Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

We Are a Mess We are a mess.  We are a mess because we are a people on a mad rant.  Sadly, we have become blinded to the fact that we are blinded by a host of pathetically self-serving agendas.  And the pathetic nature of these agendas are evidenced by the fact that they are unable to stand up to the slightest scrutiny despite how rigorous our justifications of those agendas might be.  We create a...

Welcome to Day Seven of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” Today’s Theme is “The Plague of Addictions.”   The Quote for Today Is This: "Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control." Proverbs 25:28   Life is filled with pain.  Or maybe more accurately, our lives are engulfed in pain...

How Do We Look at Time? “Time is the great intimidator, steadily stealing away precious seconds with no pause in the stealing.  And such thievery leads us to believe that in time, the pilfering of these seconds will eventually exhaust all such seconds, leaving us at the ‘end’ of everything.  Yet, God states that the seconds are actually the countdown to the ‘beginning’ of everything.” How do we lo...

Welcome to Day Six of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” Today’s Theme is “Discovering My Purpose.”   The Quote for Today Is This: “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails..” Proverbs 19:21   Purpose.  Without it, life has no meaning.  Without it, life is empty.  We can li...

We hear a lot of things.  A whole lot of things.  We’re incessantly bombarded with sheets and shards and streams of information.  It’s about bits and bytes and boatloads of data that we ingest and digest without even realizing that we’re doing that.  Either consciously or unconsciously we compile all of that sordid stuff into some sort of choppy mosaic about the life around us and the world within...

There Is No God - Evidence There is no God.  It’s not an unfamiliar statement.  In fact, it permeates much of our modern thinking, which begs the question if our modern thinking is really either ‘modern’ or ‘thinking.’ I think that the mentality that ‘there is no God’ is centered primarily on the fact that we don’t want a God.  Therefore, out of convenience, we simply declare that there is none, f...

Fear – How We Create It Fear.  We all have it.  Sometimes it’s just this slight apprehension, or this bit of inner angst, or this uncomfortable twinge that we experience.  At other times it’s utterly overwhelming, leaving us helplessly paralyzed and violently shaken right down to the core of everything that we are.  At certain times and in certain situations, fear seems to stalk us.  It seems to r...

Welcome to Day Five of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” Today’s Theme is “The Agonizing Tragedy of Suicide.”   The Quote for Today Is This: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?  You are not your own; you were bought at a price.  Therefore...

Repentance Reconfigured Standards We all have standards, even if our standard is not to have one.  We all live by something, even if it’s the denial of that ‘something.’  There’s some sort of inherent code that creates a framework that provides direction to our actions.  There’s a paradigm that we all work within.  Call it genetics, call it cultural, call it greed, call it fear, call it upbringing...

Welcome to Day Four of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” Today’s Theme is “Wrestling With the Discouragement of Failure.”   The Quote for Today Is This: “…for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.’” Romans 3:23 Failure.  It’s having set out to do something, or not do something, and having failed to...

Change - It Begins With Us Change.  It’s needed for sure…just look around.  But if our posture is to wait for someone else to create the change that we’re waiting for, we’re probably going to just keep right on waiting. As a part of my own processing in trying to understand what change is, and how ‘real’ change is caused, I wrote this: “Change. It's needed, but maybe not in the way that we think i...

What Are We Focusing On? We can be very focused people.  We can decide that there is something that we want to do, or not do, or get, or not get, or complete, or not complete, or argue, or not argue, or whatever it is that we want to focus on.  Indeed, we can be very focused people.  In fact, we can be focused to the point of being quite stubborn about whatever it is that we’re focusing on. The is...

We Reap What We Sow We reap what we sow.  In other words, what we do is never free of an outcome that will be shaped by what we do.  The ‘cause-and-effect’ of life is such that what we do will always cause an outcome that is fashioned directly by what we do.  Despite the fact that we often think (or would prefer to think) that what we do is somehow isolated to the action or the choice itself, by d...

Better or Worse? Will the choice that you’re about to make, make you better or worse?  Will it improve your life, or diminish your life?  The fact of the matter is, it’s going to do one or the other.  And because it is, it’s worth asking the question, will it make me better or worse? But that question itself can be clouded by a whole lot of things.  First, there can be people telling us that the c...

Welcome to Day Three of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” Today’s Theme is “Being Jesus to a Gender Confused Culture”   The Quote for Today Is This: “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” Psalm 139:14 One of the worst things is not knowing who y...

Who Are You Giving Yourself Away To? Who are you giving yourself away to?  To what propaganda have you come to subscribe?  To what bit of media polished bias or refined political spin have you succumb?  Who has your ear, and therefore holds the heart to which your ear is attached?  What are the voices that have methodically and patiently lulled you into some sort of comatose complacency where you...

What Is Our Narrative? What is our narrative?  What is the story-line that we’ve authored to explain our world, or allay our fears, or justify our agendas, or excuse our behaviors?  What is the narrative that we’ve created to give ourselves permission to do whatever we want permission to do?  What are the story-lines, the spins, the bits of fiction that we create so that we don’t have to face the...

“In full uniform, the color guard marched by as part of the parade.  And as they did, he forced his horribly slumped and deeply aged body out of his worn wheelchair and stood to ram-rod attention.  He held a salute until the guard had passed, and then he feebly collapsed back into his wheelchair.  As I stared in ever-warming admiration, emblazoned across his hat I saw the words “WWII Veteran.”  An...

Welcome to Day One of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” Today’s Theme is “The Aching Void of an Absent Parent “Even if my father and mother abandon me, the LORD will hold me close.’” Psalm 27:10 There are many things that are meant to be forever.  There are those things whose permanence in our lives is never quest...

“When I’m at the bottom looking up, the main question may not be ‘how do I get out of this hole?’ In reality, the main question might be ‘how do I get rid of the shovel that I used to dig it?” We dig holes.  Lots of them.  With all kinds of shovels.  But the interesting thing is that we dig most of these holes without even recognizing that we’re digging holes right in the middle of digging them. ...

“The most critical time in any battle is not when I’m fatigued, it’s when I no longer care.” Too often we don’t care, or that’s what we tell ourselves.  We work really hard not to care because we’ve figured out that caring is just too risky, in whatever way it happens to be too risky for us.  We get the idea in our head that ‘not’ caring is just easier, because we don’t care.  Or it’s safer, becau...

Betrayal Is the Manifestation of Someone’s Greed, Not a Commentary of Our Worth “After saying these things, Jesus was troubled in his spirit, and testified, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.’” John 13:21   Here’s the Thought for Today: Betrayal is intentional…ruthlessly so. It is the deliberate choice of someone to hold their interests as so superior to our well-being that th...

Not Where We Were It seems that we have some vague and rather ethereal sense of where we’re going in this thing called life.  For the more contemplative soul, that sense might be quite refined.  For the casual traveler, it might be a bit more nebulous and scattered.  For many, where they’re going is defined by the tasks of the day, rather than enlarged by a vision for tomorrow. In many cases where...

What I Would Say to the World I often think about what I would say to the world.  In the pain, confusion, fear, and rampant disorientation…what would I say?  With the deceit, the manipulation, the less than admirable agendas being floated on all fronts…what would I say?  With marriages fracturing under the weight of a culture gone rogue, with teenagers taking their lives before they ever have a ch...

"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life" To Believe In Something Better - The Rise Against What Is Our humanity is ingeniously fashioned in a manner that it can handily break the realities that would seek to break it.  Our existence need never be held hostage nor pressed into servitude to the sordid realities of all that is happening around us.  Rather, we are able to stand i...