Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes - Page 4

When my vision is numbed by apathy and narrowed by mediocrity, I can stand in the presence of great things and fail to see even the smallest of things.

Yet, there is a sense of some deep sort that runs entirely contrary to human nature, that in putting ourselves first, we must by necessity put others first.

Good tells us that our agenda is the agenda of the person next to us.

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.

God beckons me to exhilarating adventures that are without number, beyond all conceivable boundaries, and effortlessly eclipse the furthest reaches of my imagination, all while I sit languishing in stifling adventures of my own limited creation.

Avoidance is paying forward that which I would be much wiser to pay off.

Starting over begins when I develop a reawakened appreciation for what I already have, a renewed recognition of what I’ve recklessly forsaken, a rehabilitated understanding that I foolishly do both of those things, and a revitalized commitment to live the rest of my life never doing either of them again.

And who would dare write their own death into the script so that the rest of the characters in the tale might live? God of course.

Once I have impounded love and towed it into the confine of words, I have lost it altogether.

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

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.

Words can be honed to crafted perfection by the finest wordsmiths. Yet, if we trust solely in the expanse of them to explain this God of ours or articulate our experience of Him, we will have brutally destroyed the very things we are attempting to explain. And if I should do that, no words can describe how badly I wish I had no words.

Of course I don’t want to get knocked down. But the single and sole solution to that fear is to not go anywhere where I can be knocked down. And is that not already being knocked down?

Do I make up some ‘god’ in my mind, or do I make up my mind to know God?

I am thankful that I can be thankful, for if thankfulness did not exist my heart would be irretrievably imprisoned by the crazed twins of acquisition and possession, and my soul would exist as a forever slave to greed.

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.

When we actually refer to God’s blueprint, we gladly work in fascinated conjunction with it, suddenly realizing that any other action outside of that blueprint is foolhardiness and lunacy of the worst sort.

The ‘gods’ that do us the greatest harm are the gods we deny having.

I find that I spend a tremendous amount of time chasing the praises of men rather than sitting with the praises of God. The former is something I attempt to catch, the latter catches me.

Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds.

If your dream doesn't scare you, it's not big enough.

Sometimes chaos is the very thing that deliberately shakes up our neatly ordered world’s in order to get us out of the neatly ordered ruts that have kept us stuck.

What is an adventure, I might ask? And in the asking, I might begin to understand that my adventures are sorely limited to the confines of my lackluster imagination. Therefore, an adventure of the most robust and wild sort must be constructed by an unlimited imagination. And unless I am mistaken, only God has an imagination like that.

It’s about recognizing that the great movements and moments in history laid on the backs of ordinary people who simply chose to do extraordinary things.

Maybe we don’t ever feel that sweetly untainted and wholly majestic kind of love that takes every longing captive because we are hopelessly entangled in the illogical fear that despite all of love’s grand goodness, it might not be good enough to keep us safe.

My prayer is that God would continue to love me enough to refuse to answer the prayers I'm praying that I shouldn't be praying.

If I have refused to risk, I have in the self-same decision refused to love. And if indeed I have refused to love, tragically I have refused to live. And when will I realize that that in and of itself is an unacceptable risk.

You can dress up greed, but you can’t stop the stench.

We somehow have led ourselves to believe that our questions are big enough to encircle life, and that life is small enough to be contained by the answers. The real question might be, are we ignorant or just plain stupid?

Maybe the real miracle in any miracle is our ability to believe that despite our own depravity, in the eyes of God we are worthy of a miracle.

Sometimes the very things that we’re expending our lives to sustain are the very things that are killing our ability to live. And against our blind and frequently raging protests, these are the very things that God let’s die so that we can live.

To declare myself as a genius immediately evidences that I am not.

Uncommon solutions can always overcome problems of the most common or uncommon kind if I am sufficiently committed to overcoming them.

To seek the praise of men as our motivation is to abandon truly great things, for more often than not truly great things elicit the ire of men far more than they garner their praises.

If I am always standing at the bottom of the mountain longingly looking up, in all probability it is because I have heeded the pillaging dogma of mediocrity which persistently tells me that the dream is not worth the climb.

If I were to be brutally honest with myself, how often is my journey actually a path designed to circumvent my journey?

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

Being a mother is not about ‘birthing a child into the world.’ Rather, it is about repeatedly ‘birthing into the child’ a steady sense of their inestimable worth, a prized understanding of their authentic self, a conviction that the impossible is largely the stuff of myth, and an utterly unwavering belief that the cold actions of men never represent the warm heart of God. It is the relentless act of birthing these things into the innermost soul of a thirsty child that makes a woman a mother.