Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes - Page 3

How often is my tidy and well-appointed world nothing but the thin veneer of an imagination that I’ve chosen to use in the service of denial, rather than a gift I’ve chosen to exercise out of a passion for change?

Sacrifice is a noun in my vocabulary that should be a verb in my life.

Despite all of our incessant tinkering, we can’t manufacture the things we most desperately need. And if perchance we do, they will never be more than pathetically emaciated facsimiles that will leave us emaciated. And until we finally realize that we can only ‘find’ these things, we will never sense any compulsion to ‘find’ God.

We tend to perseverate on the fact that as far as we might have fallen, there’s always another bottom underneath the one we’re laying on. Yet, for every bottom underneath us, there’s always endless opportunity above us.

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?

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.

As I contemplate a relationship with God, I find that I’m afraid to ride on the coattails of the infinite. But what I fear more than that is spending my life in the coat closet.

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.

I incessantly look for water in wells dug by men, and I have drunk enough sand to prove it.

Christmas is a response to bring mankind back, to restore some original intent that could never be even remotely restored by any effort of mankind regardless of how grand or majestic any such effort might be.

The shortest short-term investment is to serve ourselves.

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.

Mediocrity is a path cleared by fear, leveled by apathy and paved by comfort.

Is safety the ‘dream’ that will kill all of my other ‘dreams?’ For the truth is, no ‘real’ dream is safe.

The length of the fall is dictated by how far we had climbed. The outcome of the fall is dictated by whether we’re holding on to that which we’re climbing, or we’re letting God hold onto us.

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.

Surrendering is intentionally laying down the power I possess. And have I considered that the power I lay down is often more powerful than that which I’m laying it down in front of? Therefore, I would be wise to recognize that surrender is less the absence of power and more the presence of fear.

My fear of standing alone often pressures me to stand with a rather unsavory group that embraces a rather unsettling belief system which leaves me wondering why I left the promises of God for the company of people.

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.

What I do is the truest mirror of who I am.

If I am indeed my own god, I’d better start praying to myself to get myself out of myself.

I am far too often the author of terribly poor decisions. Yet I must rest in the unalterable fact that God says I am far better than what the sum total of those decisions would ever suggest.

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.

A god of the ‘possible’ is no God.

I want to ‘think’ that I have all the answers. But if I ‘think’, I soon realize that what I thought to be answers were guesses. And if I ‘think’ yet again, I begin to realize that since God has all the answers He never hands me a guess.

The road from ‘here’ to ‘there’ is a map yet to be written with the pen I hold in my hand.

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.

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.

If I have not been both soothed by love and on the opposite extreme left devastated by it, I will never understand its power nor respect its majesty.

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.

Denial is a seductive ruse of our own making, force-fitting our agendas by forcing out truth all because we bent to fear rather than bowed to God.

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.

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.

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.

My goals exceed the reach of my energies, but my God exceeds the reach of my goals.

If there’s any redeeming quality that I can find in running away from something, it’s that I’m on my feet. Now all I’ve got to do is alter my direction.

If we ignorantly act to solely serve our agenda, we’re simply slogging around in the egocentric and brackish backwaters of selfishness. Any response that comes out of that kind of cesspool will be vulgarly irresponsible.

It would be advisable to realize that we will eventually become whatever it is that we’ve created. And too often what we’ve created is a massive mess.

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.

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.

It is the state of the heart within us that determines the nature of the triggers we will pull outside of us.

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.

Romanticizing comes with colored glasses of the most colored sort.

If it has anything to do with me, it has nothing to do with sacrifice.

Have we ever thought to consider that the need to be loved grows because of its absence, but that love also grows because of its presence? And does this not speak to the power of love?

To embrace the message of Christmas is to throw off my hedonistic rebellion and bow before the chafing reality that I can't save myself, and in that very act to be suddenly taken aback in that I've stumbled upon the very freedom I've longed for in the very place I'd least expected it.

Due north’ on my compass is largely ‘due’ to the fact that in ‘due’ time I have been ‘unduly’ lax in recalibrating my compass. And I’m apparently ignorant enough to wonder why I’m lost.

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

The step that we are on is only a step to the next place, and no step regardless of how massive is ever a destination.

Christmas is God deciding to become what He never had been, so that we can become what we never could be. And so, God does the most improbable thing imaginable. He orchestrates His own birth.

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

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.

If I assume the ‘truth’ to be negotiable based on whether or not it serves my agenda, then my agenda has become my ‘truth.’ And the ‘truth’ of the matter is, when I do this I’ve chosen to take a treacherous path through some very deep woods where neither path nor woods exist.

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.

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.

When surrounded by the ashes of all that I once cherished, despite my best efforts I can find no room to be thankful. But standing there amidst endless ash I must remember that although the ashes surround me, God surrounds the ashes. And once that realization settles upon me, I am what I thought I could never be ... I am thankful for ashes.

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.

The problem with the ‘herd’ is that our voice is never ‘heard’.

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

I can bow to fear and flee the pursuit of great things. I can bow to God and engage in the pursuit of making things great.