Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes - Page 2

Christmas seems to say that paradise lost and longed for does not have to be paradise given up on.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas was a response of the choice of mankind to take its existence into its own hands and chart its own course, liberally scripting its own ethics, crafting its own moral system, and choosing to believe that it was the creator and therefore master of its fate. Christmas is a response to mankind reeling off the pages of history and splattering the blood of lives and generations wasted along its free-wheeling course.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas is God saving mankind from the folly of mankind’s grandiose sense of greatness.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas is God being relentless to the point that He would die in that relentlessness.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Shrewdly crafted political agendas, innately complex philosophies, man-made religions, governments and regimes of every sort, and all the endless volumes of man-manufactured wisdom and penned prose all completely failed to redeem mankind and make us better. When the best of our efforts failed to redeem the worst of our behaviors, God declared enough as enough and a baby was born.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas is a response to bring mankind back, to restore some original intent that could never be even remotely restored by any effort of mankind regardless of how grand or majestic any such effort might be.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas is not something that sprang from the musings of some person who creatively devised caricatures of elves, spiraling candy canes, visions of a magical city whose foundation was nestled in the far reaches of the North Pole, or embellishments of a kindly bishop spun by myth into a bearded old man in a red suit.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It was the greatest, most intricate, most ingenious and most costly rescue mission in all of human history.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas is everything that God would do, and nothing that we would imagine Him doing.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas is a clandestinely ingenious script that outlines a plan to reclaim mankind through a strategy unimagined and unimaginable. This strategy involved God writing His own death into the script.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We cannot humanize the fact that the story was penned to have the eternal God, Who Himself knows no beginning nor is in need of one, choose to experience a beginning. That is genius in and of itself.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas was an ingenious plan designed by God to lay siege to the hearts of all men by submitting Himself to the greed of all men.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas was about understanding that servanthood would win the hearts of men for eternity, where raw power might win them only for a moment, if at all.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas is not a story birthed of a humanized god for it simply doesn’t fit into the rubric of such an emaciated plot.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
There’s something inherently majestic about Christmas that seems to have been abandoned by us; something flippantly cast aside, something that was foolishly abandoned and was tragically forgotten in the abandonment.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If Christmas is a universally comprehensive and keenly clandestine rescue mission strategically crafted by God Himself eons before the rescue was necessary, it would naturally follow that if it is doomed to anything, it is doomed to incontestable success.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe the greatest hope of Christmas is that what it purports to be is exactly what it is.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The ‘deep pause’ needed to cultivate wonder is far too often back-filled with an incessant busyness, as busyness errantly presumes a ‘deep pause’ to be deeply wasteful.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
My wisdom absent of God’s wisdom is nothing more than a best-guess.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Being our best is asking how can we take ourselves to the precipice of our own limits in any and every situation?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Although we may face untold numbers that by their sheer mass appear to render us as little more than a speck in the face of them, a single person standing with God amidst any mass will always be an indomitable majority.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I have both the violent turbulence of the storm and the quiet promises of God in the storm. And what I must work to remember is that something is not necessarily stronger simply because it’s louder.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Consequences need not be the obstacles that I dread, but the direction that I need.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Uncommon solutions can always overcome problems of the most common or uncommon kind if I am sufficiently committed to overcoming them.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I would be quite wise to realize that I will never craft a solution that will be the ‘end-all,’ and that God’s ability to craft perfect solutions never ends ‘at-all.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Can anything be called an achievement if it does not simultaneously enhance the life of someone other than the one who has done the achieving?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I suppose that one of my greatest problem lays in the fact that I have assumed a blessing to be something that is mine for the taking, verses being something that by sheer exposure to it takes me.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To savor the simple privilege that every day I have a sunrise to bathe in, a storehouse of opportunities to romp through, the thick wrap of relationships to keep me warm, a God who meticulously tends to every detail round about me, and it all costs me not a dime. What madness would keep me from being eternally thankful for all that?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To be found is to be exposed. No wonder so many of us are still lost.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If in fact it’s not too late to realize that something’s ‘too late’, then there’s a good chance that it’s not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It is the state of the heart within us that determines the nature of the triggers we will pull outside of us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I pray that I am never so foolishly naive or roguishly pompous to think that I can be the captain of my own ship, for if God is not at the helm my ship will soon be at the bottom.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If the truth gets in the way, I will remove it. But truth be told, removing the truth never removes the truth.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I paved the path to the very place I don’t want to be. But passing the blame off to someone else doesn’t put me any place else.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We opt to be seen as ‘right’ in the eyes of everyone else, rather than doing what’s ‘right’ in light of the situation.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In God’s vocabulary, ‘lost’ is an unnecessary adjective that is easily erased by the adjective ‘found’ if we would simply be brave enough to hand Him the eraser.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The very places that we presume God not to be are the very places that are filled with His footprints and littered with His fingerprints.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To incessantly blame others for my shortcomings is cowardice borne of fear, fed by fear, and haunted by fear. To be steadfastly accountable for my shortcomings is bravery borne of God, fed by God, and blessed by God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The service of self terminates at our own death.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Being our best involves walking away from every situation with less than what we had when we encountered it because we left something behind in the exchange.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Love knows nothing of short hauls because it has committed itself for the long haul.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Real accomplishments do virtually nothing to serve me and they do everything to serve others. Anything less is nothing more than a meaningless task dressed in the deceptive finery of accomplishments.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I am thankful that to be attuned to the needs of another attunes us to the world, and that if I stay attuned only to my needs I will always be a stranger to the world.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I am thankful that sacrifice is non-negotiable, and that counting the cost in giving to another is foolishly assuming that we can put a price on sacrifice.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To put others in front of ourselves is to put God in front of everything.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Good tells us that our agenda is the agenda of the person next to us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
There’s something tightly woven throughout the fabric of our humanity that runs entirely opposite to the baser instinct of looking out for our own good.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Contrary to popular opinion, we are all a vast brotherhood of human beings whose very survival hinges not on what we keep, but on what we give. And it is in the giving that we not only survive to live another day, but we thrive to celebrate another day.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To fill the fathomless caverns of my thirsty soul I must work entirely contrary to impulses of my own humanity, for it is in emptying myself at the very point where I am most empty that I fill myself.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I give with the motive to get, regardless of the degree to which that motive besets me, I will walk away impoverished and I will leave those to whom I have given just as impoverished as I have now found myself.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I cannot calculate nor attempt to manage sacrifice, for to do so is to attempt to sacrifice comfortably. And it is in the attempt to sacrifice comfortably that I begin to realize that the desire for comfort is in reality the demand that I put myself first, and there is nothing of sacrifice in that.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I am thankful that in the giving we receive, and what we receive is the satisfaction of knowing that whatever we give is always bigger once we’ve given it away.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I have forfeited the ability to wonder so as not to offend the tenets of the culture, and if I have sacrificed warm dreams on the cold altar of conformity, it is likely because I have somewhere traded the marvel of the infinite for the malaise of the finite.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Rhetoric can be easily recognized for it is delightfully sweet sounding but it is utterly void of sacrifice, which means it is utterly void of substance. Christmas is irrefutable evidence that God never engages in rhetoric.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Sacrifice is a noun in my vocabulary that should be a verb in my life.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To calculate sacrifice is to attempt to sacrifice safely, and safe sacrifice is one of the most outrageous oxymoron’s I can think of.
Craig D. Lounsbrough