, divinely free

Would heaven matter at all

if all of heaven could fall

right into this moment of dread with me?

too much to hold

and yet in its stead:

a curse, a pain, a fear

a gnawing dread

human craft, 

skinwrapped diviner, image of He

beginning to beginning,

brother made to me.

Heaven needt not fall tonight

for my prayers, sagged with doubt, 

burst empty -

the (w)holiest of tongues throughout

Keep the saints

Hold the night

Bind my prayers

that I might see burning Light. 

until my heart forgets the way

and somehow stumbles into holy, this:

I in you and you in me,

et cetera, etc. 

(image: Christ of the Abyss, by vmg8383, licensed by CC 2.0)

I woke to realize I'd died

and yet, I'm still walking

my mouth decayed, tried

and still, talking

a sort of incoherent wandering, 

words of babble-speak 

quietly I sat, dead, yet somehow, lingering

it was the whole of me that sprung leak

Into the seams of the floor . . .

tears and curses and love

doubt:

a holy diving dove

a flawlessly cut stone

fit to crush the man and bone

set as a divine trap to slow and swallow busy twitch

a disease-eater, a golden stitch

“so be it,” intones the company of ghosts I still love

maybe awake in the clouds or asleep in dust

a faith inflexible yet has name

is one of moth and rust,

or it’s only a thin wish,

without promise or frame

(maybe. . . he waywardly mumbles, beneath the sound wholly fools make)

there is no god of those who speak monotone

only thought crafted interpretation

called king of all and throne

alive to live more, self-gratification

we, who need rescue, rarely identify until sinking

it’s all a maybe, an echoing which leads home

this doubt, cold and old,

serves as guide through valley shadows,

in spite of cowering pose

. . . and tears like rain flowers belief all the more

(image credit: "long turn," Tim Hunter; licensed CC 2.0)

Busses float and buildings dangle:

Now and then it’s nice to see

The world – from a different angle.

‘New World’, Shel Silverstein

Our kids love poems by Shel Silverstein. It’s not all that uncommon for one of us to open up to a few of his poems and see the world from a different angle. There’s much fun in the combining of poetry and comedy. But also, there can be much learned about life in taking a gander at it from another angle.

Gazing at the world only at one particular angle is quite troublesome for many reasons, but of most concern, there lies damaging trouble in our attempts to press the world into our expectations. When we expect the world – more specifically for the Christian – when we expect those different from us to believe what we believe and place value in our beliefs, we impose upon others, not love, but an instructive value system incongruent to theirs. And for that matter, I don’t believe this was Jesus’ intent.

I should be direct here as to not mislead: My belief on the issue of marriage is based upon what the Bible does reveal about marriage being purposed for a man and a woman, but this is my belief. My responsibility is to position love - God's love - before my beliefs so that love informs my beliefs rather than people or history. 

When we place positions before people, we concede to being members of an organization rather than collected pieces of a Whole scandalously knitted together, embedded in eternity by the only One who could, who would, without ever fully knowing why except His owned desire. And when we guard our banalities more than the faith we profess, we pull faith out of the air to exist in our ordinariness. For what is faith in the absence of love, but unremarkable behavior ordinary to and at home within the walls of our selves? After all faith will one day fade, as will the beliefs associated with it, but not love. Love transcends. Love is the language which bridges our worlds and leads us home. Love bled an announcement to all who would hear, “you can come.”

This much I know about love: it doesn’t investigate for wrong before it identifies opportunity. That’s how love has worked in my life. Had love announced each of my wrongs first, I would never have known salvation. I belonged myself to a belief system as supplement to try and find my way, to feel better and escape emptiness, but love so incomprehensibly disrupted my fleeting attempts to make myself better. The disease common to the human heart is that we’re okay. But we are far from okay, even when we protect ourselves within the safety of our beliefs, pad ourselves within self-righteous activity and do all sorts of spiritual more to get more. Love heals. We all need love.

In the light of the SCOTUS ruling redefining marriage, again I’m reminded that the world our daughters grow into will be different than the one I knew. A faith not bound to time or mere understanding must find them, otherwise the faith they meet through my life will fade into the landscape of ordinary along with old wives’ tales and decayed clichés. If my faith is to be real, it must alive to those all around me. And nothing activates faith but love. Let’s be clear: love is more than carte blanche acceptance of all and anything, and at the same time love cannot only be judgment dressed up in holy words. For the Christian, love is the removal of self at center, a complete reversal of importance in our lives to where Christ is center and wholly authoritative positioning us in his likeness, that of humility, charity, choice, and commitment.

An issue should never serve to direct, guide and inform our love. Instead, Christ must be permitted into that space of our hearts holding too tightly to beliefs rather than love. There he can be trusted to lead us more than adequately through any issue foreign to our understanding. And so my response to monumental cultural issues such as same-sex marriage is simple: how can I love, as Christ would lead me to love? Our held beliefs on cultural issues should not disqualify us from loving others. A quick recall of Christ’s example leads me to take a step back from protecting a belief, value and the world as I knew it and instead move forward into loving people for who they are, just where they are. Our culture will only continue to change, and we, who are the Church, must be willing to gaze at the world from a different view, always with the intent to live ruled by the incomprehensible love of Christ.

God’s love expressed through Christ was a scandal upon religious beliefs. We should not soon forget that.

Life is change. No two days are the same. Though we find and settle into patterns through routine and habits and circles drawn – doing much of our lives the same – life ages in days passing without our permission. The yard grows and needs attention; seasons fade into longer and shorter days; the kids mature and need direction and an ever-developing parental understanding; you, yourself age and need caring. The whole of life’s activity gives evidence to change blossoming all about, all without your permission. Life does what it does and what it will do and as much as we subscribe to the frail belief that we are in any sort of control, the more life is missed. And the more life misses an unchanging you.

My life now couldn’t be more different than my life five years ago. I understand this in several ways. As way of an example, just a couple of nights ago, stooped down beside one of our daughter’s bed, she reminded me so. Approaching the end of another school year – the countdown now in half day measures – she will soon leave behind another year lived: the good, bad and the ugliness of some difficult moments not able to quickly be recalled. As I hugged her and wished her a goodnight, excited with the soon-to-be change she whispered, “I’m pretty much done with elementary.” It’s a peculiar occurrence to be called back to the present, summoned from future days into life changing presently.

I pulled back from her, smiled and replied, “But not quite yet. Don’t be in such a hurry.”

Whether I agree or desire it, she is changing in the context of life now. As her dad, I want to hang onto her and us forever. That sentimentality, as sweet as it appears and romantic of a thought it is, lurks as a thief to the days present and ahead of us and a beggar pleading for days passing through our hands.

I crossed paths with a wise man recently that gave a fixative perspective to change in my life. That man is long gone, changed beyond these days, yet his words give indication of a life well lived. His words are such: “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” Wise words, indeed. If I will live and not simply spectate, change must shift to a higher value. Change must be a current swam with, not a wave we get lost in.

Through our brief exchange of differing sentimentality, hers excitement for change, mine sadness due to the same change happening, life nudged me and reminded me to move with it. Movement is the activity of those alive. Open to the moment at hand and the next approaching. And this activity of living is one of learning – learning that I will never know all that I once thought I knew. This openness to learning and change in each passing day positions me for perfection where knowledge can mature beyond infant stages of just knowing about things and life into seeing and understanding. In the absence of my grasp for control, God can reveal the way to go and guide me through all circumstances, both great and small.

And I can fan adventure’s flame into blaze and whisper back to her, “Let’s go together.”

*(quote: John Henry Newman  ||  image: "Changing Fate") 

to all behind, now deep beneath the surface

I am, due to you, now dead in your soil

birthed blooms despite night’s dark

and the lies whispered in difficulty

languaged solace

yet somehow these days align in Beauty

:::::::

Another year into life steeped in my fair share of darkened valleys and blind curves, as well as joyous heights when celebration rises without thought or prompt. For all of it, each and every day, I am thankful, as they are gifts given in breaths uninterruptedly pulled in, heartbeats pulsing life strong through my aging veins and eyes that see God’s goodness dancing all around.

I am here right where I am and should be. That is a miracle.

What can the days behind us be called but good, else they are bad in our minds alone. There lies danger in our accounting for the days we live. Even those days terrified by unexpected happenings, bruised by circumstances gone awry, are good in that they are given and you are there always in reach of Help – rescued in each hour of need. And particularly there is where we learn the most in life. Our eyes wide open searching for God amidst the details, needing Him despite our ideas of Him during peaceful times. Quite simply, yet ever profoundly, when we unearth goodness in life through the confession of all that we should be grateful for – both significant and small – we preserve a healthy life view irrespective of circumstance, which is usually as fickle as a feeling.

Gratitude cultivates an eternal perspective in our lives overlaid upon and interwoven into each shifting day and always gives clear passage for joy to bubble up from our hearts to inform our heads of what’s really going on. Practicing gratitude requires little more than our commitment to trusting God more than trusting ourselves. And that’s not a huge theological movement, only eyes that will remain open enough to see the sunrise and ponder the miracle unfolding everyday. We grow unaccustomed to recognizing little miracles because we train our eyes to gaze mostly upon what involves us. Gratitude will never thrive in the barrenness of our hearts turned inward, yet will spring wildly, uncontrollably even, within the heart opened to life teeming all around.

Maintaining a thankful heart involves our impermanence in our journey through days and years, always remembering and reminding our hearts things will not remain this way. Perhaps beyond our breathing in this life and well passed our allotted days, yet still, a day does exist and will come when all will be as God intends for it to be, absent of sorrow and disappointment and only the shadow of good. Maybe that would be a good place for you to begin practicing gratitude – thankful that God has made perfect provision for us.

I have much to be thankful for and much happiness in my current day, but I know well the speed in which life can twist. What I hold onto is God’s faithfulness – past, present and future – throughout life, which, in my days has been bittersweet, a mixture of abounding joys and genuine sadness, but above all authentically good.

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Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.

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]]>Guy DelcambreWed, 29 Apr 2015 15:56:47 +0000http://www.guydelcambre.com/blog/blog/2015/4/to-myself-in-a-day-beyond-only-now53650885e4b0fc72e8c00458:537550c9e4b0fa0d50236139:5540fe3ee4b0da169016b33d

Remember this:

Society is set upon freneticism. Most move around unsettled, constantly adjusting to life as it unpredictably tosses around like a raging sea.

A man may be measured by what he unashamedly gives himself to. But if this is, in fact, the case, then the inversion must be counted true as well. We are all the sum of our days lived. Stated plainly, those who know us know us for who we reveal ourselves to be in and out of each passing day. But some are more than sum totals and calculative patterned behaviors. Those who find stability and constancy are those who’ve discovered Something much grander than their brightest moments and more lasting than earned by the sweat of their own brow. Due in whole of this discovery, they are much more than ever imaginable.

Here, a man may lay claim to infinite.

Of the greatest accomplishments to aspire to – success on varying individual levels and expectations – the one to unequivocally give oneself to must be consistency. This aspiration to consistency can, of course, be one of fruitless activity. That is to say, the one who is consistently bad remains bad if he is steady in his behavior. This is not the type of consistency to keep steady hold of. Rather, a man should identify the way to go and hold to the course, thereby establishing a rhythm to each day. The bored man is a dangerous man. Distracted and erratic he moves about through each day restless and out of sync. He is lost and unknown moving with the current of happenstance – carried about like a leaf pushed about by a wind – instead of making his way through the thick and thin of life. There in the activity of life in the thick and thin is where fortitude finds place within a man’s bones, the type of fortitudinous strength, which stiffens the spine and informs choices in difficulty leading him to the only reasonable route to take through difficulty, not around it. One finds strength through consistency. Countless stories of perseverance and endurance contain the same similar thread run through their fabric: consistency.

So not to mislead, consistency can be aspired to yet only partially achieved in our effort. You must give yourself to something bigger than your own life and happiness. That is why those who burn through days in pursuit of accomplishments also burn out. There is One infinite – God – behind each sunrise conspiring against society’s tossing to and fro.

This is a worthy legacy to leave behind, a blemish on society, a stance rooted deeper than surface and against freneticism.

If someday I have a son, he’ll know this truth as well.

NO MORE VULNERABLE OF LIFE do we experience as when all comes apart, twisted and mangled askew, the collateral damage of insensitive circumstance, of life going the way it will go. We float as ghosts belonging to the past – a time when life made better sense and all stood undisturbed – who cannot find rest in the present day dislodged and changed by loss experienced. And that loss can be just about anything. Loss is not exclusive to dramatic tragedy, but rather, any happening which redefines normality – loss of a job, a friendship, a home, a marriage, and so on, as well as a relocation, loss of time, possession, etc. The list can grow on and on to an innumerable length of experiences, events and occurrences in which we lose our sense of what is normality in relation to our rhythm of life and expectation. Whatever loss incurred, we suffer through seasons of difficulty. Some seasons stall lasting longer than expected, as a hurricane slowing its pace at landfall as though hungry for all destruction and upheaval that can be had.

Such are the worst kind of sufferings in life encountered: when you least expect them and their wake, they leave the worst lasting damage.

You are different for it – the loss – and because of those sufferings that have made themselves native to your life and story. Into the category of “abomination” and “damned” do most fit life’s sufferings. We shriek and swat at suffering as though it has no place in a happy life filled with minimal unanswered questions, easy explanations for the whys of life and good expectation for the day ahead.

The movie, Good Will Hunting, easily remains one of my favorites. There’s a scene where the two main characters visit the shores of suffering experienced. Will, the troubled main character, asks Sean, the counselor who’s sustained the loss of his wife and working his way through suffering, if he regrets ever meeting his wife. Of course, the inference laid within the questions consists of avoiding loss and suffering. Sean’s response rings profound: “It’s all right. It’s an important question. ‘Cuz you’ll have bad times, but they’ll always wake you up to the good stuff you weren’t paying attention to.”

Right there. The realization of purpose in suffering blooms a joy invincible. Dare I even say, vocation of suffering?

A calling to suffer, to openheartedly endure hardships, to even willing join in a fellowship of suffering, stands as a common call to all who will choose to follow the narrow and often precarious path made by Christ. I am convinced of this here: receiving suffering into your life is the only way to truly live well and outlive all that can be seen with our natural eyes.

Two encounters in Scripture help us arrive at the point where following Christ means suffering and difficulty is to not only be expected but accepted as normal, endurable and most important, purposeful (i.e., Luke 18:18-30; Matthew 8:18-22). In both, Christ’s response upends life to reveal a call to die to the idea of life as we see it and want it and trust Him with your security. A vocation of suffering is one of dying in choices of desire to discover an otherworldly abundance of joy and peace that cannot be diminished in darkened nights we must live through in circumstances we cannot control.

We must die, nothing less and nothing more. Anything less than dying to ourselves, our ideas, our desires, reveal a distorted theology steeped in suffering avoidance, and any thing more shows our heart’s ambition to be set at attempts of earning acceptance rather than simply dying and following Christ. There is purpose in your suffering and it is this: a call to join Christ in unhinging all which clings to this life as primary and to thrive no matter the circumstance or condition, all for the glory of God and acknowledgement of His forever good.

(image: Path through slate scree, by terryemilluerk, licensed by CC 2.0)

NONE OF US COULD ever make such a bold claim as to own more than the day now. As a matter of fact, this day now, this hour current, the minute passing and yes, even your breath now drawn could not possibly be claimed by you or me. For though we assume ownership of our lives and livelihood, in that we choose careers, build homes and make our lives in the context of happiness, lasting possession, quite simply, is not our own. We busy ourselves, yes, but in the business of building our lives, we mistakenly lay our hand to heavy on all that we claim, “Mine”.

Not so. Not ever.

When tragedy or calamity strike and cut into the intimacy of our lives, we raise our hand to the sky, not in reverent acknowledgement of He who does truly own life and lives, but in curse-filled rebuke demanding reason for a violation. Every man, no matter his theology, admits what he knows but forgets in his business of life and ownership – life is not ours to have and hold, as we will. Ask the mother who lost her child, the husband lost without his wife, the little child swallowed by grief. Ask me. I would tell you a tale of a man moving through life undisturbed who mistook his fortune and happiness for God’s goodness, was profoundly wounded in losing his spouse and lost all that gave cause for security in the life he thought he owned. His hand, too, rose to the sky.

Give us this day our daily bread . . .

When I was a child, I repeated this prayer many nights just before drifting off in sleep. None of those nights did the meaning ever truly penetrate through my head into my heart. Even after my brother’s death and growing up in a household shrouded in grief, life didn’t feel so fragile to me. Truth is, as many discover along the way, life is fragile – much more than we know. When we do discover this truth through tragedy or dislodging loss of some kind, we also arrive at the point where we learn and know that life is not our own to claim, for we cannot right the happenings we measure wrong, nor can we breathe life where it is no more. And so it is at this point precisely, where life fractures and suffering makes little sense to us who’ve lost. This truth of life’s fragility revealed in loss is of no good consolation to the one who has suffered and is grieving, and yet, it is truth to be taken as such and swallowed for our own good.

So the prayer goes to the One who actually does own life and days in humble request and admittance: Give us this day our daily bread. This is the nucleus of thought shaping my next book.

Nearly five years ago, when my wife then unexpectedly died, life splintered into a thousand vacated pieces of all that I once owned. No understanding made sense. Certainly not an understanding that God allowed her death to be so, and yet in a sense her death was allowed. Surely God took notice of how our lives were lived, of how we gave of ourselves to serve others and of the goodness our lives brought to the world and of our little girls all under the age of eight years of age. In the years since, we’ve grieved and will continue to deal with grief in our family for many years to come. Grief is a life-long movement, which I believe holds the potential to reorient us to God in a most powerful way. What I couldn’t see in the aftermath of life undone was hope for anything else good to come. My view stood impeded by my fortunate and undisturbed good life and then by the circumstance of loss, but as the dust settled I’ve come to see what has always held my life together: God’s sovereignty. As such my life was then able to be renovated by His hands, not mine, and I will always expect it to be as built on rock rather than shifting sand.

This is a theology of suffering: God owns, we do not.

(image: Hope by Mike Bitzenhofer licensed by CC 2.0)

TO INCITE ADVENTURE, to chase boundaries from their dreams, to hold open their hearts and guide them into the world all around, that is the whole of my heart as a parent.

Our bags await, packed and readied, for tomorrow we write an adventure together – just the two of us this time.

For months, I’ve listened to her little heart fizz with excitement as she dreamt up so many things for us to do together. I can’t help but think she’s more ready for this than I am. She always is. Today can barely hold onto her at times, especially when she loses herself in daydreams of a future she’s convinced can’t wait for her. She may very well be the fiery adventurous one of the three that leaves our home the moment she’s able to. I think she will. I love this about her – the adventure and hunger bound within her heart.

In her, I see clear my responsibility to God who’s crafted her heart in such a way as to long to chase the day ahead down and make it her own dwelling. Though the dad in me wants nothing more than to slow her step and keep her close, the father in me discovers fulfillment and exuberance in helping her learn to grow into the confidence needed to give gravity to the adventure calling to her. I’m not sure what she’ll do, but I’m set to help her learn to do it well, whatever the calling may be. And this means that as a parent I must be as much a learner with her as a teacher for her.

Tomorrow we set our way for the city of Angels. It wouldn’t have been my choice. As a matter of fact, I presented a strong case for the warm beaches of San Diego or the heavenly high woods just outside of San Francisco, to no avail, mind you. For in the end, this is her tenth year adventure. “Pick a place to explore; just you and me.” That was deal struck. When they reach their tenth birthday, they choose their adventure and together we explore.

I think we’ll find more than stars and scenery in the hills of LA. My prayer is we learn more about each other as dad and daughter and in the end, our hearts receive what all needed for the stretch of life ahead.

I love being a father. And I love adventures together.

WE ARE CAUGHT in an inescapable network of mutuality.

Those words. That knowing. His dream, informed by another, subservient beyond bounds right to what was true always, led him there and elsewhere. Most men care far less leaving them safer and justifiably right. Dr. King, indeed an intelligent man, will never be remembered for what he knew alone. Others knew as well and more, yet his dream moved him far beyond knowing alone. With the life of Martin Luther King, we should remember more than the icon, see race, but beyond, and deeper than the quotes of his oratory genius, to hear and learn what he knew – that it is not enough to know alone.

In Letter from Birmingham Jail, Dr. King’s response to fellow clergymen he deemed were “men of genuine goodwill” do more than immortalize a man who changed history. No, much more. Look and see. With his words he shows care to ensure his fellow clergymen do not mistake him to be the leader of any sort of justice movement. Instead he joins himself to a collective of outcasts who’ve cried from centuries past of Gospel freedom, a lasting freedom that no oppressor of race or economy or sex or name can ever truly rule over. For in Christ we have freedom, and in Him, we are freed indeed, now and forevermore.  Dr. King knew this, which is why from the confinement of a jail in Birmingham he could be nowhere else.

To know something is never enough. With knowledge comes responsibility for what we know. In the Good Samaritan, Jesus teaches that knowledge informs us as to guide us to what we should do and care for more than what we know with our heads. Is it not because he stooped to meet the needs of the wounded man that the Samaritan can be called good at all? We must care about what we know or perhaps we do not wholly know what we think we know. In fact, responsibility and care for what we know reveal what we actually do know.

Admittedly, I do not know all that I claim to know, not really and not truly. I allow for my knowledge to be thwarted by reason, comfort, busyness, reputation and so many other meaningless interruptions positioned between my head and heart. Certainly King, only a man himself, wrestled with this distance of head and heart and of knowledge and care for what he knew, but in his life what we see beyond the iconic legend is a man who won.

And so today, on a day where we give pause to remember a man and a movement, may knowledge so inform us, too, and may we – no, we must – care for all we know and so be guided to act. Then we will know all that we know.

We who know are indeed caught in an inescapable network of mutuality that we must care for.