Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes

Although I am far too frequently convinced otherwise, with God a dead-end is only the death of an end.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To build refuges of my own making is to construct fortresses of sand at ocean’s edge, where the relentless tides of time will leave my most magnificently constructed walls as perfectly flat sand. And now that I am subject to the very tides that destroyed these walls of mine, I am left with the reality that my single and sole refuge can only be the God who created both tides and sand.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I decry the injustice of my wounds, only to look down and see that I am holding a smoking gun in one hand and a fistful of ammunition in the other.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The problem is not that we don’t recognize the truth when we hear it. The problem is that we don’t want to recognize what the truth might mean for us if we hear it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
One sure way I can avoid facing myself is by refusing to look into the face of God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Avoidance is paying forward that which I would be much wiser to pay off.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I look closely, my failures are less about my inadequacies and more about the fact that I channel my abilities into the wrong places.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The problem with wearing a facade is that sooner or later life shows up with a big pair of scissors.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Sure, things die. Yet hard on the heels of every death there comes a birth. And if the life around me is being perpetually refreshed in such a relentless manner, why would I think that the life within me can’t have the same experience.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Too often our lives are soiled to desperation by endings that in reality are magnificently outnumbered by beginnings. And unless we become convinced that an ending is always the birthplace of a beginning that is on its way, we will live terribly soiled lives.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Judging others shackles them to the cold iron of our limited notions.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Somewhere, somehow, something arises out of the ashes of our losses to remind us that nothing ever ceases. Nothing ever vanishes. Nothing ever comes to nothing.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Have we ever thought to consider that we create values that ‘feel’ right because they serve our current agendas, which is an infinitely different thing from values that ‘are’ right because they serve an eternal agenda?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If it’s the benefit to myself that drives my decisions, I can know that I’m driving down a long road with a short bridge.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Too often we want to take stands to elevate us rather than elevate a cause.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Risk is uncertainty injected into our most vulnerable places. And because that’s the case, we may choose not to risk.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Risk is the stuff that sucks the predictability right out of the very things that we desperately wish were predictable.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We can only be our best by giving, and so we always need to be in the process of giving or preparing to give.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If your portfolio is made up of the investments that you have made in the lives of people, you will have amassed a wealth so vast that all the portfolios that will ever float the trading floor on Wall Street would, by comparison, be reckoned as nothing. And if by chance we dared to live by this truth, we would in fact love like none other.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
May we know fear, but may we always refuse to court cowardice.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To be bold is to be wise enough to realize that fear is the energy that fuels action.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Humanized gods are too small to captivate my imagination, or be worthy of my fullest allegiance.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Be confidently assured that any ‘gods’ that we build will always have veracious appetites, and sooner or later they will gorge themselves on that which built them.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I’m surprised at where I’m at, it’s probably because I’m not listening to the reality that listening to the voices that I’ve listened to have put me here. So, maybe I should be less surprised and more disappointed.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Eternity is the end of the end.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Sometimes things that appear completely irreconcilable and mutually exclusive serve a shared purpose that could not be achieved except through their contradiction.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Why is it that crisis pushes me to my own devices when those devices are frequently the very things that produced my crisis in the first place?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
There is a deep dryness of the soul and all of the recalcitrant contrivances of man to quench his own thirst will bring not a single drop of moisture to those parched places, for God and God alone holds the water that satiates the soul.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The priceless lesson in the New Year is that endings birth beginnings and beginnings birth endings. And in this elegantly choreographed dance of life, neither ever find an end in the other.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Integrity is the antithesis of compromise and the sworn enemy of comfort. It bases its decisions not on how much discomfort we might be able to avoid, but on how much we need to avoid the compromise of comfort.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I am only one, but that is infinitely better than being none.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Human beings manifesting the fullness of who they were created to be would be inviting and correspondingly transformational in a manner almost mysterious.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe we should remember that logic constructs a box that is far too small for wonder to take up residence in. Therefore, the crucial question is, ‘Will we choose to live there if wonder cannot?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Expectations are the shackles that will not permit something to be what it actually is.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Although it would lead me to believe otherwise, fear has little interest in intimidating me. Rather, it much prefers to enslave me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To ‘stop and smell the roses’ we must first believe that there’s a rose garden out there somewhere. And in this jaded world of ours, the refusal to believe in gardens leaves most of us ref of roses.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To destroy that which seeks to destroy me, God invites me to stand against it until it stands down and then falls down.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I too often allow people to become a sterile commodity to be bartered in the service of my greed, and in doing something so absurdly reckless I foolishly barter away everything that meets my need.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In choosing to exchange precious principles for worthless impulses, I have far too often bankrupted my soul in order to bankroll my ego.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A cause that only serves me is much like a door on the edge of a cliff, it doesn’t open to anywhere good.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I constantly pack my pockets full of worthless trinkets, and in such misguided gorging I leave my heart empty and my soul emaciated because I have forgotten everything but trinkets.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I craft most of my own tragedies without ever having even the remotest understanding that it is I myself who have done the crafting.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Commitment is a promise to a cause. Being non-committal is a promise to catastrophe.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
There are consequences to ignoring consequences that are a consequence of my blatant unwillingness to learn from my consequences.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Betrayal dressed in love and trimmed with the facade of good intentions is the most barbaric of all betrayals.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Every life is a canvas and every interaction is a brush, therefore we’d be wise to consider how we handle the paint.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The wisdom to be on the throne of one’s life must surpass the wisdom of the one being ruled, otherwise I will squander the whole of my life in the most appalling ways. By virtue of that reality, I would be wise to get out of the chair and invite God to have a seat.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Loving those who hate us means wantonly setting the stage and orchestrating the situation in a way that’s sure to result in a production of great personal calamity. But to not love them is an even greater calamity.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In the midst of our worried searching we recklessly abandon the treasures that life has bestowed upon us in the mad hunt for that which we wish to bestow upon ourselves.
Craig D. Lounsbrough