Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

“You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.” - Henry David Thoreau “Who am I?” The question seems a bit overused these days. In our culture, I tend to think it’s less about thoughtfully unearthing who we are. Rather, I think it’s more about creating something that’s culturally acceptable and that adheres to whatever trend is currently trending in the cultur...

LifeTalk Love – A World Without It “Love is the essence of our humanity expressing itself in actions of sacrifice so profound that we risk not surviving those expressions.” Complacency is a tragic hallmark of our lives. We’ve certainly got bunches of it. In fact, as the old saying goes, we’ve got it “in spades.” Complacency is conceived in the bosom of familiarity, where something becomes so commo...

How many times have you felt that there’s just no use?  There’s just no sense in going on.  You know, we’ve made way too many mistakes.  Or the hole that we’ve dug, or the hole that misfortune dug is just too deep.  And it really doesn’t matter who dug it anyway because, either way, we’re not getting out it.  We failed out of college, or we didn’t go to begin with.  Or our marriage went away.  Or...

People ask me, “Is there any hope?”  And there have been times (more than one), where I’ve found myself asking the same question.  “Is there any hope?” And I often ask myself, “What kind of world do we live in?  How dark has it all become?  How bad must it be that we somehow find ourselves driven to some point, or some place in our lives that’s so desperate that we actually find ourselves asking t...

The Self That I Long to Believe In Believing in a New Start Some of us don’t believe in new starts. We may feel that we’re not worthy of a new start. Or, we may feel that we just don’t have what it takes to pull off a new start. But, what would we actually do with a new start, if it were possible? Not something that looks new because we’ve cleaned it up in order to make it look new, when it’s not....

LifeTalk Reshaping Our Understanding of Prayer Hi, I’m Craig Lounsbrough. Welcome to LifeTalk. Thanks for joining us today. You know, I think that we would like prayer to be a real thing. Whether you believe in it or not, I believe that most of us would like it to be true. We all have those difficult and devastating points in life when we would love to have something that would connect us to somet...

In the Footsteps of the Few The Power of a Principled Life By Craig D. Lounsbrough Are you where you want to be in life? Are you even close? Where have your dreams gone and has your hope gone with them? Have you found yourself someplace so far removed from whatever vision it was that you had for your life that you're convinced that there's no way back (if you even remember where 'back' might be)?...

Eight Things That Prayer is Not We can ask what prayer is. That’s a great question. But it might be better if we ask what prayer is not. If our prayers aren’t working right, or if we’re not feeling any kind of energy, or if there’s nothing that we’re connecting with, or our prayer life has become some flat, boring routine, it might be that we’re engaging in something that prayer is not. Are we pra...

Today we’re going to talk about self-esteem. To one degree or another, at one time or another, each of us deal with feelings of low self-esteem. We questions ourselves. We have doubts about ourselves. And so, I want to give you some thoughts that will help you build and maintain a strong self-esteem. Let’s start with this thought. It reads this way: “Oddly enough, we might want to consider the fac...

"Despite the challenges, the river never reverses its course.  Rather, it decides to cut fresh banks, fashion serene inlets, feed swirling eddies, sweep away fallen timber, lavish the floodplains with rich nutrients, and declare by actions such as these that the cowardice of reversal would never have created rivers this magnificent." - Craig D. Lounsbrough Enjoy a video of this thoughtful and chal...

Everybody seems lost these days.  People don’t like to admit that, or they refuse to admit that…but everybody seems lost these days.  I suppose that the greatest kind of ‘lost’ is to be ‘lost,’ but to deny that you’re ‘lost,’ even though you are.  That’s about the worst kind of lost that I can think of, and we certainly see a whole lot of that kind of ‘lost’ today.  Everybody seems lost these days...

New Years 2025 Wisdom to Start the Year How do we live differently this year? I mean, with intentionality. With some sense of purpose and meaning that’s way beyond just living out our lives in order to meet some set of obligations that we’ve confused with real living? How we live with some deep sense of satisfaction and personal enrichment? How do we do it all differently? Well, at the beginning o...

New It Does Not Mean Better What is “better?”  I mean, the definition of “better.”  When we change something, we tend to label the change as “better,” whether it’s better or not.  If we adjust something, or alter something, or eliminate it altogether, we define the changes that we make as “better.”  We initiate new programs, or we reconstruct old ones, and in doing so we say that we are making thi...

Have you ever gone so far in a bad direction that you feel there’s no coming back? Is there a point where we’ve screwed up things so badly that there just can’t be a new beginning? Is the carnage that’s a result of our bad decisions, or our poor relationship choices, or our career failures, or our financial mis-management…does the carnage of all that stuff reach a point that a new beginning can ne...

Crafting the New Birthing a New Beginning She was born into an emerging America in 1890.  Through the ninety-five years of life that stood in front of her she would watch an Industrial Revolution unfold, Henry Ford roll out the Model T, and Edison light the world.  She would read the headlines of dough boys marching off to fight a Kaiser in what was originally called the ‘Great War’.  Some twenty-...

The New Year Refusing to Be Relegated to the Sidelines We stand on the escarpment of a New Year.  In many ways, it seems that what lies ahead doesn’t rally us with energizing hope, but rather it seems to rattle us with deep apprehension.  From the vantage point we stand on at the beginning of this New Year, the landscape that lies ahead looks uncertain at best and disastrous at worst.  We see a wo...

A Clean Slate The Possibility of a New Start With the New Year we long for a fresh start.  We want to wipe the slate clean, removing the smudges and the smears.  We want to get rid of the errors, the poor choices, the misguided decisions and the bruising flops that populated the previous year.  We want to wipe away old habits, clean up destructive behaviors, sponge up toxic relationships, run away...

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable an...

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable an...

Great things are hidden in small things.  That sounds terribly illogical.  Yet, it's only illogical because we don't really understand the nature of great things and that their greatness is marked in part by their ability to inhabit small things.  Greatness is not so much about size or importance as it is about meaning and value.  It's not necessarily the size of the thing, but the power that it p...

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable an...

If we fictionalize the story of Christmas as some fanciful tale spun in the backwaters of history and people long removed, in that action we have succumb to the debilitating belief that the only viable idea of rescue is fiction.  And I can think of few things that are sadder than that.” - Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable an...

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable an...

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable an...