Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes - Page 8

Making oneself large involves intentionally making oneself small.

Christmas was a response of the choice of mankind to take its existence into its own hands and chart its own course, liberally scripting its own ethics, crafting its own moral system, and choosing to believe that it was the creator and therefore master of its fate. Christmas is a response to mankind reeling off the pages of history and splattering the blood of lives and generations wasted along its free-wheeling course.

Although we may face untold numbers that by their sheer mass appear to render us as little more than a speck in the face of them, a single person standing with God amidst any mass will always be an indomitable majority.

The greatest loss lies in our inability to accept loss.

Starting over is an acceptance of a past we can't change, an unrelenting conviction that the future can be different, and a stubborn wisdom to use the past to make the future was the past was not.

Sooner or later I will realize that the very things I most desperately need are the very things I am unable to give myself. Therefore, I will either be left despising the fact that I am doomed to live out a life that is perpetually empty, or I will realize that an empty tomb is the single thing that will eternally fill me.

Rather than being incensed by the nature of the bruise, maybe we should be inspired by the possibilities in the bruise.

Maybe I don’t have enough beginnings in my life because I fought against the endings that were about to birth those beginnings.

Why does not the stunning evidence of the last miracle grant me confidence in the next crisis? Because my immaturity does not permit such a faith, my desperate prayer is that God would grant me a robust faith sufficient to trust Him not for one crisis, but for an eternity of miracles.

Decisions are the privilege we’ve been granted to have a hand in penning the script of our lives. And in the writing, the question is not the availability of the paper or the pen. The question is the wisdom to use them rightly.

Although I’ve been thoroughly conditioned by pain to see it otherwise, an ending is nothing more than the backside of a beginning.

If I’m my biggest fan, the only person in the stadium is probably me.

When the world does its level best to devalue me in ways that are nothing short of brutal, all it does is evidence my value. For why would it expend such massive amounts of energy attempting to destroy something that’s not there?

The wisdom to be on the throne of one’s life must surpass the wisdom of the one being ruled, otherwise I will squander the whole of my life in the most appalling ways. By virtue of that reality, I would be wise to get out of the chair and invite God to have a seat.

All too soon the garden of childhood is paved cold with the asphalt roads of adulthood. And while it is not within her power to halt this unrelenting progression, a mother can diligently guard this most precious garden and insure that the roads become gentle paths that wind through it instead of byways that kill it.

Fear is a lethal killer of dreams, the greatest cancer that has beset passion, and a ruthless thief of lives stolen and buried in the decay of lives squandered. Yet the greatest tragedy of all is that the fear that destroys us is rarely the monster it pretends to be, nor does it possess anything close to the power that we grant it. Therefore, it is only a killer, a cancer and a thief because we empower it to be so.

I tend to walk around convinced that any amount of forgiveness that I could extend could never possibly compensate for the offenses that I’ve had to endure. Yet, maybe the greater offense is that I’ve got that backwards.

We may find great relief and inexplicable solace in purposefully looking beyond grief in order to determine the provision made within it.

My heart says, ‘This way.’ The world says, ‘That way.’ God says, ‘I am the Way.’ And if perchance I choose to listen to the first two, I’m going to find myself so far off the ‘way’ that being lost becomes the ‘way’.

Underneath the chaos there stirs a great plan. And it will be birthed only if I give it permission to do so because I have exercised the faith that it’s there.

If I wholly unleash my imagination and forcefully stretch it out beyond its own edges, even at such a point I can only imagine a thin shard of this most immense God. And even though it is but a thin shard, it will nonetheless be mesmerizingly colossal.

If we limit love to being nothing more than a feeling, we have no real feeling for what love is.

It’s not about inviting great things into our lives. Rather, it’s about accepting the invitation of great things to step out of our lives.

In the absence of faith, our dreams will move from feasible aspirations to implausible fantasy.

I cannot calculate nor attempt to manage sacrifice, for to do so is to attempt to sacrifice comfortably. And it is in the attempt to sacrifice comfortably that I begin to realize that the desire for comfort is in reality the demand that I put myself first, and there is nothing of sacrifice in that.

True evil is unlikely to receive an invitation from us, so it clothes itself in just enough truth to make itself look appealing and then it looks to unpeel us.

May we know fear, but may we always refuse to court cowardice.

In choosing to exchange precious principles for worthless impulses, I have far too often bankrupted my soul in order to bankroll my ego.

We think that boxes take everything that’s bad and they lock all that nasty stuff out, when in reality they take everything that we are and they lock all of those great things in.

To focus solely on endings is to trade conclusions for the very beginnings that created them. And if this cycle should persist, we will likewise miss the beginning that will follow this ending.

To think that we grasp the fullness of life is to say that by holding a mere drop of water in our hands we are able to understand the immensity of the ocean.

If I must know something in order to believe in it, what I am able to believe in will be severely limited. If I choose to believe in something in order to know it, then what I believe in can be boundless.

To even begin to embrace the magnitude of God’s vision, we must first embrace our vision as being nothing more than vision by definition.

Although I’m seldom aware enough to see it, the greater cost regarding that which I possess was not what I paid for it, but what someone along the way sacrificed so that I might have the opportunity to pay for it.

Lies are like paper-Mache in a rain storm.

A life that chooses not to grow is a life that died long before it ever lived.

My life is too often driven by the fear of the next moment verses focusing on the privilege that I have the next moment.

I’ve always marveled that geese can feel a call stirring, rise on hardy wings to engage it, and without contemplation, compass or map complete the feat. And could it be that they achieve this astounding accomplishment because far too often contemplation, compass or map rob the call by sterile analysis when we should liberate the call through expectant obedience.

The true sign of a robust and mature life rests in how many times that life has been knocked down, for to be incessantly knocked down and yet find oneself still standing means that someone had the resolve to get up that many times plus one.

A parent holds within their hands the gift of a child to which they must expend the gift of themselves. And in such a monumental outpouring, the parent will lose both the child and the gifts given, but they will possess the far greater gift of knowing that they gave both.

I have diligently disciplined my life to search out life’s gifts in the places where life stores its scraps.

Christmas embodies everything that I need. However, everything that I need is often made up of a lot of stuff I don’t want.

A father teaches his children that the battle is not determined by the enemy that stands around them, but by the God Who stands within them. And that lesson can only be driven home as they watch their father stand around them, while God stands within their father.

Common sense is one of the most unused commodities available to man.

To assume that I and I alone have all the answers is to eventually find myself entirely alone without any answers.

I want to have the eyes of an adult to see the world as it is, but I more desperately want to have the heart of a child to make certain that I never forget what it could be.

If the pursuit of perfection is a way to prove our worth, in the end the pursuit will only prove our imperfections.

You are greater than you can possibly imagine, if you would only free yourself up to imagine.

I think that it is infinitely wiser to accept the fact that we’re afraid, for in accepting our fear we are in no way granting it the power to crush us. Rather we are finally empowering ourselves sufficiently so that we can crush it.

To save myself I must face myself, which may be the hardest of all things to face.

We can be seized with panic of the fall, or inspired by the potential that lies within the fall.

Greatness demands that I understand that I am not nearly as big as I thought myself to be, but that I am capable of becoming far bigger than I ever imagined myself to be.

As utterly irrational as it might seem, the greed within me has the most limited vision I can possibly imagine as it has eyes only for the few things it doesn’t have, and it is completely blind to all the many remarkable things that it does.

There appears to be value in getting past a mentality that good things can only rest in good things.

Far too often the ‘things’ that men define as success do little more than successfully destroy the lives of the very men who achieve those ‘things.’ And while I must admit that there is an authentic element of success in all of that, it’s the kind of success that I would much prefer to successfully avoid.

To assume that I can even begin to chart a ‘straight’ path is probably the best way I can take myself ‘straight’ to the very place I don’t want to go.

Surrender is a choice, it is never a calling.

If I am not at 'peace', then I can be altogether confident that I've placed a larger 'piece' of myself in the hands of someone other than God.

We recklessly attempt to disguise our ‘greed’ by dressing it in the garb of other nobler ideals such as ‘rights’ and ‘privileges.’ Yet, if we dare dress ‘greed’ in an authentic sense of thankfulness, greed will suffocate within the folds of that very clothing.

If we’ve somehow become convinced that the script we followed ‘yesterday’ can’t be edited, it will be incredibly difficult to tell the difference between ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’.