Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes - Page 6

To embrace an attitude of humility is to free myself from myself. And that is likely the great liberation of all.

If I am so terribly limited as to view my handicaps as nothing more than lamentable limitations, then I have taken some of my greatest God-given assets and completely handicapped them.

The drum to which we march reveals the conductor to whom we’re listening.

Our actions in the present build the staircase to the future. The question is whether that staircase is going up or down.

To take this one shot at life and live it with God is to take this one shot and have it reverberate across and around my world as if it were a million shots and more.

Maybe the thing that we’re losing is the very thing that has caused us to lose everything else in the first place.

There is a deep dryness of the soul and all of the recalcitrant contrivances of man to quench his own thirst will bring not a single drop of moisture to those parched places, for God and God alone holds the water that satiates the soul.

God would have us cherish even the smallest of blessings, for in taking a blessing for granted we are well on our way to taking it to its grave.

The reason my life has wandered to nowhere is likely due to the fact that the focus of the moment has dictated the destination of my life, when the destination of my life should have been dictating the focus of the moment.

I must look at the 'nature' of God, not the 'nature' of the challenge. For the former means everything and the latter means nothing.

There’s something of a restorative quality about spring, where something whispers wild rumors of new beginnings arising from the seemingly dead seeds in our lives. There’s something almost cruel about it all, as if there might be some sort of truth about a new life actually being possible. Yet, maybe it is true.

I fear that should I seek out the treasures around me, they might by comparison reveal that I have not cultivated the treasures within me.

The strewn and tangled wreckage that litters our lives is the precious raw material from which great beginnings are forged.

To dress up today in the threadbare garments of yesterday is to create an impoverished tomorrow.

Safety is not a destination that we reach for, rather it is a retreat that we escape to. And if our lives are marked by the incessant search for safety, we will live the whole of it going in reverse.

Nearly everyday life leans over and says, ‘Come on down!’ But standing at the bottom looking up, it’s finally dawned on me that it’s not these invitations that have dug this hole. Rather, it’s the fact that I accepted them.

I must never equate the degree of pain as evidencing the incorrectness of a decision, for if I do I will default on some of the most critical decisions I should have ever made.

The world brazenly touts freedom as both the inalienable right and morally liberating justification to mindlessly play in the filth that lies all around me. And the slight bit of sanity that yet remains within me asks, ‘what raging madness would prompt me to incessantly wallow in the very things that will eventually swallow me?

Perfect majesty that deliberately chose to be born into abject poverty, walk a road of perpetual poverty, and be unjustly executed in the raw nakedness of poverty is utterly ludicrous unless I realize that this is the single and sole way that God can reach me in the suffocating poverty that I myself have created.

We focus on the reasons why we ‘can’t’ at the expense of the far greater reasons why we ‘can’.

To be bold is to be wise enough to realize that fear is the energy that fuels action.

At the end, a journey based on my imagination will leave me imagining that I should have engaged the very thing I used my imagination to avoid.

There is no doubt that the most effective way to heal my pain is to purposefully put it to work healing the pain in the life of another. But that means I must endure the pain of not focusing on 'my' pain.

A conviction borne of God amply possesses the potency and power to brazenly reach beyond the possible in order to topple the impossible.

To spin the tale with great flourish but never live the tale is the power of vision strangled to fiction by the fiction of fear.

Our imagination is God’s ingenious gift that hands us the privilege of romping and playing in realities that we can’t see only because we’ve yet to create them.

I am thankful that there are those among us who have sacrificed dearly on behalf of us. And I ardently pray to God that I might be less like myself and more like them.

Fear is my mind painstakingly creating the worse-case scenario and then putting it on steroids.

Worlds of my own creation are erected with walls that are within but a few scant paces of each other. The world that God creates for me has no idea what walls are.

My fear of endings too often blocks my hope of beginnings.

If I am brave enough to stand against those who have been groomed by fear, I will recognize that where I get knocked down is all about where life begins, and has nothing to do with where it ends.

Ignorance is not bliss. Rather, ignorance is blistering.

Betrayal is advancing myself at the expense of the one who I committed myself to advance.

Arrogance is a map of a road that leads to bridges that are out.

Too often our lives are soiled to desperation by endings that in reality are magnificently outnumbered by beginnings. And unless we become convinced that an ending is always the birthplace of a beginning that is on its way, we will live terribly soiled lives.

Why is it when I pursue the praises of men I find myself with everything that I’ve looked for but nothing that I need? That’s because I have an extraordinary habit of looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place.

Why is it that crisis pushes me to my own devices when those devices are frequently the very things that produced my crisis in the first place?

Have we ever thought that being lost is our destination?

There are often two sets of goals in life: those that we establish, and those that really matter.

We have forfeited our calling for the simple reason that we’ve ignored the God who says that the ‘possible’ is never bound by the ‘probable,’ and instead we’ve dutifully heeded the god of fear that incessantly says the ‘possible’ is anything but ‘probable.

Most of my failures can be ascribed to the fact that I chose that which was ‘easy’ over that which was ‘right’. And while it’s ‘right’ to admit this to myself, it isn’t ‘easy.’ So, which choice am I going to make this time?

Christmas was an ingenious plan designed by God to lay siege to the hearts of all men by submitting Himself to the greed of all men.

More often than not, rejecting rescue is in reality rejecting our need to be rescued. And it may very well be that is why so many reject Christmas.

If a father does not altogether embrace a life of uncompromised sacrifice as the core of all principles by which he nurtures his children, he is a father by birth only and no power on earth can ever or will ever make that sufficient.

The thing that I’m most likely to collapse under is not the weight of the stresses that stand around me, but the ego that sits within me.

Every life is a canvas and every interaction is a brush, therefore we’d be wise to consider how we handle the paint.

Truth speaks for itself if we’d just let it speak.

We look around us and we find ourselves confused as to why the world has fallen into such deep darkness. And standing in this descending darkness, what we need to realize is that the farther we move from God, the darker everything gets. And no light of man can illuminate that kind of darkness.

Oh that I had the opportunity to rethink so many of my decisions, for the pitfalls into which I have so frequently fallen were often dug with the shovel of those very decisions.

Loss is an invitation to a journey of unparalleled growth, yet we seldom RSVP the invitation.

The point that I think myself to be so terribly clever is the precise point at which I am beginning to think myself to be god-like, which causes me to become God-less.

The sacrifice ‘of’ self for the greater good is the greatest calling imaginable, and it is the bedrock of the greatest nations. The sacrifice ‘for’ self is the most pathetic calling imaginable, and it is the quicksand within which nations perish.

Do I dare believe such an absurdly outrageous story that a man would die, lay lifeless in some tomb for three days and then somehow live again? Yet, if I dare to consider it, is that not exactly what I so desperately desire for this lifeless life of mine? And is Easter God’s tenderly outrageous way of telling me that that is exactly what I can have?

Without unreservedly surrendering myself to God, whatever place I might raise myself to remains nothing more than a step or possibly two off the hard basement floor of life, for of myself I can be utterly assured that I will never step out of the basement.

I ruthlessly expend my time and my energies seeking many random things, none of which will bless me in the way that I suppose they will, for despite my frequently stubborn resistance to the thought, the single and sole blessing that I can be utterly confident in is found in seeking God alone.

Mediocrity is the companion of passivity and will not heed the call of great things. Courage is the companion of sacrifice and cannot help but heed the call of great things. And we are left of our own accord to choose one or the other.

If I see only my bias, I have surrendered to a single myopic lens through which to view the world. If I dare to surrender my bias, I will spend the rest of my life seeing the world and throwing away lenses.

Why in the world have we never found what we’re really looking for? Because what we need is often the very thing we won’t accept. And sadly, in turning away the God we need, we need to understand that we have chosen to live without everything we need.

My first mistake is to humanize God. My second mistake is to hold those wretched human characteristics up against all of the majestic things that I sense God should be. The blatant discrepancy which is certain to ensue then allows me to not only justify my rejection of Him, it grants me unbridled permission to discount His existence altogether. And that third and final mistake is without a doubt the most costly of all.

Hope is not some thin thing that is subject to the winds of fate. Rather, it is something crafted hard by the hands of God.