Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes - Page 9

Timeless principles never age, and truth is as young as the day it was spoken into existence.

I thought myself sufficiently shrewd to make whatever decisions I wanted to make, and then to be able to sufficiently steer those decisions away from the rather dark and nasty places they would naturally take me. And I stand oddly perplexed that suddenly everything around me is dark and nasty.

I often ask to what place I am running, for if I am unable to identify that place it is likely that I am running in a circle of the most circular sort.

The common theme of common sense is that it’s commonly rejected as uncommonly demanding.

Sadly, it seems that I have the proclivity to create plenty of devils, but most of the time I don’t even go looking for angels.

I want to stand on the truth that God has designed us to stand, and that the opportunity to stand is the opportunity to live exuberantly and gloriously.

It’s thinking that I had the solution that probably created the problem in the first place.

The anticipation of loss is much more frightening than the actual loss as anticipation leaves room for the imagination to create that which, in all likelihood, will never transpire.

Things that are truly great need nothing from me, and to somehow think that they do speaks to my utter lack of greatness.

Ignorance is my refusal to think outside the box of my fears.

Raw power without Godly obedience is a long walk off a short conscience.

Rights’ are ‘privileges,’ and if I am arrogant enough to demand the former without respecting the latter I will lose both.

We will understand the depth of our vision when at some point we are finally faced with the price we must pay to achieve it. And when the price comes calling, most visions end up falling.

To realize your potential you must look beyond the end of yourself, realizing that where you end is most likely where you actually begin.

The assumption is that if I expend myself for myself in the end all I’ll be left with is myself, and that alone is frightening. But what I’ve failed to consider is that I have to expend so much of myself living for myself that in the end I’m really left with very little of myself, and that is unimaginably frightening.

True peace cannot be found in a ‘place’. Rather, it is found in a Person who can be with you in any ‘place’.

If I simply look at the map that I’ve so tediously created, it will explain why I’m laying at the bottom of this cliff looking up.

Failure is not the deterrent for the next try. Rather, it is information that empowers the next step.

If I can somehow focus on the pain of not focusing on my pain, I will soon find that pain healed simply because I forced myself to do the exact opposite of what my core humanity demanded I do…I sought to heal the pain of someone else instead.

Every tomorrow is an outcome of what I do today, and the beauty of it all is that today is happening all the time.

Faith is rare because fear is rampant. For faith will demand that I step into places that fear itself fears to go.

If my goal is simply to survive the journey, then I’m not on the journey in the first place.

Love in the service of self is greed in disguise.

Maybe my greater fear should not be fear itself, but what I will lose should I submit to fear.

At the very point that I’ve taken something for granted, I have at that same moment taken it to its grave. And if I look around, I realize I’ve cultivated quite a cemetery.

It’s not so much about the cards you’re dealt; it’s a whole lot more about whether you play them well, or play them at all.

Self-preservation is to hunker down in the suffocating confines of this infinitesimally tiny existence that I define as ‘me,’ instead of letting ‘me’ run through the infinitely massive expanse of everything that is not me. And if the beast of self-preservation does not permit such freedoms, I will preserve myself to my own death.

If you want to completely destroy a child, all you have to do is mold them into your vision of what you want them to be. If you want to completely liberate a child, all you have to do is grow them into the person they were created to be. The former cannot see God in the child. The latter can see nothing less.

There was a moment when any hope within me froze solid and I was finally emptied of all energy to fight the cold. And at the very point of that very surrender, when I became convinced that I must bow to a world that would be forever frigid, God cupped the hands of my soul and poured in the warmth of Christmas.

Possibly the most debilitating deception of all is to create a god of my own making, fool myself into believing that this limp god of mine is the true God, and then construct the entirety of my life on this flamboyantly fictional character. Possibly the most devastating realization of all is when the real God shows up, and in the showing up all of this come crashing down.

Sometimes what is said to be a gift may appear more of a curse only because the greatest gifts of all are the gifts that have enough disruptive force to break us out of everything that’s breaking us. And God loves us far too much not to give us exactly those kinds of gifts.

Minutes remain the same length whether they are held against the span of years or minutes themselves. Yet, when minutes are held against themselves, they seem so terribly brief. Therefore, we’d be wise to celebrate life before minutes are all that’s left.

Many of our efforts to intentionally craft and subsequently force our limited vision on life has more often than not resulted in some degree of cataclysm or schism or division or any number of other things that aren’t all that savory.

Sometimes things that appear completely irreconcilable and mutually exclusive serve a shared purpose that could not be achieved except through their contradiction.

The extent of God’s grace always eclipses the extent of my grotesqueness. Therefore, I can never be bad enough for God to tell me that He’s had enough.

It’s not that I’ve been invited to the hole I’m standing in. It’s that I accepted the invitation.

If I’m perplexed by the fact that I’m constantly lost, maybe somewhere in my head I’ve determined that being lost serves a greater purpose than being found.

We incessantly vacillate between what’s behind us and what’s before us depending on the current barometer of our courage and the ambivalent nature of our vision.

Calm for too long begs the question of whether we're in an all-out pursuit of life, or we're all-out of the pursuit of life.

I ask, ‘Is the cup half-empty or half-full?’ And when I ask that question, I am amazed at how many people have no cup.

To enjoy beauty in the company of myself is to experience beauty bound by the limits of the sole person that I am. But, to experience beauty in the company of God is to experience beauty bound by the limits of Who God is, which is to experience beauty without limits.

There’s something inherently majestic about Christmas that seems to have been abandoned by us; something flippantly cast aside, something that was foolishly abandoned and was tragically forgotten in the abandonment.

A nation aimlessly drifting away from God is a nation for which prayer is a rudder and praise is a sail. And it is the man or woman on their knees that builds the former and gives wind to the latter.

I while away my time wishing I were someone else when simply being me is the most magnificent thing I could ever wish to do.

Failure is blessing wrapped in the clothing of curse.

I can arrogantly brag that the doors I choose in life open wide and grant me unobstructed passage. But the widest doors tend to lead to the worst places.

One of the greatest lies is to believe that we don’t have value. One of the greatest mistakes is to act on that belief. And the greatest liberation is found in looking at the cross of Christ and realizing the enormity of the lie.

There is that gnawing feeling that we are far more than what we believe ourselves to be. Maybe it’s time to believe the gnawing.

To lead solely on the behalf of those being led is the utter pinnacle of fatherhood, and it is sad that so few ever stand on the summit.

At the point that it dawns on me that I am not God I have finally made room for God.

Is the goal I’ve set been determined by a desire to avoid the goal I should have set?

Expectations are the shackles that will not permit something to be what it actually is.

Blindness is a choice born of fear, nursed by complacency and groomed by comfort. And what I often don’t see in my blindness is that 'choice' evidences the existence of other options.

If the truth gets in the way, I will remove it. But truth be told, removing the truth never removes the truth.

I am wholly deserving of all the consequences that I will in fact never receive simply because God unashamedly stepped in front of me on the cross, unflinchingly spread His arms so as to completely shield me from the retribution that was mine to bear, and repeatedly took the blows. And I stand entirely unwounded, utterly lost in the fact that the while His body was pummeled and bloodied to death by that which was meant for me and me alone, I have not a scratch.

To be careless in making decisions is to naively believe that a single decision impacts nothing more than that single decision, for a single decision can spawn a thousand others that were entirely unnecessary or it can bring peace to a thousand places we never knew existed.

Christmas is not something that sprang from the musings of some person who creatively devised caricatures of elves, spiraling candy canes, visions of a magical city whose foundation was nestled in the far reaches of the North Pole, or embellishments of a kindly bishop spun by myth into a bearded old man in a red suit.

We have errantly romanticized love as something we freely get verses something we sacrifice for in the giving.

With God, the word ‘impossible’ is itself impossible.

The roads of life are paved wide and skirt the mountains. And these very roads are choked with a steady stream of pathetically pedantic travelers who in reality have no intent of traveling. And if we are to discover the real travelers, much less join them, we will find them out on precarious paths that defy the roads and scale the mountains.