Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes - Page 2

The death of our self-worth begins at its appraisal, for such an action erroneously implies that our worth can be quantified.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I can confidently state that the greatest rescues in my life have occurred when I’ve been saved from myself.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The thing that I’m most likely to collapse under is not the weight of the stresses that stand around me, but the ego that sits within me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Who you are is too vast to be captured by the reflection of a mirror, classified by the state of your attitude, or categorized by the opinions of others. Therefore, if any of these are defining you, you have yet to be defined.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I would be dreadfully remiss not to think that God would painstakingly craft something an intimately ingenious and inexplicably intricate as my life, and that by virtue of such sheer brilliance I should not examine it with the greatest precision and unleash it with the fullest abandon.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It would be infinitely more prudent to be a single “David” standing with God, than a million “Goliath’s” standing without Him.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We must leave Christmas to be what it is, for to reduce it to the stuff of myth and whimsy is take the single and sole hope of a dying humanity and obliterate it. And I would contend that such an action is insanity of the greatest sort.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The Christmas story is penmanship of the most brilliant sort, where God crafted a beginning that would never be subject to an ending.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I incessantly look for water in wells dug by men, and I have drunk enough sand to prove it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The greatest loss lies in our inability to accept loss.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Loss is the uninvited door that extends us an unexpected invitation to unimaginable possibilities.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We would prefer all gain and no loss in life, yet that would gain us nothing more than great loss.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If you haven’t figured it out yet, an absolutely certain way to lose something as quickly as possible is to forget the privilege you have to possess it in the first place.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
As it peaks over the horizon, does not a sunrise whisper the opportunity to try again. And if the day passes and our efforts were stunted by the bane of our insecurities or blunted by the challenges of life, does not a sunset invite us to rest before it whispers the same message the next morning?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I tend to walk around convinced that any amount of forgiveness that I could extend could never possibly compensate for the offenses that I’ve had to endure. Yet, maybe the greater offense is that I’ve got that backwards.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Our experiences are the building blocks of the future hewn out of the granite of the present.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If we’ve somehow become convinced that the script we followed ‘yesterday’ can’t be edited, it will be incredibly difficult to tell the difference between ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The road from ‘here’ to ‘there’ is a map yet to be written with the pen I hold in my hand.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The road ahead is not some predetermined path that I am forced to trod, but it is a rich byway that I can help create.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When the world does its level best to devalue me in ways that are nothing short of brutal, all it does is evidence my value. For why would it expend such massive amounts of energy attempting to destroy something that’s not there?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To ‘live’ is to realize that without the journey the destination is nothing more than a task rigorously completed rather than an experience riotously lived.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We desperately want to believe in something. To simply live out our lives believing in nothing is to live as if this thing we call life is filled with nothing but nothing.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If we’re missing life it’s probably because we’re expecting it to reveal itself to us, rather than realizing that life is revealed by us looking for it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If safety is my goal, living life is not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The miracle is that the brilliance of the miraculous can live in the blandness of the mundane. The greater miracle is that we have enough brilliance in our own blandness to see it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It’s really a rather simple thing to bring balance to my anger. All I need to do is remember that the ‘hand of cards’ that have been dealt to me pale in comparison to the ‘deck of cards’ that I’ve thrown at others.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I don’t necessarily sit around inviting life to knock me down, but when it does I don’t wait around for an invitation to stand back up either.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I pray that I am sufficiently stirred by the rumor of great things to seek the God who created this single thread that I am, and to marvel at a vision magnificent enough to cause this God to weave from this single thread a tapestry most resplendent.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The problem with the ‘herd’ is that our voice is never ‘heard’.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The ‘fact’ of my actions frequently collide with the ‘fiction’ of my words. And at what point will I live what I say, so I will avoid what I do?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A ‘good’ father will tenderly cultivate his children. But a ‘good’ father who is also a ‘brave’ father will let the children without cultivate the child within.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Abundant living is realizing that life is a privilege whether it’s adhering to our scripts or not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It is the length of the journey that ripens the joy of the outcome.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Disappointment focuses on ‘what is not,’ and completely misses the far greater reality of ‘what now is.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I can only begin the process of saving myself when I surrender to the reality that I can’t. And what greater place to surrender that reality than to an infant who surrendered Himself to me so that I might surrender myself to Him.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We live with this tortured feeling that we must create that which in reality we have the privilege of finding.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Mediocrity is ‘purpose’ left to rot in minds ensnared in the deluded rationalization that vision is nothing more than a collection of fanciful dreams constructed by an imaginary God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I have diligently disciplined my life to search out life’s gifts in the places where life stores its scraps.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Sacrifice is a passion that unleashes everything away from us so that it can be drawn into everyone around us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe I need to immerse the fabric of my soul in torrential nature of Christmas, and in doing so to finally understand that it is the very thing that can make the world what I so wish it were.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Thankfully, the nature of pain reminds us of what the ease of pleasure foolishly allows us to forget.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
For love to eliminate pain is to waste it, for it is love alone that possesses sufficient force to bend pain against everything that would break us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
My soul is utterly frantic for that single place of perfect refuge from which I can clearly see the winds rip and hear the tempest tear, yet despite the ferocity of the tumult I rest in such a sublime peace it is as if neither existed at all. And if I have not yet found such a place, it is because I have not yet found God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We are not built for mediocrity, but we build it into our lives nonetheless.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The legacy I leave will be unimaginably enhanced by the legacies I received. Therefore, I must be wise enough to embrace the history of those who have gone before me so that I can shape the future of those who will go ahead of me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
My sin murdered Him. And out of this self-loathing shame borne of the understanding that I could perpetrate such a heinous act, I am barely able to raise my head sufficiently to ask what crazed insanity would prompt Jesus to walk out of an empty tomb for the single purpose of pursuing a decaying soul that murdered Him? And I would be wise to consider that the question itself is asked only because I have yet to touch the barest periphery of God’s love despite the fact that because of an empty tomb it stands right in front of me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Tragedy cleans the windows of the soul by washing away the bias of our lives in the detergent of pain.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Without a beginning I am pouring the whole of my existence into the building of endings, while the cross and the resurrection declare that God is incessantly building beginnings from the collapse of endings.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The drum to which we march reveals the conductor to whom we’re listening.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We are quick to surrender that which we deem as long dead, when God is quick to restore that which He deems as never really having lived.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Possibly the most debilitating deception of all is to create a god of my own making, fool myself into believing that this limp god of mine is the true God, and then construct the entirety of my life on this flamboyantly fictional character. Possibly the most devastating realization of all is when the real God shows up, and in the showing up all of this come crashing down.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To only see ‘death’ in death is to somehow assume that death itself is a barrier so abrupt that God Himself is halted by it. To see ‘life’ in death is to understand that death is a sprawling horizon to a new beginning that God created long before death ever thought to show up.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Despite my best effort to make myself as large as absolutely possible, life will always be larger than me. That simple fact makes God not only a likelihood, but a necessity.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The greatest men stand on their values and pray on their knees.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Is my faith so terribly pathetic that I have diminished God to the point that I doubt His ability to survive in the very world that He came to save? Indeed, I have done exactly that. And all I need to do to beat that mentality is to remember that a baby born in a manger with every disadvantage imaginable stills lives today.
Craig D. Lounsbrough