Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes - Page 8

God has hewn out a hidden path more glorious, tantalizing and adventuresome than the path trod by most, and it is a path seen only through the eyes of our wounds, felt solely through the heart of our losses, and singularly traversed by those with a limp in their step.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Too often my solution is to let something die because I can’t keep it alive, when God’s solution is to let something live because His Son already died for it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Loss eventually arrives when something departs. Grief is working through both.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The greatest loss lies in our inability to accept loss.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A hole is a space where everything has been moved out so that opportunity has space to move in.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Loss is the uninvited door that extends us an unexpected invitation to unimaginable possibilities.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Maybe the thing that we’re losing is the very thing that has caused us to lose everything else in the first place.
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
Today’s ashes are tomorrow’s soil.
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
To abandon the child ‘within’ means that the adult ‘without’ will be an adult in name only. And frankly, I can only name a handful of things that are that tragic.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I have attached anything to sacrifice other than loss, I have at some level assumed a pay-off. And if I’ve assumed a pay-off, I’m only assuming a sacrifice.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Forgiving others simply means that you refuse to be a prisoner of a past that you can't change, and shackled to decisions that you didn't make.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It‘s utterly astounding that every time I get knocked down God’s mercy compassionately raises me to my feet; His grace thoroughly brushes off every trace of assorted filth I accumulated in the fall, His word precisely recalibrates my direction to insure the success of a journey resumed, and once all of that is completed He gently leans over and whispers, “How about another run?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We can hide a lot of stuff until God shows up, for when God shows up nothing is hidden, which includes both our embarrassment and His forgiveness.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To forgive is to refuse to contaminate the future with the errors of the past.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Forgiveness means that you will not allow a temporary event to have “forever” repercussions.
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
Why does not the stunning evidence of the last miracle grant me confidence in the next crisis? Because my immaturity does not permit such a faith, my desperate prayer is that God would grant me a robust faith sufficient to trust Him not for one crisis, but for an eternity of miracles.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Too often the spotlight that highlights our successes burns out quickly, while the spotlight that scrutinizes our failures is a long-life bulb.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I will not find myself, nor will I obtain any precarious morsel of life in giving all of life to myself. If I am ever to find these things, I must first be willing to give these things away at the very moment that I come into possession of them.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To forget is to blithely toss aside the hard lessons that were hard won by others before us, thereby needlessly dooming us to endure the hard lessons that are likely to be forgotten by those who will follow us. And it is altogether reasonable that in order to avoid this repetitive trouncing, God graciously granted us memories.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It would do me well to realize that the path that has led me to where I am was mapped by those who taught me and paved by what they taught me. Therefore, if God is not my teacher and His truth is not my topic I will find myself where I don’t want to be, having trod a path I didn’t want to take.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Sometimes consequences are building blocks fashioned of granite when successes are shaped of clay.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Instead of the weight that sinks us, consequences are often the life preserver that saves us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
A consequence may be the very thing that saves us because it was the only thing loud enough to get our attention.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We are about the hurried business of living life while missing it in the very process of living it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Starting over is an acceptance of a past we can't change, an unrelenting conviction that the future can be different, and a stubborn wisdom to use the past to make the future was the past was not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The issue is becoming so absorbed in positioning ourselves ahead of everyone else that life becomes nothing more than an endless strategy.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
My prayer is that God would continue to love me enough to refuse to answer the prayers I'm praying that I shouldn't be praying.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Prayer is knowing that what I ask for is always far bigger than what I could ever articulate, but it is never too big for God to understand nor is it ever too vast for Him to deliver.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Prayer is one action where I lay aside my abilities to immerse myself wholly in God’s capabilities. And the liberation found in such an action is less about being engaged with God and more about being freed from myself.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I am indeed my own god, I’d better start praying to myself to get myself out of myself.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In the deepest darkness God tenderly grasps my hand and whispers that darkness is nothing more than a place that He is preparing for the arrival of light.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Faith is the resplendent key that liberates me from the impregnable confines meticulously constructed from the raw material of my disbelief.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
My fear of standing alone often pressures me to stand with a rather unsavory group that embraces a rather unsettling belief system which leaves me wondering why I left the promises of God for the company of people.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
There is that gnawing feeling that we are far more than what we believe ourselves to be. Maybe it’s time to believe the gnawing.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Most of the things we deem as impossible are only impossible because we’ve given them permission to be impossible.
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
Faith means I chose not to know, which is different than ignorance which refuses to know.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Five of the most dangerous words I know: ‘What’s in it for me?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When I find that stubbornness continually overrides common sense regardless of the logic of my argument, it seems that the only effective solution is to tell them to go ahead and stick their finger in the socket. And what I find is that what my argument failed to solve, electricity does quite nicely.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
And so, it is always the case that the past is irreparably land-locked, and the future has yet to land. And here we are, living out our lives on the precariously thin line which separates the two.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We incessantly vacillate between what’s behind us and what’s before us depending on the current barometer of our courage and the ambivalent nature of our vision.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Starting over is an acceptance of a past we can’t change, an unrelenting conviction that the future can be different, and the stubborn wisdom to use the past to make the future what the past was not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To assist us in climbing the mountains is marvelous. To level the mountains and altogether eliminate the climb is miraculous. And at times I think that God prefers the latter because it emboldens us to face the former.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I can ruthlessly press my imagination out beyond its very edges, and even in such a remote place I have not begun to touch the barest periphery of God’s imagination.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To dress up today in the threadbare garments of yesterday is to create an impoverished tomorrow.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Eons ago, the creative genius of God foresaw that it would take the shattered pieces of my ‘yesterday’ to construct the sturdy portal to my ‘tomorrow.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The present is too often squandered grieving the past or fearing the future, which makes the present nothing more than a cheap facsimile of what was or what will be instead of what it could be.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Whatever I ‘align’’ myself with are the very things that will create a ‘line’ into my future.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I were to be brutally honest with myself, how often is my journey actually a path designed to circumvent my journey?
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
We can breathe in the sweet scent of a tepid summer’s meadow after the kiss of a warm rain, and in the very same moment we can stand utterly breathless underneath the expanse of untold galaxies that breech the very edges of the universe itself. Such are the privileges we enjoy because of God’s unimaginable imagination.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To say that my existence is entirely inconsequential is to utterly ignore the amazing reality that life is a masterful story penned by a brilliant God who wrote me into the story in such a way that my absence would literally diminish the whole of the story.
Craig D. Lounsbrough