Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes

The question is not how many years I've lived. The question is how I lived those many years.

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.

I hike up hills and call them mountains. However, God descends to mountains and calls them stepping stones to heaven. And while the immensity of it all scares me a bit, I think I prefer God's point of view.

Where there is no hope, there is Christmas. And where there is no Christmas, there is no hope.

Ego is borne of the need to 'prove' oneself instead of making the choice to 'be' oneself. And so maybe we need to begin curbing the birthrate.

Of all the ways that God could show up, He showed up by coming down. Therefore, despite the shortness of my reach it is never outside the length of His grasp.

If there is any solace to be found in the carnage of September 11th, may I find it in understanding that the potential to do great good can handily rival the tendency to carry out great evil. And out of that understanding may I commit in my own life to make certain that in such a critical rivalry I will ensure that towers will never fall because of me, but people will be raised up due to me.

We have the power of the pen to write the next chapter, and the privilege to author the page in whatever fashion we choose. Yet, seldom do we understand the power of the pen and the privilege of the page.

Disappointment focuses on 'what is not,' and completely misses the far greater reality of 'what now is.

If the road is easy, it's probably easy because it's not a road and you're not on it.

To end my life having exhausted the whole of it in the pursuit of worldly things means that I will die holding no things. But to exhaust the whole of it in the pursuit of God means that I will die holding all things. And the difference between the two is everything.

I have forged many things that I believe to be things of great beauty. Yet if God is not a part of them, they are entirely counterfeit and I have been robbed blind by the work of my own hands.

No voice is so loud that it can demand that we listen to it.

It is in refusing to recognize that we worship something that we move from the worship of that thing to slavery to that thing.

For a true visionary, today started yesterday.

What insanity causes a king abandon the comforts of his kingdom and willfully discard the privileges of royalty in order to save an ornery and rebellious people who have spent a lifetime rejecting him? We have yet to understand that such an action is nothing of insanity. Rather, it is everything of love.

It is less that you are an adversary and more that you are someone with an opinion that (although frightening to me) might in some way enrich my own. And if I raise myself to being a partner with you on this mutual journey of ours, and if I refuse to bow to the posture of being a frightened adversary as you intersect my journey with a journey different than my own, we can profoundly change what we would have otherwise both died fighting over.

What I've deemed as impossible is more the fiction I've created to avoid the failure I fear.

It might not be about perfection. Rather, it may be that that which is imperfect is that which has the most character.

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.

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.

It is possible that pain is the thing that tells me that I'm living when I see it as the thing that tells me that I'm dying?

If we're really to give ourselves the best of ourselves, we have to be honest with the worst of ourselves.

I am amazed that without any hesitation whatsoever I can completely believe myself to be on a grand journey of massive vistas and bold ascents, only to find that they are nothing more than a figment of a frightened imagination that needed a journey but could not admit to the fear of actually taking one.

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.

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.

Christmas is God deciding to find people who didn't want to be found but could not afford not to be found.

All of us, minus the part of us we wish to keep for ourselves, adds up to none of us. And that's typically what we give God.

Eternity is never having to show up because there was never a time that you were not there. And because this is the nature of God, it's not about asking Him to show up in our lives. Rather, it's about asking Him to shine through our lives.

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.

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 spend my life constantly calling in 'imaginary' debts that aren't owed to me in order to avoid the 'real' debts that I owe to others, and so everybody ends up bankrupt.

Maybe we need to reflect on the fact that the patience of God always outruns the impatience of our greed, and that His love always outweighs the greed that outweighs our love for Him.

To dream only of what is 'possible' is to be fooled into believing that one is dreaming in the first place.

I desperately want someone to see the anguish of my soul, for to walk alone in that kind of anguish creates an anguish all its own.

It wasn't until I slowed the car and rolled down the windows that I realized I spend most of my days driving 'through' life without driving 'in' life. So, I've decided to walk because the pace is slower and the windows are always down.

Hope is oxygen to the soul, and God is the oxygen of hope.

Too many of us view liberty as something that 'just is,' and too few see it as something that 'is' only because someone, somewhere was faced with the formidable reality that to keep liberty meant paying a stiff price.

Peace is a state of being that is not reflective of what is transpiring around me, but is reflective of what God is doing within me.

If the amount of times we get up is just one less than the amount of times that we've been knocked down, then we're spending our lives lying down.

Kicking the can down the road implies that we're accepted the galling reality that whatever it is that we've avoiding, it's something that's not going to go away; at least on its own.

Forgiveness means that you will not allow a temporary event to have "forever" repercussions.

May we as father's pray that God would transform the men that we are in order to heal the wounds that we have caused. And might we kneel before this God every day so that the transformation never stops, but the wounding does.

An inheritance is what you leave with people. A legacy is what you leave in them.

Greatness untethered from God results in calamity unrestrained by men.

More often than not, the thing we fear is less than half the size of the fear it creates.

God can craft ten thousand tomorrows and shape a thousand dreams to fill every one of them. And He carries out this most ingenious 'crafting' and 'shaping' using the very cinders and ashes left by the fires that had originally destroyed our tomorrows and leveled our dreams.

If the road behind me is not growing ever longer, then it is likely that the feet underneath me are not moving any longer. And if my feet are not moving, I have somehow, somewhere traded this most glorious journey for lesser endeavors.

Authentic greatness involves doing great things and then saying that I had nothing to do with it because God had everything to do with it. Anything else is my ego on a bender.

The drum to which we march reveals the conductor to whom we're listening.

With God, a mountain before me is soon to be a memory behind me.

Today is the opportunity that tomorrow is hoping we take advantage of.

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

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.

Just when our understanding of God finally appears to have fallen comfortably into our childlike formulas, God lets us know that He's not two things; a child or a formula.

The fool who thinks he's god will rather quickly discover that he is not, which simply means that the person who was fooled by the fool is none other than the fool himself.

My stupidity need not be the end of me, for if I surrender my stupidity to God it will in fact become the beginning of me.

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.

We've yet to comprehend the impervious reality that to gain 'life' we have to do the most scandalous thing imaginable, and that is to work 'against' the whole of our humanity and give everything away. And yet to give everything away is to work 'with' the whole of God's character.

Too often we confuse 'discovering who we are' with 'discovering who we want to be.' And if we commit to the former it will take care of the latter.

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.

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

I'm looking for a God that isn't designed by human hands because He's infinitely out of arm's reach.

One of the most horrific things that you can do to yourself is to discount the abilities that you have to change yourself.

Sometimes life has to strip us in order to save us.

What I would be quite wise to remember is that 'pieces' are not the end of what was, but the beginning of what is to be.

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

To sacrifice myself is the most radical way that I can exchange what I've become for what I was supposed to become.

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.

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

Pain dutifully reminds me that the world is terribly imperfect, but it faithfully helps me appreciate the world on those days when it's a little closer to being perfect.

I'm not interested in what you say. I'm interested in what you do. But more than that, I'm interested in what you do when no one else is there to see it but you. And because I will never witness those moments, I hope that you do.

The burdens I carry on my back are in direct correlation to the weight of my ego.

Could it be that questioning the existence of our purpose is in fact part of the process within which we become convinced that we have one?

Hope is not some thin thing that is subject to the winds of fate, but it is crafted hard by the hands of God.

Contradictions are the impossible chasms that create forever separations. God is the forever bridge that creates impossible reunions.

Despite opinions to the contrary, restoring Godly values is the most progressive course of action that we could ever hope to take.

Have we ever thought that being lost is our destination?

It is no secret that the greatest treasures are found in the most remote, inaccessible and difficult places where we must pursue them with great energy and even greater risk. It's the same with our lives.

It's not about working hard. It's about what we're working hard about.

God has given me both the right and privilege to outrun Him if I so choose. Yet, if I do so, I will have lost the race.

Sitting down with a great book means that when you stand up, you will be a completely different person from who you were when you sat down.

Without the 'dark' I would never understand how light the 'light' really is. And while I don't care for the dark, I do appreciate what it does for the light.

Despite our battered exterior and in spite of the festering scars and rank filth that overlays it, there is underneath it all the pristine likeness of God Himself. And we would be wise to cast an eye not on the marred exterior, but to be fixed on the glorious interior.

It's not so much about where we're at, but where we want to go from where we're at.

The greatest loss lies in our inability to accept loss.

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.

Why am I always lost in the woods," I yell at the top of my voice! And if I choose to settle down for a moment and be honest with myself, I'll rather reluctantly admit that I drew the map.

To judge someone is to say that I have the right to define who they are, verses understanding that God has handed me the priceless privilege of discovering who they are.

The problem with wearing a facade is that sooner or later life shows up with a big pair of scissors.

If all we see are cinders and ashes, all we see is 'what was' at the expense of what the cinders and ashes are preparing to be.

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

I think that there's real wisdom in leaving the old year behind you as you step into the New Year. However, if you're foolish enough to leave the lessons behind as well, it won't matter that you left the old year behind because you're going to repeat it all over again anyway.

The idea is to always be attempting things that are greater than who I am. Otherwise I will never be more than who I am. That is why I prefer the call of God over the plans of men, for the former is a call to the impossible and the latter is a summons to what I did yesterday.

When we surrender to a purposeless existence, we are surrendering to death way ahead of death's actual arrival.

Love never lives on a one-way street, for it will always come back up the road bigger than how we had sent it down the road.

We are always immeasurably bigger than the little person we've too often doomed ourselves to be.

The world offers us a lot of mirrors, and we spend a whole lot of time standing in front of a whole lot of them. And regardless of which one of these many mirrors we choose, it will never be large enough to take in 'all that we are' in order to reflect 'all that we are' back to us. For God made you far too marvelous for the mirrors of men. Therefore, you might want to quit standing in front of them.

Choosing a life of safety is safely choosing something other than life.

And because it's all that we can see, the ending becomes an end in itself when directly ahead of us new beginnings are being forged and fresh byways are being laid out from the very ending that we're caught up in.