Craig D. Lounsbrough Quotes

The most critical time in any battle is not when I’m fatigued, it’s when I no longer care.

Any new beginning is forged from the shards of the past, not from the abandonment of the past.

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.

Have we ever thought that being lost is our destination?

Real relationships are the product of time spent, which is why so many of us have so few of them.

In the oddity or maybe the miracle of life, the roots of something new frequently lie in the decaying husks of something old.

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?

The darkness makes everything disappear but it makes nothing go away.

Everything that I hold will eventually be gone. Subsequently, the quality of my life will depend on whether I choose to appreciate those things ‘now’ or wait until ‘then.

The choice to avoid risk is the choice to avoid living, and to avoid living is one of the greatest risk of all.

I decry the injustice of my wounds, only to look down and see that I am holding a smoking gun in one hand and a fistful of ammunition in the other.

To be careless in making decisions is to naively believe that a single decision impacts nothing more than that single decision, for a single decision can spawn a thousand others that were entirely unnecessary or it can bring peace to a thousand places we never knew existed.

It's really not about reading a good book.  Rather, it about being transformed by great ideas.

A sunset is nothing more and nothing less than the backside of a sunrise.

I am thankful that there are those among us who have sacrificed dearly on behalf of us. And I ardently pray to God that I might be less like myself and more like them.

Judging others is too often escapism dressed in the garb of righteous indignation, whereby I dutifully point out in others that which I probably should be pointing out in myself.

Why is it that we don’t worry about a compass until we’re lost in a wilderness of our own making?

We often throw rocks not realizing that they’re going to land somewhere.

An end is only a beginning in disguise.

To judge someone is to say that I have the right to define who they are, verses understanding that God has handed me the priceless privilege of discovering who they are.

Easter is a time when God turned the inevitability of death into the invincibility of life.

Maybe I don’t have enough beginnings in my life because I fought against the endings that were about to birth those beginnings.

Sooner or later I will be faced with the fact that the world is helpless to meet my needs. And at that point, I will be left with two conclusions; that life is cruel or God is real.

The priceless lesson in the New Year is that endings birth beginnings and beginnings birth endings. And in this elegantly choreographed dance of life, neither ever find an end in the other.

Comfort is a stance of avoidance rather than the pursuit of excellence.

Blame is the coward’s solution to his fear of accountability.

I would like to say that what I fear are the challenges that stand in front of me, when in reality what I fear is the cowardice that lays within me.

Am I a storm-waster? For it is within the fury of the very storms within which I cower that I find resources for my growth that are entirely absent on calmer days.

Common sense is one of the most unused commodities available to man.

If I get up just one less time than the number of times I’ve been knocked down, I have done one of the most devastating things possible; I have halted my life at that very spot.

To destroy that which seeks to destroy me, God invites me to stand against it until it stands down and then falls down.

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.

Faith means I chose not to know, which is different than ignorance which refuses to know.

A label locks me into a definition that people use to control me. A vision graces me with an idea that serves to release me.

Tragedy cleans the windows of the soul by washing away the bias of our lives in the detergent of pain.

To live a lie may allow us to avoid the truth, but the real lie lays in believing that we can avoid the truth in the first place.

To save myself I must face myself, which may be the hardest of all things to face.

Undoubtedly, our weariness is not based on the fact that we’re running. Rather, our weariness is all too frequently based on the fact that many of the things that we’re running from are the very things we should be running to.

I have both the violent turbulence of the storm and the quiet promises of God in the storm. And what I must work to remember is that something is not necessarily stronger simply because it’s louder.

Betrayal dressed in love and trimmed with the facade of good intentions is the most barbaric of all betrayals.

It has nothing to do with who I am as compared to everyone else. It has everything to do with who I am in companionship with God.

I spend my life constantly calling in ‘imaginary’ debts that aren’t owed to me in order to avoid the ‘real’ debts that I owe to others, and so everybody ends up bankrupt.

The difference between a ‘man’ and a ‘father’ is that the former shares his genes, but latter gives his life.

If I’m perplexed by the fact that I’m constantly lost, maybe somewhere in my head I’ve determined that being lost serves a greater purpose than being found.

I spent a lifetime in a garden one afternoon.

To be found is to be exposed. No wonder so many of us are still lost.

There are precious lessons deep in the stench of failure and the filth of selfish choices.

Ignorance might be bliss, but it also has teeth.

The adult within me would be much wiser to learn from the child within me rather than focus on the demand that the child within me grow up.

Does the robin sing because the cold of winter is leaving or the warmth of spring is coming? Or might he be singing because each without the other would lessen both?

The darkness that follows a sunset is never so dark that it can change the inevitability of a sunrise.

Life is such that beginnings and endings are neither. For in fact, they perpetually lay the groundwork for the other.

Tenderness is not weakness. Rather, it is a decision to face the scathing brutality of life, but to refuse to allow brutality to set the terms of the engagement.

An exceptional future can only be built on the transformation of the mess I’ve made out of my past, not the elimination of that mess.

It’s not that I’ve been invited to the hole I’m standing in. It’s that I accepted the invitation.

Every wall that would entrap me has a door that would free me. And I languish because the fear of freedom often leaves me preferring the familiarity of the wall.

I can wait for life to shape me in whatever manner it chooses. Or I can shape me to make life whatever I choose.

The only reason I can’t jump in and engage life is that I’ve told myself I can’t. Yet I can’t helping wondering would happen if I told myself I could?

I wonder what life would have been like if I would have taken all that time I spent wondering what life would have been like, and instead used that time to make it what I wanted it to be like.

How we handle what’s ahead of us will be determined by what we learned from everything that’s behind us. For if we learned nothing, what’s behind us will be the exact same thing that’s in front of us.

We desire an exciting future, but the demand for familiar and comfortable tempers our steps to the point that often our steps are little more than stepping in place.

I can attempt to stay on the fence. However, the problem is that the fence is a figment of my fear not a reality of my journey.

Abundant living is realizing that life is a privilege whether it’s adhering to our scripts or not.

It may be that we’re not seeing the wonder in life because all we’re doing is wondering how we’re going to survive life.

If I continually focus on what I don’t have, my life will always be completely empty despite the fact that it’s completely full.

Much like life, you don't complete a puzzle by throwing away the pieces.

The kind of new beginnings that transform our lives are less about what we do in our lives, and more about what we deliver into the life of another.

If I am not at 'peace', then I can be altogether confident that I've placed a larger 'piece' of myself in the hands of someone other than God.

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.

An obese ego is just about the heaviest thing you’ll ever carry. So maybe you should stop feeding it.

In a very tragic kind of way, sometimes things have to be gone before I fully realize that they were ever there.

Today’s ashes are tomorrow’s soil.

It is no secret that the greatest treasures are found in the most remote, inaccessible and difficult places where we must pursue them with great energy and even greater risk. It’s the same with our lives.

Let me be strong, for to be anything else is to languish in the abyss of compromise and to descend to places of impoverishment so destitute that they will squelch my soul and crush my heart.

Ignorance is not bliss. Rather, ignorance is blistering.

We are always immeasurably bigger than the little person we’ve too often doomed ourselves to be.

A commitment to never getting knocked down is in reality a decision to never stand up.

What I’m left with when I have nothing left is the satisfaction of knowing that I left nothing for myself in the service of someone else.

It’s not about the elimination of fear. Rather it’s about the elimination of the feeling that the elimination of fear is necessary before we take the next step.

My fear of endings too often blocks my hope of beginnings.

Of course God does outrageous things. But in reality, what insanity would prompt me to follow a God who did anything less?

I craft most of my own tragedies without ever having even the remotest understanding that it is I myself who have done the crafting.

At the very point that I’ve taken something for granted, I have at that same moment taken it to its grave. And if I look around, I realize I’ve cultivated quite a cemetery.

Maybe it’s a whole lot less about focusing on the fact that we’re all victims and a whole lot more about the changing the fact that we’re all careless, as that is what victimized all of us in the first place.

Vigilance of the wisest kind is to incessantly remain open to the reality that what I ‘see’ is but a single thread and solitary shard of what ‘is’, for to assume otherwise is to surrender the wisdom of vigilance to the decay of ignorance.

More times than I can remember I look around and I ask why the hole I’m in looks so strangely familiar. Probably because it looks a whole lot like all the other ones I dug before I got around to digging this one.

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?

I am wholly deserving of all the consequences that I will in fact never receive simply because God unashamedly stepped in front of me on the cross, unflinchingly spread His arms so as to completely shield me from the retribution that was mine to bear, and repeatedly took the blows. And I stand entirely unwounded, utterly lost in the fact that the while His body was pummeled and bloodied to death by that which was meant for me and me alone, I have not a scratch.

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.

I cannot be afraid of being afraid. Rather, I need to realize that it is my fear that gives me the energy to wrestle that which I fear into the dirt that is soon to become the road underneath my feet.

If a father does not altogether embrace a life of uncompromised sacrifice as the core of all principles by which he nurtures his children, he is a father by birth only and no power on earth can ever or will ever make that sufficient.

I spend a tremendous amount of time carefully choosing the roles I wish to play so that I can run from the role I was born to play. And if I keep on doing that, I will eventually set foot in my grave never having set foot on the stage.

Surrendering is intentionally laying down the power I possess. And have I considered that the power I lay down is often more powerful than that which I’m laying it down in front of? Therefore, I would be wise to recognize that surrender is less the absence of power and more the presence of fear.

Although it pains me to admit it, I am quite familiar with the holes in life. And this familiarity is due to the fact that I spend far more time in these holes than I spend on the paths that brought me to them.

Self-preservation is to hunker down in the suffocating confines of this infinitesimally tiny existence that I define as ‘me,’ instead of letting ‘me’ run through the infinitely massive expanse of everything that is not me. And if the beast of self-preservation does not permit such freedoms, I will preserve myself to my own death.

Thanksgiving is a posture of both mind and heart where we recognize how terribly fortunate we are, and how much we’ve been blessed despite the fact that we probably haven’t been the blessing that we should have been.

We look around us and we find ourselves confused as to why the world has fallen into such deep darkness. And standing in this descending darkness, what we need to realize is that the farther we move from God, the darker everything gets. And no light of man can illuminate that kind of darkness.

Starting over begins when I develop a reawakened appreciation for what I already have, a renewed recognition of what I’ve recklessly forsaken, a rehabilitated understanding that I foolishly do both of those things, and a revitalized commitment to live the rest of my life never doing either of them again.

When surrounded by the ashes of all that I once cherished, despite my best efforts I can find no room to be thankful. But standing there amidst endless ash I must remember that although the ashes surround me, God surrounds the ashes. And once that realization settles upon me, I am what I thought I could never be ... I am thankful for ashes.

Possibly the most debilitating deception of all is to create a god of my own making, fool myself into believing that this limp god of mine is the true God, and then construct the entirety of my life on this flamboyantly fictional character. Possibly the most devastating realization of all is when the real God shows up, and in the showing up all of this come crashing down.