Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes - Page 14

We’re constantly presented with opportunity, or the opportunity to create opportunity.

To recklessly excuse a failure is to believe that I’ve effectively erased it from the story of my life, when I’ve actually imprinted it in indelible ink.

Risk is the clue that our dreams are both real and great.

If I am sufficiently brave to extract the cancer of fear, I have effectively gutted my conviction that what stands before me is impossible.

An ending is only happening because at some point it was a beginning. And if an ending is dependent upon a beginning, I would be well advised to focus on the miracle of beginnings verses the pain of endings.

We have the power of the pen to write the next chapter, and the privilege to author the page in whatever fashion we choose. Yet, seldom do we understand the power of the pen and the privilege of the page.

It has nothing to do with who I am as compared to everyone else. It has everything to do with who I am in companionship with God.

Tragedy descends, and in the carnage our enraged cynicism screams ‘If there was a God, He would not have allowed this!’ And somehow we’ve conveniently forgotten that once upon a time He allowed us to tell Him to go away, and once upon that time we allowed ourselves to take Him up on that offer.

I can confidently state that the greatest rescues in my life have occurred when I’ve been saved from myself.

We are about the hurried business of living life while missing it in the very process of living it.

In my desperation, I have finally discovered that the only way that I can begin to fill the gaping hole within me is to be thankful for what’s there, and not angry for what’s not.

Uncommon solutions can always overcome problems of the most common or uncommon kind if I am sufficiently committed to overcoming them.

The worst thing that I can do is humanize God. The second worst thing that I can do is deify myself. And the best thing that I can do is to avoid both.

Too often my solution is to let something die because I can’t keep it alive, when God’s solution is to let something live because His Son already died for it.

I am thankful that in the giving we receive, and what we receive is the satisfaction of knowing that whatever we give is always bigger once we’ve given it away.

To fill the fathomless caverns of my thirsty soul I must work entirely contrary to impulses of my own humanity, for it is in emptying myself at the very point where I am most empty that I fill myself.

The war on Christmas is waged of weakness and fed by vision blinded. It is a war of intellect blunted to stupidity and calling begging at the feet of cowardice.

I am likely to fail if I have determined the cost as too high or my intelligence as too low. Yet, if I think about it, the real failure rests in believing either of these to be true.

It is not that you give birth to a child that matters most. Rather, it is what you birth into them.

Despite all of our incessant tinkering, we can’t manufacture the things we most desperately need. And if perchance we do, they will never be more than pathetically emaciated facsimiles that will leave us emaciated. And until we finally realize that we can only ‘find’ these things, we will never sense any compulsion to ‘find’ God.

To forgive is to refuse to contaminate the future with the errors of the past.

We are always immeasurably bigger than the little person we’ve too often doomed ourselves to be.

It is my wish and most cherished hope that God would be pleased with my legacy, that lives would be changed by it, and that the world would be immeasurably better because I was privileged to leave a legacy at all. And if perchance I am fortunate enough to have these things come to pass, I can then rest in the fact that I have lived well.

A lot of the situations that we put ourselves in are similar to a cat in a yard full of dogs. We rarely ask ourselves how we got here, (which doesn’t help with the question of how we get out of here), all of which rarely keeps us from finding ourselves in the next yard asking the same questions.

The cross unerringly exposes this stunningly marvelous and abruptly exquisite declaration that God will not let this single life of mine, with all of its grotesque maladies and pathetic filth pass into oblivion without unflinchingly declaring that my life carries a value worth the expenditure of His. And if I dare look upon the cross, I am utterly perplexed but wholly enraptured by the immensity of such a love as this.

Maybe the truth of it all is that we’re just too fearful to give our faith enough running room to realize that this precariously thin path that led us to the end of this life is dwarfed to obscurity by the infinitely vast byway that begins immediately on the other side.

With God, anything that stands against you will always be inferior to what resides within you.

I think we need to consider a radical rewrite of any form of patriotism that serves the individual at the expense of the community, as that is nothing more than patriotism to one's own small and solitary cause.

Of course I don’t want to get knocked down. But the single and sole solution to that fear is to not go anywhere where I can be knocked down. And is that not already being knocked down?

At the moment that everything goes dark, the sunset in front of us becomes the whole story. But if we find courage enough to wait until tomorrow morning, we will suddenly come to understand that in reality yesterday’s sunset was only half of the story.

If I assume the ‘truth’ to be negotiable based on whether or not it serves my agenda, then my agenda has become my ‘truth.’ And the ‘truth’ of the matter is, when I do this I’ve chosen to take a treacherous path through some very deep woods where neither path nor woods exist.

When standing face to face with myself, I far too often refuse to look in the mirror. When standing face to face with God, there is no place where a mirror is not.

To label myself is similar to thinking that I can come up with a single phrase to explain the universe.

The worst of it is that while we continue to sink deeper into the muck and mire that we’ve created, in the very descent itself we ignorantly declare that in reality we are rising. And until desperation has crippled us sufficiently to confess the lie that we are lifting ourselves out of this mess, and until the panic of utter hopelessness has driven us to completely surrender all of the pathetic contrivances that we’ve fashioned that have put us there, we will never realize that God has readied solid ground that stands but a single step away

What insanity would lead me to believe that I possess the power, much less the aptitude to manipulate all of the consequences out of all of my decisions?

Maybe what I need to be rescued from is the feeling that I don’t need to be rescued, for without a doubt this is the most difficult rescue of all.

If I look closely, my failures are less about my inadequacies and more about the fact that I channel my abilities into the wrong places.

God beckons me to exhilarating adventures that are without number, beyond all conceivable boundaries, and effortlessly eclipse the furthest reaches of my imagination, all while I sit languishing in stifling adventures of my own limited creation.

Christmas is a response to bring mankind back, to restore some original intent that could never be even remotely restored by any effort of mankind regardless of how grand or majestic any such effort might be.

It’s not that I’ve ‘faked my own death’ as the saying goes. Maybe it’s that I’ve ‘faked my own life,’ and in doing so I’ve yet to realize how dead I really am.

To deny the battle is unwise. To believe that I can fight it without God is insane. To actually do so is suicidal. No wonder so many of us walk around looking like death warmed over.

To only see ‘death’ in death is to somehow assume that death itself is a barrier so abrupt that God Himself is halted by it. To see ‘life’ in death is to understand that death is a sprawling horizon to a new beginning that God created long before death ever thought to show up.

Without a beginning I am pouring the whole of my existence into the building of endings, while the cross and the resurrection declare that God is incessantly building beginnings from the collapse of endings.

I would be an utter fool to let my journey be defined by the denial of the journey.

Have we ever thought to consider that God allows things in our lives to die so that in that death we might come to the precious realization of how little we’ve actually lived in the first place?

Christmas is a clandestinely ingenious script that outlines a plan to reclaim mankind through a strategy unimagined and unimaginable. This strategy involved God writing His own death into the script.

Christmas was about understanding that servanthood would win the hearts of men for eternity, where raw power might win them only for a moment, if at all.

Once I have impounded love and towed it into the confine of words, I have lost it altogether.

Human beings manifesting the fullness of who they were created to be would be inviting and correspondingly transformational in a manner almost mysterious.

One of the most terrifying things I fear is not my potential, but how much regret I’ll die with should I never use it.

To be blessed and yet permit gluttony to blind me to the blessings is to banish myself to a life of unrelenting poverty even though I might be utterly engulfed in the embrace of a million marvelous blessings.

I am amazed that without any hesitation whatsoever I can completely believe myself to be on a grand journey of massive vistas and bold ascents, only to find that they are nothing more than a figment of a frightened imagination that needed a journey but could not admit to the fear of actually taking one.

It would be advisable to realize that we will eventually become whatever it is that we’ve created. And too often what we’ve created is a massive mess.

If I’m conceited enough to believe I’m invincible, then maybe it will take me doing the very thing I swore I would never do to understand that I’m not as wonderful as I thought I was.

Most of our fears are borrowed. Since that’s the case, we should get busy returning them.

To be ‘one’ in one’s own hands is to be ‘one.’ To be ‘one’ in the hands of God is to be ‘one’ that is far too vast to be counted.

Rare are the handful of principles that incessantly drive us to stand even when we face the stark realization that we will likely perish in the standing. And rarer still is the person who will surrender all to protect such principles. Yet, the rudimentary principles of freedom and liberty pristinely untarnished by greed and selfishness took captive the hearts of simple people and raised this nation up from untamed wilderness and unchecked tyranny. And let us all be warned that without renewed adherence to these principles, we will rapidly return this nation to untamed wilderness and unchecked tyranny.

The adult within me would be much wiser to learn from the child within me rather than focus on the demand that the child within me grow up.

In the oddity or maybe the miracle of life, the roots of something new frequently lie in the decaying husks of something old.

Forgiveness means that you will not allow a temporary event to have “forever” repercussions.