Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes - Page 16

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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I have never had, or worse yet, I have lost the conviction that life (despite all of the blows it wields and the savagery that it spawns) is nonetheless an incalculable privilege, I will have in that single loss forfeited the whole of my life and effectively wiped out any hope that I can or will do anything other than exist.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Where there is no hope, there is Christmas. And where there is no Christmas, there is no hope.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The message of Christmas is a message of hope when all other such messages created by men can do nothing more than be hopeful.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
My fear of endings too often blocks my hope of beginnings.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Any dream that I am absolutely confident I can achieve should immediately be discarded for the simple reason that it is simply too small.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Easter is a marvelous affirmation of the genius of our design, but it is likewise the blunt acknowledgement that left to its own devices, the genius of our design will result in the destruction of our lives.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Hope is not some thin thing that is subject to the winds of fate, but it is crafted hard by the hands of God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Hope is not some thin thing that is subject to the winds of fate. Rather, it is something crafted hard by the hands of God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
With God, the impossible is not an obstacle but an invitation.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I ask, ‘Is the cup half-empty or half-full?’ And when I ask that question, I am amazed at how many people have no cup.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Strength other than that received from God is just hype manufactured by men.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Once faith dies, the death of hope follows hard on its heels.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Looking back, I now realize that I left home in search of all the things that were right in the very place I left.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I can draw the slightest smile across a single face obliterated by pain, in that act I will have begun to understand the power of an ordinary human being to perform the seemingly impossible in the life of another human being. And how can that experience do anything less than drive me to try and make the world smile.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Truth even in the most whispered tones will always roar.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Things that are truly great need nothing from me, and to somehow think that they do speaks to my utter lack of greatness.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
So, there’s this hornet’s nest. And there’s this long stick. And then there’s me. How I walk away from all of this will depend on whether I realize that some things go together and some things don’t no matter how hard you try.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If you can get others to believe that your random guesses are actual answers, they’ll never guess that you never understood the question in the first place.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Impulsivity is something akin to spontaneously jumping out of an airplane and not realizing that you forgot something until about five seconds before impact.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A lot of the situations that we put ourselves in are similar to a cat in a yard full of dogs. We rarely ask ourselves how we got here, (which doesn’t help with the question of how we get out of here), all of which rarely keeps us from finding ourselves in the next yard asking the same questions.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I'm in a hole because at some point I found a shovel and started digging. Maybe I should trade my shovels for ladders and start climbing.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In case you’re short on definitions, here’s one. Insanity: ‘Destroying the very things that sustain us.’ And if we’re so short-sighted so as to make such preposterous choices, then it’s not all that preposterous to believe that shortly our end will be in sight.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I must never equate the degree of pain as evidencing the incorrectness of a decision, for if I do I will default on some of the most critical decisions I should have ever made.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If there’s one thing that’s irrefutably absurd, it’s believing that we can separate intelligence from wisdom and still have it be intelligence.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Too often, opinion is a lens polished by the grit of bias. And as I stare through my own lens, I might ask how much polish can the grit of bias actually create?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Imagination envisions what could be. Reality states what is. And when my journey is shaped by one of these at the exclusion of the other, I will eventually wake up on some road facing the ‘reality’ that I’m far more lost than I could have ‘imagined’.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A compass calibrated by my greed is a rather shrewd way to legitimize my agenda. However, true north on a compass such as this is a straight line to the edge of a really big cliff.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It’s not that I’ve been invited to the hole I’m standing in. It’s that I accepted the invitation.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Things becomes invisible at the very moment I refuse to grant them importance. And while I am utterly ashamed to admit it, many of the most important things in my life are invisible.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I can arrogantly brag that the doors I choose in life open wide and grant me unobstructed passage. But the widest doors tend to lead to the worst places.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To be careless in making decisions is to naively believe that a single decision impacts nothing more than that single decision, for a single decision can spawn a thousand others that were entirely unnecessary or it can bring peace to a thousand places we never knew existed.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Forgiveness allows the burdens that we carry to become the histories that we forget.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Ethics are the things that say, 'Don’t stick your finger in the socket.' The world says, 'It’s okay because we’ve shut off the electricity.' And at the point that we’ve chosen to listen to the world and ignore our ethics, we say, 'I’m having a really hard time getting back up.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Faith is rare because fear is rampant. For faith will demand that I step into places that fear itself fears to go.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In the end, if we don't have God we don't have anything other than an end.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Tomorrow’ is the thing that’s always coming but never arrives. ‘Today’ is the thing that’s already here and never leaves. And because that’s the case, I would much prefer to invest in today than sit around waiting for an arrival that’s not arriving.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The darkness that follows a sunset is never so dark that it can change the inevitability of a sunrise.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Tragedy descends, and in the carnage our enraged cynicism screams ‘If there was a God, He would not have allowed this!’ And somehow we’ve conveniently forgotten that once upon a time He allowed us to tell Him to go away, and once upon that time we allowed ourselves to take Him up on that offer.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
At the moment that everything goes dark, the sunset in front of us becomes the whole story. But if we find courage enough to wait until tomorrow morning, we will suddenly come to understand that in reality yesterday’s sunset was only half of the story.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We ask, ‘Why the need for God?’ Maybe the better question is ‘Why the need not to need Him?’ And could it be that that question in fact evidences our need for Him?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
You are not made in ‘your image’. You are, in fact, made in ‘God’s image’. Therefore, which one are you looking for when you look in the mirror?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I’ve prayed, I never have to worry about being the first one to show up.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We look around us and we find ourselves confused as to why the world has fallen into such deep darkness. And standing in this descending darkness, what we need to realize is that the farther we move from God, the darker everything gets. And no light of man can illuminate that kind of darkness.
Craig D. Lounsbrough