My new site is live. Go to guydelcambre.com to take a look. There are a few things that will adjust and be added, but it's a solid start. This site will remain, but will simply be a redirect page within the next few days. Lots of guest posts next week to kick off the first full week of the new site.

So much thanks to Meshali Mitchell for her amazingly creative photography and insights. Check her work out here: meshalimitchellphoto.com
By the way, Meshali Mitchell shot the video below for me recently.

Let me know what you think...

There is much to say about the year or so behind me; both a darkness and a glow to reflect upon.  Grief and grace.  Love and loss.  Redemption and a beautiful new day.  I found myself lost waking each day stumbling in circles, mumbling promises that did not belong to me.  Those days were dark.

 
and in the dark, cold, broken, alone
turn your face to the warming light
a harbor to the refuse of life undone

Happiness killed me, and I did not want to be.  It is the most peculiarly crushing feeling to not fit into your own life all of a sudden.  Comfort on all levels was barely comfortable.  Pictures of a life I once knew, faces of friends that we were connected to, a home that we built together and a day manufactured by our love and God’s hand, all broken and all much more unfamiliar.  That’s precisely how grief entered in my life.  One day life was uninterrupted and strong, full of love and expectation.  The next, terrified and haunted by the death of my wife.  Then a barrage of blurred days, melted together by pain, confusion, insecurity and fear.  I not only lost true love, but faith and God, too.  Prayer seemed worthless and superstitious as a result of unanswered desperate requests made as neatly and broken as I could make them.  And so, I lost my wife and my God.  It must be comparable to waking to a surgeon unexpectedly cutting into your chest to remove only half of your healthy heart.  The continual sensation being conscious and aware while only mostly sedated.  And then being rushed back into your daily routine while the scars only kept breaking open.  The days were long, my strength was short and I was lost with no end in sight.  People kept telling me things would change, that life would get better.  I resented some of them.

Somewhere along the way, slowly, not like a rushing wave cleansing the dirtiness of loss, pain away, but more like a steadily rising tide that begins to carry you and make you feel lighter, that new day arrived.  It will never be a good thing that I lost my wife, but I will never curse the day or dismiss it because the absolute bitterness and the now certainty of sweetness is that some of what I lost needed to be.  And the most beautiful and sacred thing that did not need to be was forever memorialized in the hearts of my daughters.  She would never want me to wallow and sink forever in the ashes of the life we once had together.  It was, but is no more. 

There are many thoughts about grief and how it exists in a person’s life; uninvited and unrelenting, but ultimately good.  If grief could be a measurement of one’s health or location of how close one is to making it out, then acceptance would be the finish line, but that is just as ridiculous as it sounds.  There is no finish line or certificate of completion to grief and loss.  I do not think of acceptance as some submissive posture of being okay with death breaking into my life and taking from me.  That will never be okay.  For me, acceptance as a form of grief and reaction to losing my wife is about recognizing the absolute beauty of what was, as it being special and unique, something all to ourselves, but is no more.  Acceptance is about giving myself permission to let that day lie in the past, stand in the depths of God’s grace and allow my heart to open fully again.  That day has arrived.  I have seen the glow on the horizon while the night was still cold, but now I feel the warmth that that new day brings.  In the most fitting of ways, the new day validates and supports my acceptance of what was.

Thanks for following me here for the past year or so, for traveling with me through such a time as it was and for being a depth of encouragement that you may never fully comprehend.  This will be the last post that I write here at allthingsdelcambre.com. 

My new site will launch later this week.  I will announce it here.  I hope you continue with us as we move on into love and life.

So in the end, I am not finished, but much more complete. 

“We were gonna get married.”

Sitting across from a man abandoned by time and lost in circumstance moving faster than his emotions and any ability to actually absorb all that was happening, I looked into his eyes that were mirrors for just a moment.  It was just me and him sitting there, both aware.  The woman he loved was there, but not completely.  Teetering somewhere between him and death was precisely where she was at, her body being swallowed by death in the form of cancer. 

“It spread faster than we ever imagined.  We love each other.”
“I’m certain you do, sir.  I can tell by the way you hold her hand, gently and protectively.”

He asked for a moment.  He was sinking in the confusing realization that it would not be too long before they were finally separated by her death.  The consolation, her suffering would be over.  That is only the smallest solace that is quickly overrun by the untimely arrival of death.  I left the room as he started to talk to her.

Waiting just outside her hospital room in the hustle of nurses and doctors, therapists and social workers and families walking by with either a look of relief or grief, I thought about death and circumstance and time.  I was a face wandering through the hustling halls of a hospital not long ago.  My look was one of grief.  Circumstance was insurmountable no matter how badly I wanted something different.  Time lost meaning and the days just spun in circles.  And sitting there, right outside of this dying woman’s hospital room where this man was me and I was him once, time found me as I tried to fight back tears for a man and his wife who had no more time together.  Inside of this room, the man knew it, too.  So did she, the one he wanted to marry.

Something he told me just continually replayed in my head.  “She was scheduled to begin a newly released drug that just got approved in two days.  It is supposed to be the best thing for melanoma.”  No matter how effective that drug truly was, it didn’t make a difference.  It couldn’t, and it wouldn’t.  There was no time.

It is true that there is no time like the present.  But those are usually the words of men spooked by fear, bothered by failure and haphazardly walking into what they may or may not quite be ready for.  The glaring truth is that the present is all that we really have.  It is all that truly exists.  And the present time is full despite what the day before or the day impending after, or even the very next moment, may hold.

Now is both a promise and an opportunity.  Tomorrow is neither with absolute certainty and yesterday has come and gone.

With my work badge hanging on my belt, wearing dress clothes typical for me during my work day and while setting up this woman’s end of life care, I realized that for a good part of the last year and a half, I have been swaying between the aftermath of the death of the woman who once so lovingly and incredibly was my wife and the life glimmering and shining with promise just ahead.  Yesterday and tomorrow defining my response to today.  And it’s been killing me.

For the very few absolutely amazing things gracefully existing in my life right now today, there is no time to live with the weight of yesterday or the pressure of tomorrow.  I must allow today to be valued only by the time that it contains.  Otherwise, I’ll worry away people and possibility that I love.

Today is here, and it is happening now.  May it continue to be a miraculous result of God’s unending, persistent grace.  And let it be an announcement echoing within my heart to love those in my life easily and live the day thoroughly in the moments given now.

Truth holds a value forever deeper than words. 
Words are a vehicle that both carry and hold truth. 

It is quite simple.  When we do not tell the truth, we lie.  Truth is not a complexity that must be judged, evaluated or measured.  It plainly and very absolutely is what it is.  We lie when we do not speak truth.  No matter how convenient or polite or thoughtful it may be to not tell the truth, if it is anything other than what is real or honest, it will always be a lie.

“How do I look?”

Relationships can only really exist when they are held by truthfulness and honesty.  Without truth, relationships cannot evolve.  In fact, relationships that exist with holes maintained, not only remain immature and anemic, but dissolve and crumble.  Truth is an accurate measuring depth of health, direction and growth of every intimate relationship.  Without honesty and truth, all you have is a loosening association.

What you really say when you do not tell the truth is that I do not matter as much as you do.  No relationship can suffer such a blow, especially repeatedly.  Over time, it is small, convenient untruths, lies, that cause much more harm to relationships than isolated ones that are corrected.  A person who is repeatedly lied to will struggle with having to determine if what is being spoken is truth or not.  Distracted with having to validate and confirm truth, the relationship suffers.  When we lie and pass it for truth, we begin to redefine what truth actually means.  Truth and honesty become something a bit more ambiguous and reconfigurable when we need it to be.  What we really say is that we are very honest only when it is good for us to be.  Otherwise, in tough and straining situations, there is a good chance we are not telling the truth. 
At least not completely.

And what is truth if it is not true?   

Truth is better than gold to me.  Without it, there is nothing to hold two people together meaningfully.  With it, relationships are indescribably beautiful, immeasurably strong and forever valuable.

As best as I can and in all situations, I am striving to be honest consistently and thoroughly.  Truth is, I am only as good in relationships as what I really say.  If the cumulative total of your words is a trail of half truths and conveniently positioned words, then you will always lack deep connection.

Truth is a lesson that I am continually trying my best to stay fully committed to.  By doing so, I will be able to teach it accurately to my daughters.  That is my ultimate secondary goal.  One day, they will be committing themselves to relationships.  I want them to be identified as trustworthy.  In teaching them to be honest now, I will be giving them the gift and ability of being able to establish healthy, quality relationships that they are secure in, not always protecting, proving, reshaping and trying to hold together.

Hope raises men from the ashes and the lonely depths of missteps and defeat.  Like a rope thrown out to a drifter overboard and under-lucked, pulled by waves in the direction of lost, hope is a way back. 

Hope is a voice calling amidst all that is perverse and befouled to a heart, mine, graffiti-ed with accusations against a Protector who did not defend me against all that opposed and did not answer when I called.  Left to politely violent, disruptive little violators of sleep and sanity, untrustworthy and unrelenting, damnable lies picking at the little that did remain like vultures craving the death of the defenseless, wounded carnage that was once a life together, now broken dreams undone.  That is how hope found me, shuffling around in the ashes of the life I once knew just the other day.  It was a sure voice guiding me back to life and safety.

I think of hope as a continual rescuing, a safe harbor always open and just within distance.

Hope is the deep breath taken when life gets a little heavier than normal, whatever it is that normal exactly means now.  Tomorrow and the life ahead is brighter, warmer and inviting because today, right in this moment when things do not always set easily and during those days inexplicably more difficult than others, hope has lifted me.  I have drowned a thousand times in seas too stormy to survive.  Each time, it is hope that has revived me when my grasp on life has loosened.

And what reason generates such a capable and certain hope?

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.
“Because he holds fast to me in love, I will deliver him; I will protect him, because he knows my name.  When he calls to me, I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will rescue him and honor him.  With long life I will satisfy him and show him my salvation.”  
 Psalm 91:1, 15-16, ESV

It is nothing and no other but He who provides such a surety of hope.  God of the beginning and of the end is plenty capable to sustain all that happens and goes awry in the middle.

I am deeply thankful for the hope that He has implanted and continues to nourish within my heart and in each day no matter the condition and circumstance.  Hope is a reality invading, overcoming and replacing all that seems forever foggy and dismal.  It is God’s reality of redemption and goodness that no matter how far-fetched and good it can seem at times faithfully lifts me up.


For your contemplation and thinking on this Thanksgiving day...

Oh come, let us sing to the Lord;
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!
Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!
For the Lord is a great God,
and a great King above all gods.
In his hand are the depths of the earth;
the heights of the mountains are his also.
The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.
Oh come, let us worship and bow down;
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand.
Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,
as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,
when your fathers put me to the test
and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.
For forty years I loathed that generation
and said, “They are a people who go astray in their heart,
and they have not known my ways.”
Therefore I swore in my wrath,
“They shall not enter my rest.”
Psalm 95, ESV

Love finds us.

A person can love all they want with fidelity and steadiness, and yet, still not sink into the full warmth of love’s embrace.  Like an actor playing a part for no one watching or a poet writing words that are not being read, love only leaving you and not returning lacks the fullness of its experience and intention.  I was loved once for no other reason than her choosing, and it unlocked places within my heart that I had never known were even there, or locked, for that matter.  Love finds us.

My face could not adjust from the smile stubbornly remaining.  My hands full of the weight of a life so perfectly given.  My heart leaped and collapsed and grew stronger and clearer the moment I held each of my new born daughters for the first time.  All three experiences were very different and unique, fitting for their beautiful arrivals into the world and our lives.  I loved them before I knew them.  And now, their lives respond to my love given.  Much like a well watered plant, they grow healthily.  Love finds us.

Love both given and received, by us and to us, is but a hint, a whisper telling and revealing the basis of life, humanity and all that we know: love.  Time begun.  Life created.  Sin interrupted.  Love redeeming.

I am thankful for having every reason to love, but for being loved also.

Love finds us.

We all grow up.  Then we die.

Just as day overcomes the darkness of night only to fade leaving no sign, not even a glimmer, life miraculously is and then, it is no more.

That’s how I used to think about death and the space between now and then. 

I am a middle child who grew up as an oldest but seemingly never forgot that I was in the middle.  My older brother, who in his time stood taller than me and owned my affection, lived a relatively short life.  But that was so long ago.  A lifetime ago.  I was really young.  Five.  Much of the details about his illness escape me.  There is not a day, however, that I forget that he died.  I have three lasting memories about my brother, Colby: repeated trips to St. Jude’s in Memphis, playing with our Star Wars figurines in our bedroom closet and playing in the back yard on a wood stack.  That’s it. 

Well, I do have a final thought.  Standing next to the hearse as they put his body into it.  It was raining that day, or at least it felt like it.  I wanted only to escape that day and for things to be different.  My dad’s heavy, able hand resting on my chest as I stood as tall as I could in front of him.  I was five years old and did not fully understand why I was crying, but I do remember a deep loss settle within my heart, and a fear.

In the twenty eight years following, I found so much life.  Just as the warmth and beauty of a new day can cause you to forget haunting dreams that reside in the night, life and all of its goodness can effectively distance you from the crisis of tragedy and death.  All is mostly good during the day.  In fact, most is great.  Life was amazing for us.  Then unannounced and unwanted day slipped into night.  Death arrived, again.

Night returns.  The day fades no matter how certain things seem.

I can remember being in such a fog for most of the year following Marianne’s death.  A mother and a wife gone with no sign, no good reason and no meaningful explanation.  Just no more.

Death took so much for me.  Reason.  Faith.  Trust.  Hope.  Breath.

Inadvertently, and maybe even gracefully, death also took fear from me.  Death has become a friend teaching me value; what to hold tightly and what to let loose.  In a peculiar way, that is a little unsettling at times, I am thankful. 

For without night, there would be no hope or expectation in a new day.  Death reminds me that life is full and that I have much, so much, to be thankful for.

We were half way through the ride, my first time on a mountain bike in well over eight years.  At the top of a drop off apparently known as the ‘piss and scream’, I contemplated several things that contributed to my safety and well-being.  For starters, I had not been on a mountain bike trail in over eight years.  My sense of balance and instinct on my bike lacked a certain crispness and confidence necessary for sharp corners and fast transitioning terrain.  Of equal importance was the fact that my bike had not been tuned up or adjusted since the day I bought it, close to ten years earlier.  In the more challenging parts of the ten mile trail, I could tell that my bike was as out of shape as I was.  The brakes didn’t really bite or respond the way I needed them to, the gears kept skipping and my seat was positioned too high.  All of these issues caused me to lack confidence on the trail, but this drop off was one of the more challenging and intimidating parts of the trail.  Standing at the top, looking over my handle bars, the drop appeared to be only slightly more horizontal than a straight vertical drop.  I estimated it to be at least 20 foot change in elevation from top to bottom.  What made that part of the trail even more intimidating was the fact that as soon as you hit the bottom with ridiculous speed, you had to brake slightly to make the right 90 degree turn through two trees a tad bit wider than standard handle bar width.

In a moment of delirium and testosterone, I closed my eyes for a second, white-knuckled my handle bars and just went for it.  Honestly, I probably wasn’t experienced enough to attempt any technical parts of the trail especially this part.  I opened my eyes half way down in just enough time to adjust for the turn at the bottom, nicking my right elbow on one of the trees.  I did it.  I just went for it and gave it all of my effort in that moment.

The first few words that came out of my mouth in response to Elizabeth’s question, “Is S-E-X a bad thing?”, felt a lot like just going for it on the trail that day.  It was one of the most intimidating moments I have ever experienced as a dad.

Here’s a truth I learned: effort most often displaces experience.

I asked her what she knew and understood sex to be.

“Making out and sleeping in bed.”

That was plenty enough to tell me that the topic of sex was discussed in conversation with friends and classmates.  Right then and there, I knew that not only did I need to try to find an answer for her question, but more importantly I needed to set right the reality of what sex is all about.  It was a golden opportunity.

I could see her more fully attentive as I told her that sex was not a bad thing at all.  In fact, sex is a very good thing that is experienced between a man and a woman who make a promise and a commitment to be husband and wife forever.  “That’s what God intended sex to be.  Something very intimate shared between two people who blend their lives together, forever.  After all, where do you think you came from?”
 
“So, a husband and a wife sleep together and that’s sex?”
“Uh, well...yeah.”

I figured this is as much as she needs to know at this point.  The details can come as she gets a little older.

In that conversation, I realized something and became very resolute and passionate about it.  If I do not have this talk, then I will forfeit the opportunity to score truth in her life and establish a good foundation in my daughter’s heart.  If I don’t speak up, then someone else will.  The last thing I want is for someone else to speak into her life in this area. 

Dads, I believe completely that it is exactly us who should be the voice speaking to the truth of love and relationships in our daughters’ lives.  This includes the uncomfortable talk about S-E-X.  I have no choice in the matter, and neither do they.  My girls do not have their mom anymore.  They only have me.  And it’s a good thing because I am the most perfect person on this planet to be the one to establish how love is defined in their lives.  Dads, even though your situation may be different from mine, you should not abandon this talk to her mom.  A daughter needs their daddy more than ever as they grow older, not less.  Traditionally, the tendency is for the dad to become more distant as his little girl who liked to wrestle and follow him around begins to develop and mature into a young woman.  But this is when daughters need their daddy the most to love them, accept them and being just as involved helping them navigate through the changes, as they develop into young women.

You do not need to have all the answers.  You really do not even need to have a single discernible answer as much as you must have an open, accepting heart that is engaged in their lives as it changes.  And dads, think about it like this: if you do not establish your daughter’s definition and idea of love, someone else will.  The last person I want establishing love in any of my daughters’ lives and being the non-discriminant open arms to them is some sensationally and hormonally driven, pimple raging boy who is ‘there’ for them.

To this end, I’ll fore-go experience and give that conversation all the effort I’ve got to see that love is defined by my willingness to go wherever they need me to go in conversation and always expect my arms to be open to them as they find their way in life.  One emotional day, I will give each of my daughters away to a man each of their choosing.  I can do more than only hope he is good. 

By defining love and establishing the idea of sex as something really good and intimate shared between two people who commit their lives together, I can almost create the man that they will identify and notice in the future.  I do not want them falling into the arms of someone who happens to be available.  He will be the one.  And I will have done my job.