Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life" Not Where We Were - Finding Ourselves Somewhere Else 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 d...

"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life" What I Want - The Frightening Call of Great Things I want to be happy, but I don’t think I want to be satisfied; for satisfaction lures me into believing that happiness is found in reaching some point rather than realizing happiness is born of striving for those points.  I want to experience a resilient and wonderfully endearing sense...

The front porch was the door to the world “out there.”  As a kid, it was the stepping off point to the world that never forced us to step off.  It was the place through which the outside world would come into mine; monitored and managed in a way that didn’t make the world safe, but that pared and neutered it sufficiently to make it safe whenever it was granted entrance.  As a kid, other than it be...

They leave sporadically.  Some of them go at the first hint of fall’s advance.  Others hang around until the first snows herd them southward as a rancher with heavy-footed cattle lumbering across pasturelands; gorged on the last of summer’s grasses.  The air is sullen and stilled by their absence; the void of song leaving a hole wide and gray.  Trees stand as tenements emptied, their residents hav...

Did you ever run with leaves: a wild race born of wind and liberated foliage?  It’s a race, but more than that it’s really an invitation to partnership and farewell.  Racing with the leaves was not about finishing first; rather it was about a romp enjoyed in the midst of a transition being celebrated.  It was playing with a friend before that friend was called away home. It happened in fall’s own...

It’s eight feet at best, if even that.  When you’re a kid you run with the natural assumption that life will fall in your favor.  It grants exceptions and kind of looks out for you.  You think of life as some sort of doting grandparent and adventurous friend all in one; inviting you out to wild frolicking play while hovering close enough to catch you if you fall.  It’s the best of both worlds; of...

Abandonment When People Make Destructive Choices There are times when the best of our logic fails to understand the worst of other’s behaviors. It’s part of the oddity or maybe complexity of the human psyche that we sometimes make choices that defy any shred of reason or seem void of even the slightest hint of sensibility. More times than we can count we stand in awe of the choices that some peopl...

In the Footsteps of the Few Our Calling   “This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.” I Timothy 2: 3-4 (NIV)   “The Bible tells us that Jesus Christ came to do three things. He came to have my past forgiven, you get a purpose for living and a home in Heaven.” Rick Warren   It’s inevitable.  Sooner or later our lives will be...

He was four years old . . . barely.  Boyish innocence was tightly stitched and held fast to a deep zest for living.  He was a mosaic of the threads of a splendid tapestry whose fibers were being woven into a soft spirit that reveled in life.  I love Corey.  I love him for what he is, and what I see in him that I am not.   He is innocence untainted and unsoiled, a young boy that catches the essence...

Think About It You are what you choose to be.  Life is not a dictated script.  It’s far from being something to which you have to surrender.  Yes, there are things that we did not ask for that we have to deal with.  Regardless, whatever our flaws there is always room to do something about them.  Always.  Some option always exists.  There are always possibilities.  Life affords us choices and chanc...

Dean was deaf.  It was that simple, but it was inordinately complex at the same time.  Life can have its sinkholes.  Sometimes there’s a bunch of them, enough of them to cause a broad and crippling implosion where things just cave in all around us.  Life then becomes a litany of foggy responses to trauma where we move zombie-like through whatever the day or the moment holds.  There is no forward m...

"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life" I Was Thinking - To Think Outside the Box(s) I was thinking.  And the more I thought, the more I realized that there is a whole lot to think about.  But in my thinking, I thought that most of our thinking (despite how much there is to think about) is really pretty standardized and chafingly rote.  We think in predetermined patterns and...

Darren and a cheap plastic fish; it was a dollar store bin filler indelibly stamped with “made in China” that bordered on being junk.  There were numerous needs in Darren’s life, so numerous that he himself was lost in them.  They were pathetic and endless, so it seemed anyway. A plastic fish was little more than a cheap toy that momentarily anesthetized a child-like mind trapped in the deteriorat...

Filth described her very well.  While it was an apt depiction, it failed to embrace the fullest description of what she was.  Some lives seem to be nothing more than a brutal manifestation of the accumulated slag and scum that is leftover in the wake of some departed tragedy.  These people become the thing that life has done to them, being so irreparably identified with their own tragedies that th...

Not Defined by a Journey Gone Wrong “To let myself be defined by my greatest mistakes is my greatest mistake.” Craig D. Lounsbrough Hi, I’m Craig Lounsbrough Welcome to LifeTalk It seems that we have some vague 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 scatte...

LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues.  Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes.  All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire.  Today's thought is: “Love is the essence of our humanity expressing itself in actions of sacrifice so profound that we risk not s...

LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues.  Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes.  All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire.  Today's thought is: “Running from what we fear is like throwing a bunch of stuff in the bed of a truck and somehow thinking that...

LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues.  Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes.  All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire.  Today's thought is: “Who are you sending into the future and how are you sending them?  For this is the stuff of legacy that we t...

LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues.  Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes.  All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire.  Today's thought is: “It comes down to 'fear' and 'faith'. 'Fear' of what stands in front of me. 'Faith' in believing that the res...

Slavery as an institution is pretty far removed from the minds of most of us residing here in 21st century America.  Slavery sits back plenty far enough in the faded, yellowed and brittle pages of history to create a more than comfortable chasm between us and itself.  We view that chasm of time and social development and modernism as broad enough to keep slavery from leaping from the past across t...

Flecks of Gold On a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's For Profound Living An unknown author wrote, “Real treasure lies not in what that can be seen, but what cannot be seen.”  Oddly, we possess this strangely cockeyed perception that we must be able to see something in order to treasure it.  What we see as treasure is really only the thing that’s revealing the treasure itself.  The treasure in a dais...

Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone – Simple Truth’s for Profound Living” Someone once uttered the timeless saying that “timing is everything.”  There’s something about things happening in a certain order in a certain time that makes it all fit in a certain way.  We sense a natural and correct progression that, if followed, leads to success or happiness or fulfillment or whatever it is that we’re ch...

Common sense is a ‘common’ phrase that is in reality far from common.  To add insult to injury, common sense also seems to weigh in a trite bit light on ‘sense’ as well.  It might be proper to say that common sense is neither common nor does it make much sense anymore.  Today, common sense commonly lacks sense and we are the poorer for it. It seems rather apparent that some things in life should s...

Great things scare us, as they should.  If something doesn't scare us then it's probably not all that great.  All of us are called to great things.  Those things will likely be different for each of us.  However, in whatever way they are great, they are great.  We are not here to pass through this existence as some distant observer of whatever's going on in this existence.  Our lives are not passi...

Rescue.  It is hard to admit that we need to be rescued.  We think ourselves to be smart enough, cunning enough, strategic enough, and enough of whatever it is that we need to be enough of to save ourselves.  We tediously craft an endless array of things to rescue us from the things that we previously crafted to rescue us that ended up stranding us.  We add problem to problem.  Dilemma to dilemma....