Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes - Page 2

Denial is fear gone delusional. Acceptance is fear given to God. Engaging is fear overruled by God. Victory is fear banished by God.

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.

In my desperation, I have finally discovered that the only way that I can begin to fill the gaping hole within me is to be thankful for what’s there, and not angry for what’s not.

God’s absence in the carnage is due to one single rather unnerving fact; that at some time past He honored our request that He leave. And if we are not brutally honest with ourselves regarding that choice, it is we ourselves who have set the stage for the next tragedy.

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.

We are not built for mediocrity, but we build it into our lives nonetheless.

I pray that I am never so foolishly naive or roguishly pompous to think that I can be the captain of my own ship, for if God is not at the helm my ship will soon be at the bottom.

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.

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

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.

The cross unerringly exposes this stunningly marvelous and abruptly exquisite declaration that God will not let this single life of mine, with all of its grotesque maladies and pathetic filth pass into oblivion without unflinchingly declaring that my life carries a value worth the expenditure of His. And if I dare look upon the cross, I am utterly perplexed but wholly enraptured by the immensity of such a love as this.

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.

To incessantly blame others for my shortcomings is cowardice borne of fear, fed by fear, and haunted by fear. To be steadfastly accountable for my shortcomings is bravery borne of God, fed by God, and blessed by God.

Most journeys are armchair calculations strategically charted in some reclined state that are designed to allow us to embark upon a grand journey without ever leaving the armchair. However, real journeys are absent of furniture.

Has it not ‘dawned’ on us that many of the things that we incessantly blame others for are actually things that our actions originally set in motion? Or, are we too weak to experience a ‘dawning’ of that sort?

If I scan the expanse of my heart and find it empty of everything except emptiness, it is because I ‘poured’ the whole of my passion into something other than God. And anything other than God will always be too ‘poor’ to be able to ‘pour’ back anything that can fill that kind of emptiness.

In a very tragic kind of way, sometimes things have to be gone before I fully realize that they were ever there.

The greatest gains that we will ever experience arise from the greatest sacrifices that we have ever known.

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

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?

Thankfulness is an attitude of possibilities, not an attitude of liabilities.

What rubs off on me is hard to rub off. So, I’d better figure out what I rubbing up against.

And so, it is always the case that the past is irreparably land-locked, and the future has yet to land. And here we are, living out our lives on the precariously thin line which separates the two.

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

There’s not much that I can find in places where there is nothing to find. However, to avoid facing God I find myself spending a lot of time in those very places.

Easter is a time where we are reminded that conclusions in man's mind are beginnings in God's plan.

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.

Love that is fueled solely by feelings will suddenly find itself out of gas on a long road with no gas stations.

The greatest men stand on their values and pray on their knees.

It’s not about the elimination of fear. Rather it’s about the elimination of the feeling that the elimination of fear is necessary before we take the next step.

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

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.

An ending is only happening because at some point it was a beginning. And if an ending is dependent upon a beginning, I would be well advised to focus on the miracle of beginnings verses the pain of endings.

The worst of it is that while we continue to sink deeper into the muck and mire that we’ve created, in the very descent itself we ignorantly declare that in reality we are rising. And until desperation has crippled us sufficiently to confess the lie that we are lifting ourselves out of this mess, and until the panic of utter hopelessness has driven us to completely surrender all of the pathetic contrivances that we’ve fashioned that have put us there, we will never realize that God has readied solid ground that stands but a single step away

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.

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.

Who you are is too vast to be captured by the reflection of a mirror, classified by the state of your attitude, or categorized by the opinions of others. Therefore, if any of these are defining you, you have yet to be defined.

Despite my incessant desperation, I simply cannot paint the perfect picture within which I would wish to live out my life. And because I cannot, God picked up the brush of love, positioned the canvas of history and painted a manger.

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.

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.

I craft most of my own tragedies without ever having even the remotest understanding that it is I myself who have done the crafting.

The hands of man can manufacture many things both penetratingly brilliant and utterly astounding. Yet, despite their amazing dexterity and profound skill they cannot manufacture hope. Such a masterpiece as that is left for the hands of God and a manger crafted by those hands.

One of a mother’s greatest gifts is to teach her child that to grow is not to timidly sit on some safe shore at water’s edge and clumsily grab whatever happens to float by. Rather, it is to deliberately step into waters both calm and turbulent in order to wrestle great things to shore. And that lesson can be best taught by a mother who stands before her child dripping wet.

The best I can do is to ‘pretend’ that I’m my own god. But in the pretending I have to pretend that I’m not pretending, and somehow that doesn’t sound very god-like to me.

In reality, is being sedentary a choice to run from our calling by not running after it?

Once faith dies, the death of hope follows hard on its heels.

In a relationship with God, our most secret places once thickly cloaked and meticulously hidden away now stand before us utterly and entirely exposed. And it may be that this dreaded fear is the single thing that keeps us an arm’s length from God, and forever a single step away from His blessings.

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?

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.

Christmas is everything that God would do, and nothing that we would imagine Him doing.

To calculate sacrifice is to attempt to sacrifice safely, and safe sacrifice is one of the most outrageous oxymoron’s I can think of.

If I choose to take the pen from God and write the story of my life without Him, I better have plenty of erasers and a whole lot of white-out. Better yet, I should invest in a good shredder.

The best way to see majesty is to strip away everything that pretends to be majestic so that which is fake wholly collapses in the face of that which is majestic. And God in a manger is likely the most remarkable example we have of such a monumental truth.

I am only one, but that is infinitely better than being none.

Am I a storm-waster? For it is within the fury of the very storms within which I cower that I find resources for my growth that are entirely absent on calmer days.

What we’re searching for will determine where we arrive, or if we arrive. And right in the middle of such risky choices, Christmas is God perfectly solving the problem by showing us what to search for and then bringing it to us.

Oh yes, I am frequently driven to an enraged frenzy by the blatantly crass actions of others. But to be painfully honest, that anger is much less driven by the reality of their actions and far more fueled by the realization that everything I am is everything that I hate in them.

We can only climb the mountains because there’s a valley that makes the mountain a mountain.

It is in building the best of our abilities that we ultimately destroy the worst of our liabilities.

Too often the spotlight that highlights our successes burns out quickly, while the spotlight that scrutinizes our failures is a long-life bulb.