Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes - Page 4

If my decisions constantly heed the voice of the world, I can be completely assured that I’m going to end up in a ‘world of hurt.’ If my decisions heed the word of God, I can be completely assured that this ‘world of hurt’ isn’t anywhere near my solar system.

The darkness that follows a sunset is never so dark that it can change the inevitability of a sunrise.

To blithely discard the spent kernels of something that has ended is to discard the very resources that have painstakingly been harvested from that ending from which a spirited new beginning will be cultivated.

The real promise in too many promises is a promise that I’m going to be disappointed.

It might behoove us to realize that isolation is the absence of all the senseless clutter, and all the incessant racket that would keep God from having ample room to show up and sufficient silence to be heard. Therefore, isolation may actually be the place where we are least isolated.

The death of our self-worth begins at its appraisal, for such an action erroneously implies that our worth can be quantified.

To ‘pretend’ is to say that I’m willing to waste the precious energy that it takes to pretend, and I’m unwilling to cultivate the bravery that it takes to be real. And I am at a complete loss to pretend that either of these aren’t true.

Truth is its own defense, therefore if something can’t speak for itself, it’s not truth.

If it’s the benefit to myself that drives my decisions, I can know that I’m driving down a long road with a short bridge.

The child you hold in your arms is your gift to a future that you will not see. Therefore, we must turn a blind eye to ourselves and selflessly pour the best of ourselves into our children while rigorously sifting out the worst of ourselves. And once we are utterly spent by such daring gestures, we will shockingly discover the resulting emptiness as astonishingly filled.

It is when I am cold, alone, bitterly forlorn and shuttered from all hope that you will see who I truly am. And my goal is that at those most precarious of moments, what you will see is Jesus holding you through my tears.

I feign fullness, but in reality I am achingly empty. And it is because I too often sit at the table of the world instead of the feet of God.

To look beyond our horizons is to acknowledge that we’ve hemmed ourselves in by creating them in the first place.

I decry the injustice of my wounds, only to look down and see that I am holding a smoking gun in one hand and a fistful of ammunition in the other.

Too often fantasy is not a rich elaboration of life designed to enhance our existence, rather it is our pell-mell escape from life with the intent of exiting this existence. And the most imaginative fantasy of all is to somehow think that I can do that in the first place.

The clash is born of the fact that the child within me sees with undiluted clarity what the adult within me is incessantly working to deny. And in these most vexing moments, to be the adult is to defer to the child.

If I have refused to risk, I have in the self-same decision refused to love. And if indeed I have refused to love, tragically I have refused to live. And when will I realize that that in and of itself is an unacceptable risk.

What in the world would ever lead to me believe that life is a series of opportunities that are readily available to everyone else but me? What really leads me to believe such an atrocious lie is that I don’t believe in myself sufficiently to engage those opportunities in the first place.

We can certainly run from a lot of things. But when we eventually pull up exhausted and entirely out of breath, we are rather shocked to discover that we haven’t been able to create any distance between ourselves and what we’ve been running from regardless of how fast we might have been running and how far we think we might have gotten.

I would be quite wise to realize that I will never craft a solution that will be the ‘end-all,’ and that God’s ability to craft perfect solutions never ends ‘at-all.

Any dream that I am absolutely confident I can achieve should immediately be discarded for the simple reason that it is simply too small.

Why is it that we don’t worry about a compass until we’re lost in a wilderness of our own making?

If I see God as nothing more than a caricature of history or imagination I cannot do anything less than make myself my own ‘god’. And once I realize that in doing so my rendition of being a ‘god’ is embarrassingly inferior to the very caricature I am mimicking, I quickly come to realize that maybe the only thing that can be ‘god’ is a God. And if that is the case, I suddenly find myself hounded by the stunning reality that God is not a caricature.

Sometimes the very things that we’re expending our lives to sustain are the very things that are killing our ability to live. And against our blind and frequently raging protests, these are the very things that God let’s die so that we can live.

Only God understands how incredibly far we’ve fallen, and only God understands how incredibly far we can rise. And only we can determine if we’re going to wallow in the mediocrity that is born of the refusal to understand either.

No, I am not powerful nor do I wish to be, for it is God using my weakness that makes me potent and I would never wish to surrender that.

Sacrifice” and “self” both begin with the same letter, but the spelling is way different after that.

Fairness is not something to which we are entitled. Rather, it is something for which we hope.

The worst of me is the raw material from which God molds the best of me.

To forget is to render the pages of history as entirely blank, and the lessons of history as never taught.

I find that I spend a tremendous amount of time chasing the praises of men rather than sitting with the praises of God. The former is something I attempt to catch, the latter catches me.

Faith revels in the liberating fact that only a terribly miniscule part of life lies within the constricted confines of my reach, and that I am graciously invited out to live in a place beyond my grasp.

It was the greatest, most intricate, most ingenious and most costly rescue mission in all of human history.

Purpose declares that the trajectory of my existence and the course of human history were intentionally set to collide at this precise moment in time because what I have to offer human history is desperately needed at this precise time.

If it’s about me, I can be assured that there will be a bunch of empty chairs in the auditorium of my life; save the one I’m sitting in.

In God’s vocabulary, ‘lost’ is an unnecessary adjective that is easily erased by the adjective ‘found’ if we would simply be brave enough to hand Him the eraser.

Being a mother is not about ‘birthing a child into the world.’ Rather, it is about repeatedly ‘birthing into the child’ a steady sense of their inestimable worth, a prized understanding of their authentic self, a conviction that the impossible is largely the stuff of myth, and an utterly unwavering belief that the cold actions of men never represent the warm heart of God. It is the relentless act of birthing these things into the innermost soul of a thirsty child that makes a woman a mother.

Where there is no hope, there is Christmas. And where there is no Christmas, there is no hope.

When we choose to stay down, we are in reality confusing wisdom with cowardice. When we choose to stand back up, we are using wisdom to overcome cowardice.

Being our best is asking how can we take ourselves to the precipice of our own limits in any and every situation?

Shame is embarrassment multiplied against itself until it dies under it’s own weight and we with it. Forgiveness is freedom multiplied against the Cross until it flies under it’s own liberation and we with it.

The problem with wearing a facade is that sooner or later life shows up with a big pair of scissors.

Too often, opinion is a lens polished by the grit of bias. And as I stare through my own lens, I might ask how much polish can the grit of bias actually create?

Christmas is not a story birthed of a humanized god for it simply doesn’t fit into the rubric of such an emaciated plot.

I cannot be afraid of being afraid. Rather, I need to realize that it is my fear that gives me the energy to wrestle that which I fear into the dirt that is soon to become the road underneath my feet.

Intelligence without wisdom is nothing more than stupidity that looks smart.

We can only get to God through God. Every other possible avenue is a dead-end before it even starts.

Because I have ‘chosen’ to see something as impossible, there’s a good chance that it’s not.

The goal of comfort is at the self-same time the abandonment of great accomplishments.

Real patriotism embraces the wholly immovable belief that without freedom, the essence of the human soul and the life-breath of the human spirit is doomed to perish for lack of space and absence of light.

Starting over begins when I develop a reawakened appreciation for what I already have, a renewed recognition of what I’ve recklessly forsaken, a rehabilitated understanding that I foolishly do both of those things, and a revitalized commitment to live the rest of my life never doing either of them again.

If there’s one thing that’s irrefutably absurd, it’s believing that we can separate intelligence from wisdom and still have it be intelligence.

It’s not that I can’t remember. It’s that I prefer not to remember, which means that I prefer not to remember what not remembering did to me the last time I did it.

If the baser instinct of rampant self-preservation adamantly refuses to surrender itself to the infinitely greater call of self-sacrifice, in attempting to save our lives we will have in reality completely destroyed our lives.

Somewhere, somehow, something arises out of the ashes of our losses to remind us that nothing ever ceases. Nothing ever vanishes. Nothing ever comes to nothing.

I have finally come to realize that it’s being forced to be honest with myself that’s made my pain painful all along.

Despite opinions to the contrary, restoring Godly values is the most progressive course of action that we could ever hope to take.

When I’m at the bottom looking up, the main question may not be ‘how do I get out of this hole?’ In reality, the main question might be ‘how do I get rid of the shovel that I used to dig it?

The world is shaken by major events, but it is ‘transformed’ by slight subtleties. And while we may be far too small to create even one major event, we are just the right size to craft a thousand subtleties.

The image of God infused in us never sees the light of day in the service of self, but it becomes the light of day in the service of others.