Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

The gift of Christmas (the gift of God’s Son) empowers us to do all of what we were designed to do, but will fail to God unless God empowers us to do it. It is the liberation from everything that we were ‘not’ designed to be and not designed to do. It is the opportunity and the power to finally, finally be our authentic selves. And then, how about the durability of Christmas? These things that Chr...

Rarely do we rise to the pinnacle of our capabilities.  However, all too often we readily descend to the dismal pit of our inabilities.  We’re remarkably human, but we’re terribly primal at the same time.  We have the ability to access an intellect that has no equal in all of creation, yet we defer to something more animalistic that’s all too common in all of creation.  And that primal, animalisti...

We quite naturally and quite appropriately presume that to live in the world, we must understand the world.  We know quite well that to navigate this complicated and frequently fragile existence of ours, as well as have any hope of emerging on top in some form or another, we must understand what we’re navigating.  If we don’t understand the terrain around us, and if we’re not acutely aware of the...

We always have, and we always will have the intrinsic need to believe in something.  Life is a journey whose demands will always exceed whatever personal assets we might possess in an attempt to meet those demands.  Life always has and life always will require more of me than I have within myself to give it.  All of my accumulated resources meticulously gathered and shrewdly coordinated in the mos...

I am only one.  That’s all I am.  I am only one and I will always be only one.  I was born as one, I will live as one, and on the day of my death I will die as one.  In this journey that we all call life, I am and will always be completely restricted and wholly limited to being one and only one.  And all of those daunting realities strike me as miserably pathetic and colossally discouraging.  Sadl...

Integrity - To Understand and Live It Integrity.  You’ve heard that “Integrity is doing the right when nobody’s watching.”  It’s not about being a crowd pleaser, or working to get some sort of edge.  It’s not agenda driven, other than we do the right thing for no other reason than it’s the right thing…and that’s not an agenda.  That’s a conviction.  It’s not about the cost of doing the right thing...

At times, the innumerable dialogues regarding the state of our nation appear to be less dialogues and more something akin to agenda mongering and rights crusading.  It seems that we have hijacked the solemn rights and sacred liberties afforded us and have forced them into servitude around our ego-centric agendas and myopic special interests.  The altar of self is where nations perish.  And on that...

It's Not About Being Ordinary It’s not about being ordinary, because we all are.  In talking about myself, I’m about as ‘ordinary’ as they come.  But, it’s not about being ordinary.  It’s about recognizing that being ordinary does not limit us to ordinary things.  That’s the beauty of it.  We’re all ordinary, which gives us everything that we need to be extra-ordinary.  God granted you and He gran...

The majesty of our humanity and the capabilities laid out within us are nothing short of marvelous; so much so that we are barely cognizant of it.  All of us run thick with untapped potential.  We are rich with possibility and formidably equipped to tease the cusp of the impossible and to overcome it in the teasing.  The essence of our being is immense beyond words and the breadth of it eclipses a...

We Like Things to Be New New.  We like new things, or things to be new, or to do away with the old to make a place and a space for something new.  The idea of ‘new’ is appealing.  And because it is, we chase it.  But ‘new’ does not mean ‘better,’ and I think that quite often we associate the two way too much.  We tend to automatically think that if something is ‘new,’ the fact that it’s ‘new’ some...

“Right now, it’s Saturday for me.  I’m between what was and what is yet to be, living squarely between a death of sorts and the unknown of the ‘what next?’  It is my Saturday.  If the ‘yet to be’ is nothing more than what is transpiring right now, my future will be shrouded in the thick cold of bitter hopelessness.  A shift in a slightly different direction, and there may be jubilation.  Either wa...

What Is Right and What Is Not? What is ‘right?’  What provides our guiding function?  What is our “north star?”  Our constant?  Our set of rules that keep us civil?  Our code?  Or… is our code the commitment to the absence of a code?  What is ‘right?’   The question, “What is right,” must be asked without our efforts to choose what is ‘right,’ or to think that we actually have the power to do that...

Why Is the World Like This Anyway? Why is the world like this anyway?  Why is the world so much of what we don’t want it to be like, and a whole lot less of what we do want it to be like?  Why is it so incredibly difficult to create the kind of world that we all would love to live in?  How is it that we’re able to visualize what we would actually like the world to be like, yet we seem so incredibl...

It's Time to Listen 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...

Where Did All The Time Go? “Rush often results in waste and moments forever lost.  Attention to time is inattention to the life that fills that time.  So much can be lost.”  “Where did all the time go?”  We ask that all the time.  However, it’s not where the time went.  It’s what we were doing with the time while it was going. Think about this.  When it comes to time, we only get a certain amount...

What Is Success and What Is It Not? “Success”.  People chase after this thing that we call “success.”  But in the pursuit of this elusive thing that we call “success”, maybe the better question is, “What is success”?  How do we define it?  How does the culture define it?  How do the people that we spend our time with, or live with, or work with, or play with define this thing that we call “success...

Trust.  How do you define it?  Typically our definition of it is terribly basic and somewhat shallow.  We seem to define it as that ability to rest fully and completely in something or someone.  That's about as far as we take it.  Yet, the incredible power of trust suggests that it is more . . . much more. Remove trust from a relationship and that relationship simply cannot survive.  Extract trust...

We all throw around the idea of having a purpose, or not having one, or wondering if we’re supposed to have one, or whatever we’re wondering.  We wonder if we really need a purpose, and if so do we create it or does it already exist and we just haven’t happened to happen upon it just yet.  For some of us, we think that the whole idea of having a purpose suggests that life is much more intentional...

Success has been accorded an endless array of definitions.  Some of them are crafted to make failure seem more like success so that we can limp through life and fail without remorse or guilt.  Other definitions are quite lofty, written to give us opportunity achieve in a manner that has little to do with the achievement and everything to do with restoring blunted self-esteems.  At times success is...

“Who Am I?”  What the Question Evidences “Who am I?”  The question seems a bit overused these days.  It’s something more like a vogue, trendy kind of question that pulls us out of the doldrums of living among the masses and plants us in the more desirable currents of the intellectual mainstream.  In our culture, I tend to think it’s less about thoughtfully unearthing who we are as a means of livin...

The Self That I Long to Believe In - The Challenge of Building Self-Esteem “We’re driven.  Whether that’s for our good or our ill, we’re driven.  That drivenness may be born of a free spirit bent on living with unimpeded freedom, or it might be a drivenness used to hold ourselves captive.  It might be a drivenness to face ourselves, or a drivenness to run from ourselves.  We can be driven to do gr...

Do we realize that the choices that we make today lay the foundation for tomorrow's outcomes?  Do we really think that things just happen, or do we understand that what happens today is the consequence of a series of choices that we made yesterday?  We seem to stand stunned and perplexed by what we see in our culture.  But are these things really happenstance and the turn of fate, or are they simp...

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 chance to even understand what l...

"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...

Jesus calls us to be the "light of the world."  The fact is, we are all lamps.  We all have the capability to cast light into a darkened world.  And furthermore, we can actually cast a compelling and far-reaching light if we choose to. But even though we are a lamp with great potential, is that lamp ever lit?  Are our lives ever really bright and casting something hopeful into the darkness around...