Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes - Page 15

If I can draw the slightest smile across a single face obliterated by pain, in that act I will have begun to understand the power of an ordinary human being to perform the seemingly impossible in the life of another human being. And how can that experience do anything less than drive me to try and make the world smile.

To declare myself as a genius immediately evidences that I am not.

The Christmas story is penmanship of the most brilliant sort, where God crafted a beginning that would never be subject to an ending.

I must not imagine what is ‘not’ as a means of escaping what ‘is’. Rather, I must understand what ‘is’ and imagine how I can make it what it is ‘not’.

The art of living is to rise above lesser things so that we can truly enjoy great things. And the message of Christmas is the greatest of all things.

If I have not been both soothed by love and on the opposite extreme left devastated by it, I will never understand its power nor respect its majesty.

The issue is becoming so absorbed in positioning ourselves ahead of everyone else that life becomes nothing more than an endless strategy.

Contrary to popular opinion, we are all a vast brotherhood of human beings whose very survival hinges not on what we keep, but on what we give. And it is in the giving that we not only survive to live another day, but we thrive to celebrate another day.

The more we construct lives that prioritize safety, the bigger the prison we construct around ourselves.

Undoubtedly, failure is growth in pain’s disguise.

What is an adventure, I might ask? And in the asking, I might begin to understand that my adventures are sorely limited to the confines of my lackluster imagination. Therefore, an adventure of the most robust and wild sort must be constructed by an unlimited imagination. And unless I am mistaken, only God has an imagination like that.

Too often it’s about what stands before us, not what stands within us.

Faith is the most unexercised muscle known to man.

Do I make up some ‘god’ in my mind, or do I make up my mind to know God?

Hope is oxygen to the soul, and God is the oxygen of hope.

Although it pains me, I must admit that I have never found what I ‘need.’ And I am in this place because long ago I took it upon myself to decide what I ‘want’ to need, verses surrendering to what I ‘need’ to need. And thankfully I have realized that God made Christmas everything that I ‘want,’ but more so He made it everything that I ‘need.

We can fill our lives with ‘stuff,’ but as we do we’re concurrently filling our lives with the obligation to maintain that ‘stuff.

I would suggest that the prisons I incessantly create are not designed to lock me in, rather they are designed to lock the world out. And the oddity is that either way, I am a prisoner who has sentenced himself to a prison within which I do not belong.

The greatest abuse that we perpetrate on liberty is our assumed right to it.

Of course God does outrageous things. But in reality, what insanity would prompt me to follow a God who did anything less?

It would be wise to define ‘living’ as walking in the fullest expression of who I am, verses wallowing in the confines of who I’m not.

Dream extravagantly, for God has imbued us with ample imagination to dream out to and across the very periphery of the impossible.

I hold in my hand a million ideas and more. But if I am puzzled as to why they have never leapt out of my hand and been birthed into the realities they were crafted to be, it is likely because the other hand has withheld the sacrifice that is necessary to birth an idea.

The worst denial of all is being in denial that we’re in denial in the first place. And I would wonder if that’s not exactly where most of us live out most of our lives.

I am thankful that to be attuned to the needs of another attunes us to the world, and that if I stay attuned only to my needs I will always be a stranger to the world.

Being lost without grasping the rather obvious fact that we are lost is by far the best guarantee we have that we’re going to stay lost.

If you can get others to believe that your random guesses are actual answers, they’ll never guess that you never understood the question in the first place.

My fear of standing alone often pressures me to stand with a rather unsavory group that embraces a rather unsettling belief system which leaves me wondering why I left the promises of God for the company of people.

Through the eyes of men an utterly irrational birth followed by a terribly improbable execution are miscues of the most pathetic sort. And all I can say is that I’m immeasurably thankful that I’ve been given access to the eyes of God.

The promises of God hold up long after the promises of the world have blown up.

I have both the violent turbulence of the storm and the quiet promises of God in the storm. And what I must work to remember is that something is not necessarily stronger simply because it’s louder.

Commitment is a promise to a cause. Being non-committal is a promise to catastrophe.

Shrewdly crafted political agendas, innately complex philosophies, man-made religions, governments and regimes of every sort, and all the endless volumes of man-manufactured wisdom and penned prose all completely failed to redeem mankind and make us better. When the best of our efforts failed to redeem the worst of our behaviors, God declared enough as enough and a baby was born.

I do not walk into the storm unless I have been called into the storm. For the former is arrogance and the latter is obedience.

Avoidance is paying forward that which I would be much wiser to pay off.

The power of a thing is not based on the power it actually possesses. Rather, it is much more about the power that we permit it to possess.

At this moment God might not necessarily be a necessity, but know that His absence will of necessity eventually result in His necessity.

Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds.

More times than I can remember I look around and I ask why the hole I’m in looks so strangely familiar. Probably because it looks a whole lot like all the other ones I dug before I got around to digging this one.

God has hewn out a hidden path more glorious, tantalizing and adventuresome than the path trod by most, and it is a path seen only through the eyes of our wounds, felt solely through the heart of our losses, and singularly traversed by those with a limp in their step.

The hand of God is wonderfully evident at those times when He pens stories whose lines we ourselves are far too fearful to pen or whose imaginations are far too limited to envision. And I would unashamedly suggest that the Christmas story is that very story.

Either we are running ‘from’ what we fear or running ‘to’ what we fear. The former is a choice controlled by fear, the latter is an action inspired by it.

If we are merely a chance product of ‘random happenstance’ and nothing more, doesn’t it strike you as a bit odd that we have the ability to contemplate the question of ‘random happenstance’ with such methodical complexity?

The road from ‘here’ to ‘there’ is a map yet to be written with the pen I hold in my hand.

Jesus was and is the greatest restoration specialist of all time.

I can be absolutely assured that any endeavor of which God is not a part is most certainly a step backward. And any step backward is at least two steps behind where I’d be if I’d have gone forward in the first place.

Self-serving biases and self-centered agendas are cotton jammed in the ears of our conscience. Even if truth shouts, we can’t hear it.

Instead of the weight that sinks us, consequences are often the life preserver that saves us.

To keep my life free of evil I must of necessity keep my life full of God, for keeping my life full of anything else will give evil everything else.

My vision of what God can do is nothing more than a fleeting glance of the backside of the ‘possible,’ while God is inviting me to the forefront of the ‘impossible.

To make a choice not to sacrifice is to decide that I am better off allowing a life to perish than release the resources I possess that might allow it to thrive. And because of choices such as these, the life that I am really allowing to perish is mine.

If the road behind me is not growing ever longer, then it is likely that the feet underneath me are not moving any longer. And if my feet are not moving, I have somehow, somewhere traded this most glorious journey for lesser endeavors.

Easter is God throwing everything at death so that I can give everything to life.

Sooner or later I will be faced with the fact that the world is helpless to meet my needs. And at that point, I will be left with two conclusions; that life is cruel or God is real.

Too often we make it more about what stands before us, and we miss all that stands within us.

If I have forfeited the ability to wonder so as not to offend the tenets of the culture, and if I have sacrificed warm dreams on the cold altar of conformity, it is likely because I have somewhere traded the marvel of the infinite for the malaise of the finite.

Love is a perpetual journey that is extraordinary because it will never find itself terminated by a destination.

We can hide a lot of stuff until God shows up, for when God shows up nothing is hidden, which includes both our embarrassment and His forgiveness.

A consequence may be the very thing that saves us because it was the only thing loud enough to get our attention.

To be alone with myself in the space of silence is horrifying, for I know with the utmost certainty that in that space I will hear the very things that I constantly use the clamor to drown out. And so the question becomes, how long can I keep up all the noise?