Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes - Page 13

To seek the praise of men as our motivation is to abandon truly great things, for more often than not truly great things elicit the ire of men far more than they garner their praises.

The most critical time in any battle is not when I’m fatigued, it’s when I no longer care.

The burdens I carry on my back are in direct correlation to the weight of my ego.

What I do is the truest mirror of who I am.

Be confidently assured that any ‘gods’ that we build will always have veracious appetites, and sooner or later they will gorge themselves on that which built them.

Good tells us that our agenda is the agenda of the person next to us.

I too often allow people to become a sterile commodity to be bartered in the service of my greed, and in doing something so absurdly reckless I foolishly barter away everything that meets my need.

Heaven shows up all the time. But we plan our time so that we show up in other places.

In one way or another, every mission that I have ever set out on to rescue myself is yet another mission that I end up needing to be rescued from. Hence, there is God.

I craft most of my own tragedies without ever having even the remotest understanding that it is I myself who have done the crafting.

The problem with the ‘herd’ is that our voice is never ‘heard’.

Loving those who hate us means wantonly setting the stage and orchestrating the situation in a way that’s sure to result in a production of great personal calamity. But to not love them is an even greater calamity.

In a very tragic kind of way, sometimes things have to be gone before I fully realize that they were ever there.

While real sacrifice is committed to the result, it relishes the effort

We cannot humanize the fact that the story was penned to have the eternal God, Who Himself knows no beginning nor is in need of one, choose to experience a beginning. That is genius in and of itself.

In the thoughtlessness of my incessant hurry, I have made God an ‘addendum in’ my life verses the ‘agenda of’ my life. And what I need to hurry up and realize is that with these priorities positioned as such, what I am hurrying to is my own demise.

To say that my existence is entirely inconsequential is to utterly ignore the amazing reality that life is a masterful story penned by a brilliant God who wrote me into the story in such a way that my absence would literally diminish the whole of the story.

It is, I think, a far lesser offense to blatantly ignore God’s directions for our lives rather than arrogantly think ourselves shrewd enough to be able to bend them to our liking without breaking them and therefore breaking ourselves.

Although I rail against it, death is the dark demarcation beyond which I am at the mercy of my own end. To the contrary, an empty tomb says that my end is at the mercy of God’s beginning.

The problem with holiness is that once we look into the face of it we are no longer capable of taking that which is odious and filthy and somehow pretending that it’s translucent and clean. In other words, we have to do one of the most revolting things possible; we have to face ourselves.

The assumption of ‘rights’ is the cancer of privilege.

We really can’t afford to live our lives walking in some sort of introspective darkness as if the darkness is the only thing that we can walk in.

Discouragement is the cancer of great things.

We can’t even remotely fathom that whatever is ending for us is always more than an ending.

Too many of us view liberty as something that ‘just is,’ and too few see it as something that ‘is’ only because someone, somewhere was faced with the formidable reality that to keep liberty meant paying a stiff price.

I am pressed to admit that I don’t have the capacity to understand the bloodied horrors of a cross and the wild exhilaration of an empty tomb. But at the point that I think I completely understand God, I have at that very point humanized Him and in that very action I have lost Him. Therefore, I much prefer to simply marvel.

To lust for something is desire turned selfish and gone mad. To embrace God’s passion is desire turned selfless and gone mindful.

Once I finally understand the immensity of my own impoverishment, I am finally in a position to see the enormity of God’s majesty.

Words can be honed to crafted perfection by the finest wordsmiths. Yet, if we trust solely in the expanse of them to explain this God of ours or articulate our experience of Him, we will have brutally destroyed the very things we are attempting to explain. And if I should do that, no words can describe how badly I wish I had no words.

The greatest prayers that I could ever utter come from the heart. And when I pray that way, I rarely need to open my mouth. Therefore, maybe I should think about talking less.

Far too often, it is at the moment where we finally stand on the very precipice of some great thing that we turn and abandon it, for it is at these seminal moments that fear wins and greatness dies. The beauty of Christmas is that God steps over precipices.

Humanized gods are too small to captivate my imagination, or be worthy of my fullest allegiance.

An idea without sacrifice, regardless of grand it might be, will never be anything more than an idea.

Independence that has declared its ‘independence’ from the sure and certain compass of sound morals is nothing more than rogue greed having scantily dressed itself in the garb of independence while running off the cliff of anarchy.

The only reason I can’t jump in and engage life is that I’ve told myself I can’t. Yet I can’t helping wondering would happen if I told myself I could?

In the midst of our worried searching we recklessly abandon the treasures that life has bestowed upon us in the mad hunt for that which we wish to bestow upon ourselves.

I often wonder if my imagination is one of God’s choicest gifts bestowed upon me to deliberately break me free from the frequent doldrums of my humanity.

I cannot live without you. For to attempt to do so would be to rob both of us of each other, and that is thievery of the greatest sort.

I pray that I am sufficiently stirred by the rumor of great things to seek the God who created this single thread that I am, and to marvel at a vision magnificent enough to cause this God to weave from this single thread a tapestry most resplendent.

If I were to sit down and count them, how many of my prayers were tainted by the seduction of greed? None, simply because nothing of that sort is a prayer.

Tragedy cleans the windows of the soul by washing away the bias of our lives in the detergent of pain.

Jesus came to give us life so unimaginably beyond anything that we could ever hope to conceptualize that wonder cannot help but be our constant companion.

The reason placing blame repeatedly fails to work is that I repeatedly place it on everyone else instead of where it actually belongs.

To destroy that which seeks to destroy me, God invites me to stand against it until it stands down and then falls down.

The father who has selflessly poured himself into the life of his children may leave no other monument than that of his children. But as for a life well lived, no other monument is necessary.

The problem is not that we don’t recognize the truth when we hear it. The problem is that we don’t want to recognize what the truth might mean for us if we hear it.

If safety is my goal, living life is not.

It is the length of the journey that ripens the joy of the outcome.

To live a lie may allow us to avoid the truth, but the real lie lays in believing that we can avoid the truth in the first place.

I am what no one else is, and in the hands of God I can do what no one else does. And if I dare set such a truth in motion I will change my world.

The greatest men stand on their values and pray on their knees.

Fear tells me that while there might be a host of people who wish to stand beside me in times of crisis, the tangled wreckage is sometimes so enormous that the best of their efforts leave them stranded at a great distance. And standing desperately alone surveying the carnage that holds all others a bay, God suddenly taps me on the shoulder, leans over and whispers, 'how about a little demolition?

The key to understanding if something is truly precious is to ask if we can hold it, for things truly precious cannot be held.

How often do I stand in abject terror and raw trepidation before the impossible peaks that soar to impossible heights in front me, when God turns to me and calmly says “what mountains?

I cannot create greatness as I can only create weak facsimiles. And in sorting through the innumerable facsimiles around me, I will only happen upon true greatness when I happen upon the true God.

If I don’t know who I am apart from everyone else, I probably need to spend some time apart from everyone else.

I have yet to learn that I am not designed to carry the burden of men. Rather, I am designed to carry the love of God so that I might soothe the burden of men.

Imagination envisions what could be. Reality states what is. And when my journey is shaped by one of these at the exclusion of the other, I will eventually wake up on some road facing the ‘reality’ that I’m far more lost than I could have ‘imagined’.

I can only see life as this most miserable accident that I have been forced to endure simply because I refuse to see it as the most astounding plan that I have been privileged to engage.

Authentic love is deciding to live on a one-way street where all the arrows point down the street and not a single one of them point back up to where I’m standing.