Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes - Page 11

If truth be told, the easy road is nothing more than an armchair in clever disguise. And if you look around, it seems that there are a whole lot of people in the furniture business.

A lie is my attempt to tamper with the truth so that I need not face the truth. Yet as shrewd as I think myself to be, I would be wise to understand that God designed truth as ultimately tamper-proof.

Anything great will only be appreciated if I am given the opportunity to feel the absence of it, or experience the reversal of it. It is only then that I can even begin to understand its majesty and cherish it in the manner I should have all along.

To put others in front of ourselves is to put God in front of everything.

By choosing comfort we are in the very same decision choosing to miss every great thing in life, and that thought should be anything but comforting.

What we’re searching for will determine where we arrive, or if we arrive. And right in the middle of such risky choices, Christmas is God perfectly solving the problem by showing us what to search for and then bringing it to us.

If you think you can stand to know what you’re made of, try kneeling before God.

In too many instances we have settled for a world of our own shaping that is shaping up to be in terrible shape.

To avoid the cost incurred in pursuing great things we opt for ease and blithely abandon great things. The sheer recklessness of such a pathetically apathetic trade-off will eventually cost us a life squandered, which in the end is the greatest cost of all.

What insanity causes a king abandon the comforts of his kingdom and willfully discard the privileges of royalty in order to save an ornery and rebellious people who have spent a lifetime rejecting him? We have yet to understand that such an action is nothing of insanity. Rather, it is everything of love.

It‘s utterly astounding that every time I get knocked down God’s mercy compassionately raises me to my feet; His grace thoroughly brushes off every trace of assorted filth I accumulated in the fall, His word precisely recalibrates my direction to insure the success of a journey resumed, and once all of that is completed He gently leans over and whispers, “How about another run?

I would be dreadfully remiss not to think that God would painstakingly craft something an intimately ingenious and inexplicably intricate as my life, and that by virtue of such sheer brilliance I should not examine it with the greatest precision and unleash it with the fullest abandon.

We would prefer all gain and no loss in life, yet that would gain us nothing more than great loss.

If we’re honest, what makes something impossible is not our fear. Rather, it is our indifference.

To find one’s purpose is to discover one’s worth, discern one’s direction, wholly dedicate oneself to the journey, and forge an unbending determination that I will not leave the world the way I found it. This week's blog outlines the finding of our purpose.

If we dare examine our decisions, we will see our values woven in and through every single one of them. Therefore, it would do us well to take an occasional peek to insure that our values remain at their peak.

We live with this tortured feeling that we must create that which in reality we have the privilege of finding.

I take my cues from the world around me and carefully paint a self-portrait that the world can’t help but accept. However, I would be much wiser to put down all such artistic notions and hold up the portrait of me painted by God simply because that is a picture at which the world can’t help but marvel.

Sacrifice is a noun in my vocabulary that should be a verb in my life.

Risk is uncertainty injected into our most vulnerable places. And because that’s the case, we may choose not to risk.

Of course I fall. Yet, I incessantly blame my falls on circumstance so that I can deny my own inadequacy and therefore remain my own god. And so, I am left to ask which will come first, the fall that kills me or the surrender that saves me?

Running’ is driven by panic. ‘Destination’ is driven by thought. And while it’s terribly painful to admit, incessantly pretending that I do the latter doesn’t replace the fact that I’m constantly doing the former.

The barrier to our future is often the very plans that we’ve created to get there.

Denial is fear gone delusional. Acceptance is fear given to God. Engaging is fear overruled by God. Victory is fear banished by God.

Despite my best effort to make myself as large as absolutely possible, life will always be larger than me. That simple fact makes God not only a likelihood, but a necessity.

Where am I?” you ask. Where you are is where the things you’ve denied worshipping have taken you.

Eternity is the end of the end.

Ignorance might be bliss, but it also has teeth.

A god of the ‘possible’ is no God.

If your portfolio is made up of the investments that you have made in the lives of people, you will have amassed a wealth so vast that all the portfolios that will ever float the trading floor on Wall Street would, by comparison, be reckoned as nothing. And if by chance we dared to live by this truth, we would in fact love like none other.

Jesus came to give us life without leaving out any of life in the giving.

For once in my life maybe I ought to actually think about taking God at His word, and in doing so to suddenly find myself riotously welcoming the rather shocking reality that Christmas is truly everything that He says it is.

Oh God, please find it within your heart to grant me a heart that looks after itself only because it has first looked after others. And help me to realize that anything less is not a heart.

The length of the fall is dictated by how far we had climbed. The outcome of the fall is dictated by whether we’re holding on to that which we’re climbing, or we’re letting God hold onto us.

With God, the impossible is not an obstacle but an invitation.

Maybe I need to immerse the fabric of my soul in torrential nature of Christmas, and in doing so to finally understand that it is the very thing that can make the world what I so wish it were.

Are the returns on my journey equal to the length of the road behind me? And if not, have I realized the pressing need to surrender to God the road in front of me?

I am thankful that sacrifice is non-negotiable, and that counting the cost in giving to another is foolishly assuming that we can put a price on sacrifice.

Integrity is the antithesis of compromise and the sworn enemy of comfort. It bases its decisions not on how much discomfort we might be able to avoid, but on how much we need to avoid the compromise of comfort.

I am far too often the author of terribly poor decisions. Yet I must rest in the unalterable fact that God says I am far better than what the sum total of those decisions would ever suggest.

An exceptional future can only be built on the transformation of the mess I’ve made, not the elimination of it.

Most journeys are armchair calculations strategically charted in some reclined state that are designed to allow us to embark upon a grand journey without ever leaving the armchair. However, real journeys are absent of furniture.

Often we don’t see the majesty of God’s design because we’re caught up in the mediocrity of our own designs.

I am always trying to figure God out so that I can figure Him in. But after a while I figure that I should just let God be God, and figure that He’ll figure it all out anyway.

I incessantly look for water in wells dug by men, and I have drunk enough sand to prove it.

My wisdom absent of God’s wisdom is nothing more than a best-guess.

The romantic within us is a harbinger of our deepest desires.

We can live out our lives, and in the end realize that we never really ‘lived’ a day in our lives.

To calculate sacrifice is to attempt to sacrifice safely, and safe sacrifice is one of the most outrageous oxymoron’s I can think of.

With the gentle force of their words, the dogged warmth of their embrace, and the assuring touch of souls softly bared, mothers are silently shaping whole societies and authoring entire cultures that sit poised on the horizon of the future. And although we ignorantly relegate such roles to some lower caste status, we would be wise to understand that the role of a mother sets the cadence of the future.

To be found is to be exposed. No wonder so many of us are still lost.

I'm in a hole because at some point I found a shovel and started digging. Maybe I should trade my shovels for ladders and start climbing.

With God, being lost is nothing more than an idea that never has and never will be anything more than an idea.

Because a door slammed shut, we assume that our dreams were slammed shut with it. Yet before we surrender to a closed door, it might be wise to take a moment and consider the fact that any dream is far too big not to have a couple of back doors.

In evaluating ourselves, we tend to be long on our weaknesses and short on our strengths.

Judging others shackles them to the cold iron of our limited notions.

I have diligently disciplined my life to search out life’s gifts in the very places where society mistakenly says life stores its scraps. And I am constantly amazed that in the treasure trove that surrounds me, I stand in the company of so few.

Why is it that none of the things I construct ever make me feel safe? The answer lies in the fact that safety can’t be created. It can only be found. And the only thing I've found that’s never been created is God.

Denial is a seductive ruse of our own making, force-fitting our agendas by forcing out truth all because we bent to fear rather than bowed to God.

If your dream doesn't scare you, it's not big enough.