Episodes
17 hours ago
Podcast Short: We Reap What We Sow
17 hours ago
17 hours ago
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 doing something we have, in fact, set the stage for a future outcome that will reflect whatever the action or choice was that we made. We reap what we sow. And that is an immovable reality.
And if we look around us, what we see today will tell us, quite clearly, the stuff that we sowed yesterday. The events of today grew out of the choices of yesterday. We can complain about the world today. We can bemoan our lot in life, or we can find ourselves becoming deeply hopeless and darkly dismayed about the state of our culture. We can grieve deeply over tragedies that seem to befall us at every turn and that leave us drowning in an agony so consuming that we don’t have time to heal before the next one befalls us. We can be utterly stunned at the nature of events and the course of the culture, having believed that such things were leagues beyond the scope of reality…but here they are. The headlines are strewn with news so dark that it sometimes seems nearly apocalyptic and we sit teetering on some abyss that our choices delivered us to. But does not our surprise reveal our ignorance, because the fact of the matter is, we reap what we sow.
Have we been so oblivious as to somehow think that this would not be the case? And are we so adamant about wanting to preserve our so-called ‘rights’ to engage in whatever destructive behavior that we choose to engage in that we altogether deny the cause-and-effect of those choices? Will we pretend that we are somehow above such an immovable reality. Will we delude ourselves with the belief that we have license do whatever we want, and that we somehow have obtained the power to grant ourselves a free pass from the consequences of doing what we want? Are we foolish enough to believe that we can indulge in the most rogue and base passions imaginable, and do so in some sort of perfect isolation?
Or do we actually accept the fact that we will reap what we sow, but that in time what we reap will somehow magically become better, despite the fact that it was, and will continue to be sown from the same exact stuff from which we’ve reaped the bad stuff? Or have we been sufficiently fooled by those who would declare that what we’ve reaped was actually that of others who have liberally sown our cherished and rather admirable efforts with toxic seeds designed to undermine our efforts, and it is their seeds which we have reaped? Let’s not be fooled, for we’ve been fooled for far too long already. We reap what we sow.
And so maybe we should look at what we’re sowing. Honestly. Frankly. With great pause and even greater thought. And maybe we should think about what the things that we’re sowing are going to result in. And maybe we need to refuse to live in denial of that painful and frequently disappointing reality. Maybe we should understand that while we might like to believe that we will reap something good from compromised seeds, that that is not the case, nor will it ever be despite how much sowing we might do. And maybe, just maybe we should start sowing something different. Something very different. Something radically different. Maybe it’s time for a change of seeds, a real change, an honest change. Maybe it’s time to sow something better because we cannot afford to continue to reap things that are this bad.
“A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”
- Galatians 6:7-9
4 days ago
4 days ago
"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 of contentment that neatly threads itself through every part of my soul, but I don’t want that contentment to morph into the baser mentality of complacency. I want to keep a weathered eye on every horizon, but I want to do more than just watch those horizons from some sorry distance. Rather, I want to walk their ridges. I don’t want to contemplate the taking of a journey. Rather, I want to be contemplating a journey as I’m taking it.
I want to robustly celebrate the achievements and vigorously revel in the milestones in a manner completely worthy of them, but I never want to fall to the bane of mediocrity that would prompt me to see them as a terminus. I want to develop a sturdy confidence born of the advances made, and I want to have that confidence perpetually reinforced by the successes achieved. Yet, I pray that my failures will always serve to temper that confidence so that it never turns to rot in the form of arrogance. And in further managing this tempered confidence, I never want it to be so strong that I errantly assume any challenge as too small to be worthy of my time. I want to be happy, but I don’t think I want to be satisfied.
For whatever reason I might do it and in whatever way I might do it, I never want to hand myself excuses to round the next summit instead of scaling it. I never want to slothfully presume the ability to achieve a goal without holding myself accountable to actually getting on the track and running the race. And I suppose worst of all, I never want to scan my assorted array of trophies, whether they be numerous or few, and in the scanning embrace some languid sense born of complacency that somehow it is done and that I can hang up my hat, when in reality life is never done and no hat is really ever hung.
Why Do I ‘Never Want’ to Do These Things?
Laziness is humanity domesticated to its own destruction. Mediocrity is life pent up in the very iron-clad cages that we create out of the misguided notion that an ‘adventure’ is a product of those misty-eyed idealists who expend their lives chasing dreams too elusive to catch. Therefore, we create dreams that we can cage so that they simply can’t elude us, and in their captivity we can manage them so that, God forbid, they never manage us. And what we forget is that a dream caged is nothing more than an anemic, pasty-white wish that is always in the process of dying in whatever cage it happens to find itself.
We Are Made for More
We are made for more than all of that. Our humanity yearns for the next adventure. We desire lofty summits and distant finish lines that tax the whole of our energies in order to get us to them. There is inherent within us this incessant sense that where ‘we are’ is not where ‘we’re going,’ and that to park it wherever we’re at is to start dying in that very place. There is some fixed notion in our psyche and some insistent voice in our souls that will not be silenced and cannot be appeased by lesser agendas. These call out despite the many ways we work to silence them, and in the calling out they call us out.
Sadly, in light of the calling, we too often surrender to fear and we sell-out to apathy. We foolishly peddle our resources and pawn off our talents to lesser things so that we can hold up some small, pithy achievement to offset the gnawing guilt we experience over bypassing the greater achievements that were our calling before we were called away. We can’t show up empty-handed, for that would work against our efforts to squelch the already suppressed voice of passion. Yet, unless we set our sights on higher things we will always be empty-hearted, for blind obedience to fear and the steady ingestion of apathy leaves everything it touches empty. And I would propose that emptiness of this sort is the bedfellow of death itself.
Therefore, we achieve something because we must. And at times we dress up those ‘somethings’ so that they don’t look half bad. But too often our achievements are an insidious effort to sedate our sense of passion and render it appeased. They’re the anemic manifestation of our fears, a groveling by-product of our lackluster vision, and a response to the snide voice of mediocrity that herald’s ‘passion’ as the fool’s errand.
Passion is not fooled, even though we are fooled by the belief that we somehow fooled it. To numb passion is not to diminish its power. Rather, it is to diminish our sense of its power. In doing so we stepped down instead of stepping up. We swapped mountains for back alleys, and dramatic vistas for fading fences. And these realities create a grinding angst within us that will not be soothed by anything but heeding the call from which we’ve run.
What to Do?
Decide to Do Something
As obvious as it may sound, the first thing to do is decide to do something. Without the decision to do something, anything and everything is only an idea. An idea, regardless of how ingenious or bold changes nothing until it is birthed as a reality. The greatest ideas will only tickle our imagination, but they won’t fire it until they’re released. They will nudge us, but they won’t force us to jump. They will call, but they won’t beg.
To do something is to decide to be disciplined. It’s a decision to take a step rather than toy with ideas. It is a choice to move from the non-committal ease of playing out various scenarios in our head, to grabbing one of them by the throat and acting on it. It is not based on cost in stepping out, for the greatest cost of all is in not stepping out. And it is the sad reality that most of our ideas die without ever having been birthed as realities because we choose to do everything but step.
Decide If You’re Going to be Brave
An idea as only an ‘idea’ and nothing more than an idea is safe. As ideas and ideas only, they’re manageable. They’re domesticated. They’re leashed. We hold them within the safe confines of our minds and our imaginations, toying with them as time permits and returning them to those confines when it does not. But cut the reigns and turn an idea loose and it may not be as manageable and domesticated as we might like it to be. So, are we brave enough for the ride that is certain to ensue?
An idea that is given legs is one of the most dangerous things imaginable, but it is also one of the most exciting things possible. An idea running at full stride is wildly frightening in a manner that unleashes something that was never supposed to be leashed. It is not about throwing caution to the wind as some might think. Rather, it’s about stepping into the wind and being swept up by it while wisely holding caution as we do. It’s about understanding that wisdom is not held hostage to safety. Rather, wisdom is based on figuring out how we navigate dangerous things in a way that no longer renders them dangerous. And as such, are we going to choose to be brave?
Decide How Important Comfort and Familiarity Are
Unleash your ideas and things will never be the same; guaranteed. Things will change when great ideas are unleashed because they can’t help but change. What ‘is’ will become the stuff of a history that will lay beyond our ability to ever reclaim again. Our ideas are the stuff of the future. They are never home in the present for the present is only the thing that launches them, not the thing that cultivates them. If our lives have been expended in the acquisition of comfort and the cultivation of familiarity, our future is our ‘now’ and no idea can sufficiently grow in that.
While the degree of success rests on the magnitude of the idea being released, the greater degree to which it will be successful is the degree to which we unleash it. And if we prefer familiarity and the comfort that it engenders, we might never truly let an idea loose, or we may well attempt to cram it back into the confines we released it from after we’ve unleashed it. At best, the ideas are hamstrung. At worst, they perish.
Get the Resources
If you’ve decided that you want to do something, if you’re sufficiently brave to do it, and if you’re willing to forgo familiarity and comfort in the pursuit of it, then get the resources that you need to make it happen. Real resources. This is not about thin and pasty resources, nor is it about material that’s been worn thin. It’s not about sugary-sweet notions or trite sayings that are fun and fanciful but are shallow and porous.
Rather, this is about finding bold, honest, timely, daring, frank, deep and brisk material that will thrust you out beyond the confines you saw as the terminus of your dreams. Find resources that are unforgiving in helping you grow, reliable in content, proven in substance, and thick with wisdom. Learn from trusted people who have been there-and-back who have likewise taken other people there-and-back. Grab these resources, let them grab you, and then rigorously apply them without delay or excuse. When you do, you will start the process of placing yourself in a position to begin heeding the call of great things.
4 days ago
4 days ago
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 simply ‘be’ without any thought about whether they should ‘be.’ We would define those as the common things. If we tinker with the idea of “common” for a moment, it would imply something that just ‘is’ because it has a place in life that’s uncontested, blatantly obvious, globally useful, intrinsically beneficial and it’s as cleanly natural as sunshine and rose petals. ‘Common’ defines those things whose existence we simply presume without questioning what they are or what role they play. They just ‘are’ because they’re supposed to be and we accept them as such.
Common Sense
It seems that common sense should be common as well, or at least we would like it to be common. After all, when we apply common sense things usually come out pretty good. Even if we can’t rightly define it, the phrase “common sense” has a nice ring to it. There’s something soothing about the idea of “common sense” as it seems to have some reliable guiding quality to it that’s much more likely to insure a good outcome. Common sense seems to bring a sure and steady compass to situations that are short on compasses. It seems to be the thing that will not fail us when all the craftiness, shrewdness, cunning and presumed brilliance of men who presume themselves as brilliant fails. Common sense is the spotless and orderly notion that we smile at with a kind of soothing and pleasantly simplistic agreement.
Common sense implies a cup of wisdom, a dash of discernment and a dollop of intellectual acumen that’s blended clean and translucent. It’s clarity in chaos and focus when all else is frantic. It suggests the direct application of life experience, gently hemmed in by intuition and held fast by reason. Common sense is the best of our senses refusing to react to the worst of our fears. It appears to be a culmination and consolidation of the best of our experiences that in combination are sufficiently adequate to overcome the worst of who we are.
The Absence of Common Sense
The absence of common sense seems in large part to be related to the fact that we tack so much stuff on to it, or cut so much stuff out of it, or painfully contort it to the point that we’re not certain what we’re left with other than it’s probably nothing even remotely close to common sense. We’re prone to nip, tuck, tinker and toy with it until it’s a whole lot less to common sense and a whole lot more something else. Common sense then gets unrecognizably blurred or worse yet it gets entirely lost in our tinkering.
What’s problematic is that once we’ve done all of that stuff to common sense, we think that what’s left over is still common sense. If fact, we often think that we’ve refined it to the point that it’s tight, clean and logically invincible. In reality, common sense is lost to the point that we don’t even recognize that whatever we’ve got left over after messing with common sense, it’s probably anything but common sense. We’ve got our own derivative of something that maybe started out as common sense but is only common in the fact that it no longer makes any sense.
But we go ahead and treat it like common sense anyway. The obvious and natural progression is that we act on it thinking all the while that its common sense that we’re acting on. The repercussions are that we end up acting on something that’s likely distorted by our agendas or shaped by whatever the cultural bias is. The result is that we do incredibly stupid things while applauding ourselves for how smart we think we are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said it well when he wrote, “Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.” George Bernard Shaw put it another way when he said, “Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.” Common sense is the stuff of simple man’s uncluttered instinct simply applied to whatever we’re facing. Instinct is all of our life experiences pooled together that gives us a sense that something’s right or wrong, good or bad, constructive or destructive, wise or not. Common sense then is simply using that instinct; refusing to convolute it by engaging in tangled complexities, and doing nothing more than directly applying it to our situation as our instinct tells us to apply it.
If that’s the case, then why is common sense so incredibly uncommon? Common sense would suggest that common sense itself is contaminated and distorted by things that dramatically diminish or altogether destroy common sense. We bias it and distort it through a number of means that undercut it and render it largely anemic. In doing that we rob it of its simplicity, we sully its purity and then we strip it of its effectiveness. We make decisions based on whatever we’re left with and the end product is typically something reeking with the rancid stench of stupidity.
Authentic Common Sense is Free of Prejudice and Bias
Common sense is a frankness that’s not convoluted by prejudice, bias, special interests, personal demands, self-centered motivations, self-seeking agendas or any of a thousand things that twist it to something rank and spoiled. Those things cloud common sense to the point that it’s so mucked up that we can’t see in it, or through it, or even around it. In reality, common sense is a blend of truth and fact untainted by any agenda that would dilute or skew it. It’s clean and transparent, entirely uncluttered by all of the muck and mire that we rigorously pump into it.
What makes common sense so uncommon is that we contaminate it with all that stuff. We have a difficult time setting our agendas cleanly apart and maintaining some disciplined degree of objectivity. We don’t get that common sense has a voice of its own and that voice is not our voice. What we adamantly listen for is our voice, our opinions, our sense of what should be. What do we think about this, that or the next thing? What are the pro’s and con’s that we can weigh out to weigh in our favor? We tend to like to hear ourselves talk anyway, so when we hear our own voices we typically like what we hear. Because we like what we hear, we assume it to be common sense and we act on it as such.
Common sense is not our voice. It’s the voice of life experience. It’s the voice of uncompromised truth and hard fact. It’s the voice of a guiding conscious that whispers or sometimes screams in the back of all of our heads. It’s the voice of something that’s far greater than who and what we are that speaks simple truths that are so clean that we can’t even apprehend them in the sludge of our own minds. Whatever commons sense is, it’s not our voice. So, if we’re listening to hear what we’re saying, we’re not listening for common sense.
Authentic Common Sense Uses Knowledge as Wisdom
Despite the fact that it’s pretty clean and simple, we somehow have the need to analyze, decipher, scrutinize, probe, inspect, dissect and then review it all in retrospect. If we don’t go through this gargantuan process, we feel that we’re not being entirely responsible and thorough. In this cumbersome process the intellectual acumen takes it all in a thousand different directions which are then further skewed by our own biases. In the end common sense is altogether killed and swapped out with something that’s certainly intellectually shiny and pretty impressive, but probably entirely irrelevant and likely utterly off-base. Once we get to this place it’s all so messed up that we typically can’t even backtrack sufficiently well enough to find the place where we left common sense buried and dead.
Robert Green Ingersoll said that “it is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.” Common sense is not something that’s learned in academia. Rather, it’s something gained by raw, hands-on, day-in and day-out experience where we get slapped and slugged. Common sense is gained in the rough and tumble of life, where we get beat, bruised, belittled, betrayed and battered. It’s standing up after we’ve been pummeled, shaking ourselves back to some level of consciousness and asking “what did I learn from whatever it was that just happened?” Whatever we learned, we add it to our base of preexisting knowledge. It’s the pooling of all those experiences and bringing them to bear on our situation that’s the raw fiber of common sense.
The Value of Common Sense
Common sense is a whole lot more valuable than we might think. There is something inherently grounded in common sense, something that resonates with the facts and the realities of whatever we’re facing. It keeps things on track, focused and balanced. It directs correctly and in a manner that brings relevant solutions that are effective even in seemingly implausible and impossible situations. Common sense takes the confusion that we tend to create and develops a clarity that sometimes seems too simplistic to be worth anything of real value. Yet, common sense can have tremendous value. Re-evaluate your thought processes. Reconsider the impact of both your own mind and all the sordid messages impressed upon you by the culture. Get back to the basics and you’ll find that life often has a stunning clarity that was stunningly missed.
6 days ago
6 days ago
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:
“Decisions based on timeless truths will never leave our tomorrow regretting the decisions of our yesterday, for such truths will always supersede any ‘then’ or ‘now.’”
Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Wednesday Apr 17, 2024
Podcast Short: Repentance - Reconfigured Standards
Wednesday Apr 17, 2024
Wednesday Apr 17, 2024
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, call it faith, call it whatever you want…but we all have standards shaped by something. We each have them.
But the thing that shapes them the most is us. We want standards because we’re supposed to have them, or they were inbred within us, or we just picked them up growing up, or whatever the case might be. But we want standards of convenience. We want standards that are fluidly permissive and that grant us ample free reign to do what we want when we want. We want standards that won’t hold us back if we hold them up. At times, we want standards that give us permission to do what, in fact, standards tell us not to do. We want standards that are standards in name only. We want standards so that we can say to others and to ourselves that we are people of standards…when, in fact, the standard is not to have one.
And to pull all of that off, we tediously and rather ingeniously reconfigure our standards to the point that they’re not quite empty, but pretty much empty. They have a slight hint of ethics or morals or principles or values hidden away somewhere within them. But that slight hint is left there solely as a means of granting those standards a soothing illusion of legitimacy. But they are not left there as something to which the standard adheres. And then we intricately weave these largely empty standards into our lives just enough to provide the illusion that we are indeed people of standards. We make them sufficiently legitimate to look the part. We make them tolerable. We make them doable. We take the ‘standard’ out of the standard, but we leave them with the name. And in the end, we are utterly fooled into believing that we are people who live by standards. That we are people of principle. That we walk the hard road of integrity. That we live right. That we stand for all that is good and just.
But we are not. We are people living a distortion of what we say we’re living. And that is utterly heart-breaking. If we honestly face that reality, it’s nothing short of catastrophic. It’s a shock to our system. It’s a blow to everything that we’ve built. It’s a pill that’s far, far too big to swallow. It’s a reality check that upends this incredibly fragile and permissive narrative that we’ve built the entirety of our lives on.
And it is in the acceptance of this painful and often devastating truth that repentance is born. This is where we stand before all of the good that we thought we were, and we recognize that this ‘good’ is a myth convincingly spun by this horribly comprised standard that we fashioned. Repentance is a stark realization and a horribly jarring awakening that we’re living a life of reconfigured standards that are not standards at all. Repentance is a hard and terribly frank look at the flimsy narrative that we created to grant us permission to live a fluidly permissive life of self-serving, dark, and personally destructive agendas. Life is full of this stuff. They’re everywhere in every place. These permeate everything, including you and including me.
Repentance is acknowledging these behaviors, and then rejecting these behaviors as destructive for us and everything around us. It’s confessing the destruction we’ve brought on ourselves and everyone around us, and it’s repenting of such an inexcusable and wholly squandered life in a manner so comprehensive that no moment, from this one forward, will ever be squandered again.
And once we’ve cleared the house of all of that stuff, repentance is being sufficiently bold to ask what the great standard is. The final standard. The ultimate standard. The real standard. That standard that will stand no matter what. The standard that will stand upon, against, and over every other standard. What is it, where is it, how do I draw it into every shred of my being, and how do I live by it in a manner entirely uncompromised? Repentance is uncompromisingly abandoning every reconfigured standard that we ever created and embracing the only standard that will outlive every other standard. Ever. And that is repentance.
And so where are those kinds of standards. Those are the standards that God, and only God, can create. Therefore, it is God to whom we should repent, for He holds the only standards worth dying for and living out. He holds the only standards that will still be standards when all other standards have long fallen away. He holds the great standards, the final standards, the ultimate standards, the real standards. That’s where they are. In fact, that’s the only place that they are. Repentance. Abandon your reconfigured standards and seize God’s eternal standards. That’s what will save you. That’s what will bless you. That’s what will transform you.
“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
2 Corinthians 7:14
Sunday Apr 14, 2024
Sunday Apr 14, 2024
"Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part One
We yearn for security. There is an inherent need deep within the fiber of our being that desires to be able to lean on and lean into the things around us, knowing with steeled assuredness that they will hold us firm and steady. We want life to be safe because we have a passion to engage life. And to engage life out to its furthest edges, we must of necessity step out of ourselves and into that which is around us. We have to step up, step off and step out. Any real journey is of necessity a journey beyond ourselves. A robust journey unapologetically takes us outside of all that we are able to keep safe, into that which we cannot. To do that, we by nature need some degree of safety in the endeavor.
Not only do we naturally yearn to lean out into life, life at many junctures demands it, and a real journey is not possible without it. Life frequently arrays itself before us in a manner that forces us to trust; to moderate or marginalize caution and to step out onto ground or relationships or circumstances that have not entirely convinced us of their certainty or safety. Sometimes we have to step out into things that are not of themselves safe at all.
Yet, if we are to journey, we must step out into these things. Likewise, if we want to embrace everything there is to embrace, we must step out into and onto all of these things for most of them do not necessarily come to us. We must of necessity go to them; extending not only the effort stepping out, but taking the entire initiative of seeking them out as they move either largely hidden or complete obscure. Life most often calls us outward. It beckons with grand and rich invitations that hold out the promise of growth and great adventure. But it does not always come to us with those invitations. We most often must go to it. The hard evidence of our passion for the journey is illustrated in our willingness to chase it however elusive it might be.
The Risk in it All
Life however is terribly imperfect. It seems that there was some grand design that granted us tremendous ability and then graced life with tremendous opportunity. There seems to be shadows of some great correlation where we were equipped to do great things and then life laid out great resources and ample space within which to do those things. The chemistry of it all made life something potentially grand.
Somewhere the whole marvelous arrangement seemed to have gotten marred. Somehow it was apparently damaged. “For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), which is the ultimate loss of the ultimate gift. The original intention of grand opportunities remains, but it now has to overcome obstacles, barriers, and various difficulties. Life demands that we battle disappointments, cruel turns, unexpected twists and surreal pain. Life remains for the taking, but it now comes with risk; sometimes great risk.
Betrayal as Part of the Risk
Into all of this comes betrayal. Betrayal is a cruel reversal. It takes the trust entrusted and uses it for purposes contrary to trust’s intent. Trust is a powerful thing. It willingly bequeaths both power and vulnerability when it extends itself to another or to life. Without trust, the greatest things in life are simply not achievable. Trust pushes out the boundaries. It allows us to extend ourselves out into places we would not otherwise venture. Whether that trust is vested in the destination itself, who we’re journeying with, who we’re journeying for, or whether that trust is vested in ourselves, it must be present. Trust is the prerequisite to risk and without risk little can be accomplished.
Betrayal takes trust and cruelly uses it to the advantage or purpose of the one initiating the betrayal. The agenda is most often self-centered. It’s about using trust to achieve an agenda that trust was not extended to achieve. Betrayal is altering both the journey and the intent for which trust was extended. A great gift is used for a great evil against the giver. Something painful and at times barbaric is then perpetrated.
Betrayal at Its Worst
The greatest and most painful aspect of betrayal is the belief that the very action of betrayal is not betrayal at all. Betrayal dressed in love and trimmed with the façade of good intentions is the most barbaric of all betrayals; being in reality a double betrayal. It is where the betrayer is set upon betrayal in a manner hidden and cloaked. It is chillingly devious and it carries an impaling venom deadly to the one who extended the gift of trust.
There is also a deluded sort of betrayal where betrayal is seen as a correct course of action or a necessary agenda by the one initiating the betrayal. Betrayal is often justified or rationalized as something other than betrayal. At times the action is viewed by the initiator as healthy or appropriate or entirely just, and it is projected as such. It seems the right and necessary thing to do. Unacknowledged betrayal is the most damaging and destructive betrayal we can experience. It presumes a violation as no violation. In the face of great betrayal it pretends no such betrayal. We are then left with the betrayal itself and no means of resolution with the party who betrayed us because they see no violation. We are left not only damaged, but we are left entirely alone with no means of justice with the betraying party.
Coping with Betrayal
Betrayal wounds deeply and its effects are lasting. Yet it has come into all of our lives and it will come again. There are several ways to cope and heal.
First, we must recognize that betrayal is not our fault. We may have done things that have been damaging or inappropriate, but nothing justifies betrayal. Despite whatever our actions were or were not, betrayal is not appropriate. There are always other means to deal with life issues. Other options exist.
Second, betrayal is often another person attempting to navigate their life circumstances. Sometimes those efforts are naively well-intentioned and based in ignorance or immaturity. Other times they are malicious, intended to force an agenda that the person feels can be achieved in no other manner. Either way, betrayal is the effort of an individual attempting to navigate some circumstance. Regardless of how or why it happened, it is inappropriate.
Third, betrayal is painful but it affords opportunity for growth. The farther down we are thrust, the higher we can rise. Betrayal pushes us to the darkest lows. These places, dark and cold as they are, create opportunities for us to grow to tremendous heights. Rather than embedding fear of people or life within us, betrayal gives us experiences and profound discernment to engage life with even greater risk knowing that our dramatically sharpened discernment provides us vision for a safer course.
Betrayal has likely come for you already. It may have visited you many times. You can be assured it will show itself again. Whatever the case, it can build you or diminish you. It will not leave you the way that it found you. Do not let betrayal betray you or your future. May you grow and be enriched because of it.
Saturday Apr 13, 2024
Saturday Apr 13, 2024
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 than maybe we thought it was, and that maybe we’re all part of a grand design of some sort.
For others of us who tend to see life as more happenstance, it’s more about figuring out how we can figure ourselves in to whatever’s being figured out around us. In that sense, we create a purpose if what’s around us appears to make it worthwhile or possibly necessary to do so. However, or in whatever way we go about it, we all ponder this whole idea of having a purpose. For having a purpose gives us a desperate sense of purpose when our self-esteem would tell us that we serve none.
There’s something about life that doesn’t quite make sense without a purpose. There’s too much rhythm to life. There’s too much that seamlessly meshes, even when scrutiny of the most exacting kind would not be able to ascertain how it possibly could. There’s a beautiful and even mysterious connectivity that creates a dynamic unifying function, drawing everything together in some jointly corporate effort as a means of keeping everything moving and growing and flourishing. Even the darker side of life, perpetually roiling with its chaos and anarchy has an underlying cadence that maintains the darkness and feeds the destruction. Things have a place and a purpose in that place.
We Need a Purpose
Whatever the nature of our orientation might be, it seems that we need a purpose. There’s a lot of things that we talk about and discuss and debate and ponder and pontificate about in life. We analyze and scrutinize a whole bunch of stuff. And most of those discussions are really all about sizing all of that stuff up in order to determine if we want to engage in them or not. Do we want to invest in those things, or learn more about them, or build some part of them into our lives? Or do we categorize them as wholly irrelevant, blithely toss them aside, and move on from them to whatever the next thing’s going to be? Most of our discussions are a part of this bit of shopping that we’re doing in order to determine to if we want to purchase the product or pass on it.
But when it comes to purpose, it’s not about shopping. Shopping implies that we have a choice. It suggests that we’re leisurely strolling the endless aisles of life working out those endless decisions of whether we want to purchase something or not purchase something. There’s a sense that we can live with or without whatever it is that’s crammed onto the shelves that flank us on our left and on our right. The majority of these things are bright and shiny accessories that simply compliment what we already have or lend a bit of accent to what we already believe in. In the complimenting and the accenting, they don’t necessarily add to what we have nor do they detract from it. Most of them are appealing options designed to supplement something, not sturdy truths constructed to support something. We can take them or leave them without any major repercussions in the taking or the leaving. That’s most of life.
But purpose doesn’t appear to be a bright and shiny accessory. It’s not designed to ‘supplement’ anything because everything else is designed to supplement it. In fact, it’s not an item that we choose to select or not select. Purpose doesn’t leave us with the luxury of deciding whether we’ll choose it or whether we won’t. It’s inborn. It’s how we make sense of our existence as it’s played out within the rest of existence. We have meaning because there’s a role that makes sense of our existence and that serves to compliment everything else in existence. It’s simply not optional for purpose to be an option.
If we’re going to live with fullness, we have to be fully committed to seeking out and working out our purpose. Otherwise, we will exist with a gaping internal vacuum that will leave our lives ill-defined, or worse yet, undefined. And herein we often discover the source of our damaged, raw and bleeding self-esteem. We feel that we have no purpose and that can only mean that we have no value.
The Question Regarding Our Purpose
Therefore, the question regarding purpose is not “do we need one?” The question regarding purpose is far beyond any tangled debate as to whether one is necessary. We can engage in the rather diffuse and ever-shifting debate of whether we have a purpose. We can ponder the subject and bring it under the scrutiny of political leanings, emerging philosophies, wildly divergent doctrines, the voice of the important people in our lives, or other such assorted maladies. Regardless of the microscope under which we put it or the template that we force upon it, it’s not a question to be asked. Rather, it is a reality to be embraced.
Debates such as these often arise from those who would view life as this perpetually shifting expression of whatever they feel moved to express at any given moment. In such scenarios purpose gives way to the randomness of those who demand randomness as a platform to indulge whatever they wish to indulge whenever their mood moves them to indulge it. Or, it arises from those who tightly align the idea of ‘purpose’ with the belief in a Superior Being that orchestrated this existence and our place in it. Wanting to reject all such notions of a God in order to hold tight to the gospel of self-determination, they reject all such notions of a purpose (or at least a divine one). Arguments such as these can likewise arise from those believe there’s a purpose but fear the magnitude of it. In their minds, to know it and to pursue it is to risk failing at it. So, it’s better not to know.
In reality, the question of purpose is simple, direct, but inherently complicated. The question demands bravery. It rises on the belief that we have an utterly indispensable role to play in our own existence because it is not just our own existence. Fulfilling our purpose has an equally critical role to play in the existence of others. It is our part in this ever-unfolding corporate story that we have been granted an indispensable part in.
It is to understand that despite our own sense of unworthiness, we have been given a purpose. The fact that we have a purpose is not so shaky as to be dependent upon our belief as to whether we’re sufficient enough to have one. Quite the opposite. The fact that we have been granted a purpose evidences that we were worthy to have one. But more than that, we were sufficiently competent to play a role whose impact would move far beyond the limits of ourselves.
The Power and Scope of Purpose
To have a purpose is to possess power. For any purpose never begins and ends in itself. It is never that constricted, for then any purpose would be something so anemic that its very existence could not be justified. It never is held to the parameters of the life within which we live. Our purpose always moves out, as it never consolidates itself as a means of always moving in upon itself. Engaging in our purpose and working that purpose out has an influence far beyond the scope of the purpose itself. It is highly influential. It is the thing that builds upon the purposes of those around us, vigorously enhancing communities, nations and the global experience itself. To have a purpose is to possess power. And if we have been granted power of this sort, our value cannot be understated.
In fact, to not ask the question of what our purpose is, is to relegate our lives to mediocrity of the basest sort. It is to question the rationale of our existence as not existing. It causes us to debate the essence of who we are and what we’re supposed to do with who we are, which in fact questions everything that we are. We possess the power and the freedom to ask the question. And I believe that we’ve been granted that authority so that in the asking we might find the purpose. The question is, “What is my purpose?” The question is not, “Do I have one?”
It’s embracing that question and insistently asking it until we have the answer squarely in our hands so that we can begin to live it out squarely in our lives. That action both defines and breaks open our existence in ways few other things do. And it most certainly validates the worth of our existence in ways powerful and profound.
What “Purpose” Tells Us:
First, We’re More Than Just the Sum Total of Our Existence
The fact that we have a purpose evidences the fact that we are more than just the sum total of whoever it is that we are. A purpose says that we have a much larger role in this thing that we call life than just the living out of our individual lives. Life is bigger than any of us will ever be as an individual. Purpose tells us that we’re specifically designed to engage every bit of that expanse. Purpose tells us that everything that’s within us is designed to engage everything that’s outside of us, and there’s a whole lot out there. A purpose tells us that we are far more than just the sum total of our existence because we are called to do something in an existence that far exceeds us. A purpose tells us that we are more than just “us.”
Second, There is Something Greater Than Us That We’re Invited to Participate In
The fact that we have a purpose tells us that is ‘something else’ out there. It tells us that the horizons in life don’t come anywhere close to ending at the end of our existence as the single, solitary human beings that all of us are. The nature of purpose is such that it will always be bigger than us and it always live beyond us. It grants us the opportunity of legacy. It extends our influence beyond our own death when we’re no longer here to extend it. These unshakeable realities substantiate the fact that there’s more out there than we can possibly imagine. Purpose not only invites us out to embrace the wonder of imagining all of that, but it extends us a priceless invitation to actually step out into it. Gratefully, a purpose tells us that we are not the end of all that there is. In fact, ‘we’ are barely the beginning, and that in and of itself is wildly exciting. A purpose says that the ‘out there’ is far, far greater than the ‘in here.’ And it invites us out to freely run in it, to exuberantly play in it, and to potently transform all of it in the running and the playing.
Third, We’re a Piece of a Much Larger Puzzle That’s Would be Incomplete Without Us
Our purpose tells us that this massive world out there, as huge as it is, is sorely incomplete without us. As big and as enormous and as complicated and as intricate as the world is, it remains less than completely complete without us. We have a purpose in this world that only we can complete. Large or small, complicated or simple, breathtaking or life giving, regardless of what our purpose is, the world will be incomplete unless we fulfill it. That makes each and every one of us terribly important in ways that most of us never even consider, and few of us even remotely conceptualize. We are utterly irreplaceable which makes every one of us invaluable beyond any sort of monetary reckoning that we could hope to calculate. Everything that’s out there will be less than everything that’s out there if we forsake our purpose. And that fact makes us incredibly valuable.
Fourth, We Do Not Need to Surrender to the Mundane
Our purpose tells us that life is intentional. It is to live out something not in the frustration of random happenstance, but in something for which this life was purposely designed. It tells us that we have the power and the mission to vividly enhance life, rather than living in some terribly foreboding mindset while we sit on ‘pins and needles’ anxiously waiting to see how life is going to play itself out. There is a destination that has enough meaning and sufficient value to call us to the challenges that will certainly be part of fulfilling that purpose. That we are not here to aimlessly pass by and leaving nothing in the passing. To the contrary, our existence is designed to live on beyond our existence. To leave a bold legacy of generational impact. To fight against all that fights against us in order to create space and grant opportunity for all of the things that would wish to live within us to be expressed outside of us. And to do this for those in that walk beside us as well as those who will come behind us.
Fifth, We Can Deny It
Could it be that the first and foremost purpose of ‘purpose’ is to convince us that we have one? Is it likely that our purpose can only be fully manifest in a manner utterly transformational when we are convinced that we have a purpose to manifest? Possibly the most brilliant way that ‘purpose’ can do that is by granting us permission to deny that we have one. However rigorous the nature of the argument might be against having a purpose, we bring it to bear in our defense and we passionately pound whatever podium we’re pounding on in that defense. And any reasonable person would hold that if we’re putting so much thought, energy and passion into a defense of this sort, there must be something there to defend against. Therefore, it is our own arguments against having a purpose that substantiates our actually having one.
We Don’t Have to Create a Purpose, We Only Have to Find It
Purpose is not something that we create, or have to create, or can create. To do what it does, it must be exceedingly greater than what we could ever create it to be. It’s not something that we create because it eclipses our vision and it lays leagues beyond the scope of our creativity. If we’ve created something that we’ve defined as our ‘purpose’ and we’re chasing after whatever that is, what we’re chasing is probably a nice idea or some collection of ideas. But it’s not our purpose.
Rather, purpose is something that we find. It’s not about tediously constructing some sort of purpose out of the scattered pieces and errant parts of whatever we understand ourselves and our lives to be. It’s not about rummaging around the confines of our existence looking for ideas, or sitting and awaiting the arrival of one of those ever-elusive moments of inspiration. It’s not about figuring out how we build it or where we get the parts from in order to build it. God’s done that work already, and He’s done it with absolute perfection. Neither is it about about earning it, for it was always yours and it was never not yours. Your very existence unarguably speaks to the fact that you have one.
We just need to commit ourselves to finding it. Not earning it, but finding it. Not piecing it together, but discovering that it was never in pieces in the first place. Next to our search for God, seeking out our purpose is one of the most phenomenal adventures that we will ever have the privilege of undertaking. As we’ve noted, it’s a treasure hunt of the greatest sort. It’s an adventure that leaves all other adventures as largely adventure-less. It’s seeking out the very thing that we were designed to do. It undergirds and gives meaning to everything else. It is the rationale for our existence laid out on the table and explained. And it’s there to be found if we commit to the search.
We Were Made for Our Purpose
Once we begin to quit denying our purpose or quit attempting to manufacture it, the nature and fabric of it will begin to coalesce. With this ever-emerging clarity, we may well find ourselves increasingly paralyzed but subsequently awed by both the size and gravity of it. It’s imperative that we understand that what we are seeking is decidedly bigger than the sum total of who we are. In fact, if we dare to explore it fully it will eventually tower over us, for anything less is less than a purpose. It’s big because it’s supposed to be. It’s big because we were created big.
Therefore, the immensity of a purpose too often dictates the intensity with which we are prone to flee it. Yet, if we understand that we are explicitly built to perfectly mesh with this gloriously enormous thing that we call ‘purpose’, we begin to understand that we are finally at home in way we’ve never been at home before. We sit with something huge because we are created by a God Who is huger still. Therefore, to be paralyzed by the size is to miss the fact that a purpose is not to be managed. It is to be done. It’s not to be sized up. It’s to be lived out. And once we’re there, the size of our purpose becomes utterly exhilarating instead of profoundly intimidating.
To Not Seek Out Your Purpose is Only to Exist
Yet, many choose not to believe that they have a purpose, or they believe that they have one but don’t bother themselves with finding it. There are those of us who succumb to a life of mindless tedium, or a pathetic routine where we senselessly march in lock-step with a world around us that’s forsaken its purpose as well. There are those of us who readily embrace the pabulum of mediocrity which declares that things are about as good as they can get, so we’d better just settle for what we’ve got.
We surrender to a purposeless existence which is surrendering to death way ahead of death’s actual arrival. And the sad story around all of this is that the majority of people will walk the journey of life down a road flat, never ascending, and rarely challenging. Many of us will know nothing other than a directionless cadence, having left the footprints of our lives meandering down a road that’s meandering itself. Eventually the road will lead to wherever apathy and mediocrity pave it. And we can be certain that it will never lead to whatever our purpose was.
Your Purpose Awaits
You have a purpose. Despite your low estimation of yourself, you have a purpose. It stands eager and ready to be discovered. Purpose is never going to be so elusive that you can’t find it simply because purpose is deeply desirous of being found, seized, unleashed and ultimately achieved. In doing so, you will change your life and the lives of those around you, because when you embrace your purpose nothing less than change can happen. If you don’t seize your purpose, you will live out an anemic life and the world will be the poorer for it. Your existence will be of marginal effect, if any effect at all. And that reality is nothing short of tragic. It’s time to ask one of the largest questions that you will ever ask yourself. And that question is, “What is my purpose?” The fact that you exist endows you with the right to ask that question. So, let’s begin shaping and exploring that question.
Friday Apr 12, 2024
”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - The Inadequacy of Men
Friday Apr 12, 2024
Friday Apr 12, 2024
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:
“I am left with no alternative than to look beyond the efforts of men, for efforts of those sort leave cities flattened, nations teetering, and lives crushed. Instead, I must shift the whole of my gaze to the God who tenderly kneels in the midst of this unimaginable carnage and effortlessly makes the healing imaginable.”
Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Wednesday Apr 10, 2024
Podcast Short: Fear - How We Create It
Wednesday Apr 10, 2024
Wednesday Apr 10, 2024
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 relentlessly circle us, waiting for some opportunity to pounce on what little bit of sanity and what tiny shred of hope we have left. Fear. It can be brutal. And we all have it.
In grappling with fear, we might ask ourselves how many times have our choices set the stage for the fear that we’re experiencing? How many times have our choices, in fact, resulted in the very actions that created the very things that we fear? How many times have our choices presented opportunities for fear to find some space in our lives, or increased our susceptibility to what we already fear, or made what we fear bigger than what it already is? How many times has our fear been a product of our choices?
And in contemplating these thoughts, we might ask two very profound, yet very fundamental questions. First, where am I walking? And second, who am I walking with? Where am I walking in life, and who am I walking with?
First, where do we walk? What kind of places are we walking in anyway? In good places? In the wisest of places? Are we walking in the places that everyone else is walking in simple because everyone else in walking in them? Are we walking in the kinds of places that are trendy now, but will likely fall out of favor as quickly as they fell into favor? Are we walking in places where we can fly under the radar, because in today’s cultural climate we’re frequently too afraid to be on anyone’s radar? Are we walking in places that have thrown ethics to the wind, so that we find our life’s a journey where we’re always walking into the wind? Have we chosen the places where we’re walking based on some politically-correct notion, or some vogue philosophy, or some fleeting agenda that’s not grounded in much of anything other than not being grounded?
We can walk in all kinds of places. Some are places that are good to be in. Others are not. Some will strengthen us in preparation for the next place, and others will keep us from getting to the next place at all. Some are wise and others are foolish, even though those walking in foolish places claim those places to be wise indeed. However, the question remains, where do we walk…because our fear often arises from the very places where we’ve chosen to walk. Therefore, have we chosen wisely?
Second, who are we walking with? What kind of companions have we chosen? What kind of people are walking along with us? Are they for us? Are they against us? Or are they altogether apathetic about us? Do they care are about us, or are we largely irrelevant to them? Is the journey viewed as a joint venture, or have they declared (either silently or not so silently) that it’s “every man is for himself?” Is it about the destination, or is it about a partnership in the journey to the destination? Can we count on them, or can we count on not counting on them? Who are we walking with, because our fear often arises from the people we’ve chosen to walk with.
Where am I walking, and who am I walking with? Have we chosen the right places and the right people? Or do we look around us and realize that we’re in all the wrong places with all the wrong people. Or maybe we’re in all the wrong places without any people at all. Or maybe we’re not even certain as to exactly what place we’re in or who’s in whatever place this happens to be. In other words, we’re lost. Really lost. And there’s a good chance that we’ve been lost for a long, long time. A really long time. So long in fact that we wonder if we can ever be found, and that creates a lot of fear all by itself.
Where am I walking, and who am I walking with? You might want to think about that, because those might be the very questions that you need to ask in light of the very fears that you are grappling with. It’s likely that your choices generated a lot of your fears. And so maybe you need to walk in an entirely different place, and you need to walk that ‘different place’ with the God Who is never the wrong person.
“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”
Psalm 23:4
Sunday Apr 07, 2024
Sunday Apr 07, 2024
"Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Four
Did you ever have one of those surreal moments when it seems like something snaps in your head and suddenly you see everything like you never saw it before? Have you experienced those times when things unexplainably shift and they don’t look at all the same as they did only a moment ago? When what was entirely familiar is no longer familiar in quite the way that it was before?
A lot of things can trigger these moments . . . an argument, a child leaving the home, a death, a job loss, a divorce, a birthday, unexpected contact from a long-lost friend or any number of similar events. In the middle of whatever this is, you’re suddenly able to see the reality of your life with a stunning, nearly razor-sharp clarity that you’ve never had before. It’s kind of like you were blind and you didn’t know it and in the briefest nanosecond, for the briefest nanosecond you were granted stunningly perfect vision. And with that perfect vision, everything looks perfectly different.
Suddenly, what we now see is familiar but strangely unfamiliar at the same time. We intimately know everything that we see around us but it’s entirely alien just the same. It looks different or not quite right. It’s my life but it’s not my life, or at least what I wanted my life to be. It’s what I’ve been living all along, but at the same time it’s not what I’ve been living, or what I thought I was living.
And we stand there rubbing our eyes because what we see is not stuff we saw before, or at least what we saw with the clarity that we see it now. In the emotional turmoil these rare moments create we’re often left asking “who am I and where am I?” And in the briefest nanosecond, in exactly the same way it came, this vision is gone. However, the memory of what those few incredible moments revealed is anything but gone.
What times like this most often reveal is the paralyzing reality that we are not where we intended to be. This was not the destination that we had mapped out as pimply-faced teens or adventurous young adults or giddy newlyweds. The line that we had drawn from those younger years forward in time didn’t go where we’re at now, or weren’t supposed to go here; to this place that we now realize we are. We never really considered the heading on our compass. And now we pick it up, shake it to make certain it’s actually working and we’re left realizing that it’s working perfectly but we didn’t follow it. And now we stand at some point far removed from, and possibly decades away from where we were supposed to be, or thought we were supposed to be.
What hits us really hard is that we didn’t fully realize the deviation from the path that our dreams had laid out so long ago. We got here and we didn’t even realize that we got here. But now we know it. And we’re standing deflated, attempting to figure out where we got so terribly off course, all the while madly calculating how many years we have left, and how many responsibilities we have on our plate in order to determine if we have the time and the freedom to ever get back on course.
Worse yet, some of us don’t even remember what the course was in order to retrace it. Others of us never set a course for ourselves in the first place; having allowed the winds of life and the currents of circumstance to bring us here. Whatever the case, there is this chilling, haunting sense that we are not where we wanted to be, and that the path intended to take us there may now be forever forfeited. We fear a life squandered. And the question wildly reverberates in a near panic, “how did I get here?”
I Am Where I Am
At these times we can certainly pull out our tattered life map, grab whatever compass we’ve used over the years, or review the saved settings on our personal or relational or spiritual GPS. We can then hunker down over the topography of our past trying to scrawl out the line that brought us here. We can do all of that. And in doing that there may be value.
However, we are where we are. Like it or not, we’re “here,” wherever “here” is. First, the task is really about determining exactly where we’re at in order to get some sort of bearing on our life. After that, we need to determine where we want to go. Then we need to determine do we have the time and the resources to get there. It’s not about bemoaning where we are. Certainly we can make room to do that for a bit if that gets it off our chests. It’s really more about grabbing hold of our lives and planning a strategy to take us where we want to go.
Where Am I?
So where am I anyway? Not where I think I am or necessarily perceive myself to be or have deluded myself into believing I am. But where am I . . . really? It may be a tough or even painful thing to think about. It may be harder to accept and embrace. It’s likely that not thinking about it was a major contributor to getting you here in the first place. So look around and be chillingly honest.
Embracing where we’re actually at will likely involve grieving time and opportunities lost, anger that it happened, disappointment in that we let it happen, frustration that we weren’t attentive enough to keep it from happening, confusion over how it happened, and a host of other weighty and powerful emotions. Our desire to avoid these may result in a less than honest assessment of our location. However, such a less than honest assessment of where we’re at will entirely undermine any ability to reclaim lost dreams and dashed hopes.
Where Do I Want to Go?
Where I want to go is not about running from where I am. Sometimes our destination in life is determined by our desire to get away from where we are. If fleeing our present place in life is what drives us, we’re likely to make poor choices about where we want to go simply because the motivation is not entirely adequate.
Second, where we want to go does not necessarily have to be a radical resurrection or reconstitution of our old hopes or dreams. We’re in a different place under different circumstances with different realities and different responsibilities than we had way back when. It’s more about re-evaluating life and asking fresh and new questions about where we want to go.
Third, we may find that we really shouldn’t go anywhere at all. It may be that we should commit to build upon and expand where we are. Investment and renovation in the very place we’re at may result in the exact life we’re looking for. Where we want to go may very well be utilizing the resources that we have right here and shaping them into something that we didn’t ever consider they could be.
Do I Have the Resources?
Some resources we have less of, like time. Other resources we have more of, like maturity and knowledge and experience. It’s about assessing our resources and realizing that we likely have more resources at our disposal than we did in the earlier years; we just don’t realize it. Then it’s about pooling and maximizing those resources into whatever endeavor we feel directed toward.
Have You Considered . . . ?
In reality, most of us end up someplace other than what we intended. Life is not so smooth or manageable as to chart direct courses on tidy timelines. It’s more about recalibrating and making course corrections along the way, believing that life is a journey that takes us off course at times, but provides us resources to likewise alter those courses. Not where you want to be? Think about it.
Saturday Apr 06, 2024
Saturday Apr 06, 2024
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 defined by whatever will accord us the accolades of others or advance us socially or professionally. At yet other times, the definition of success is more about giving ourselves a sorely needed boost when our spirits have been lagging.
Sometimes definitions are crafted as we go along, granting us permission to fluidly and rather nonchalantly alter the definition of success in order to form-fit whatever the outcome of our choices have been. In doing that, we have granted ourselves full license to define the outcome in whatever way suits our choices. We can craft a definition of success to embolden a faltering cause or create support when our base is splintering and our people are wavering.
Then there are other times when the definition of success is modified to diminish the works of those we’ve come to abhor and elevate those upon whom our favor has fallen. Some definitions of success are those shaped by the shifting pen of political correctness, or the placating tenets of the culture, or by the gnawing need for acceptance, or formed from the dictates of a particular social grouping that demands adherence to a prescribed set of standards. Sometimes success is defined by the proclamations of some revered leader, or the family system that we grew up in, or the job description that shapes our nine-to-five lives.
Lost in the Array of Definitions
Whatever and wherever their source, a dizzying array of definitions abound. Many seem to be a target created after the trigger was pulled, making every decision a bulls-eye even if the aim was horrid. Some are thrown out because they’re easy, or we’re not certain what success is so we just come up with something that might pass for success if people don’t pay too much attention. And in the squalor of definitions gone awry and rogue, we seem to have lost a genuine definition of success.
Subsequently, it is this mad array of definitions that sends us scurrying in a million different directions in order to be successful in whatever way success is defined at the moment. We might not know what success is, but if we do well enough in enough areas, or if we adhere to enough of the things defined as trendy and vogue, or if we chase whatever everyone else is chasing we just might happen to land on something successful. Maybe it’s the proverbial ‘shot in the dark’ that might altogether miss, yet the fact that we took the shot itself was defined as success regardless of what it hit. In the end, success becomes more defined by figuring out exactly what success is rather than actually fulfilling the definition.
Why Success?
It's interesting that success, in whatever manner it is defined, has come to define our worth and value. That’s why a lack of perceived success will tank our self-esteem quicker than just about anything else. Success appears to have become the litmus test as to the credibility of our existence and the unforgiving gauge of our worth. Success has evolved into the exclusive commodity by which we ascribe value to ourselves and others. It’s the thing that gives us status, grants us credibility, authenticates what we say, lends weight to our opinions, and awards us with the sense of a life well lived. It is the crown jewel of our existence; something to be vigorously pursued and rigorously obtained at all costs, for not doing so is a life squandered, opportunity lost, and self-esteem decimated. We are led to believe that to ‘not’ be successful is to live out the story of this sorry existence of ours without having validated the legitimacy of the existence that we wasted.
Fear of Questioning the Definition
Success becomes so acutely defined and so irrevocably defining that we seldom entertain any other possible definition. We find ourselves entangled in the culturally mandated definition of success, or the definitions imposed by our families or friends or occupation. We become so absorbed in the sorting out and the achieving of those definitions that the endeavor to achieve them becomes inordinately consuming. We have little tolerance to question the definition of success because we were told that we shouldn’t...so we don’t. Or, the pursuit of it is so intense that we never stop long enough to question it. And if we did, we fear that the cultural definition might be incorrect or our families would get sufficiently perturbed that our lives will have forever run amuck because we missed the cherished mark in the questioning of it. So we don’t question it.
Therefore, given that the defining scale of success has assumed such a dominant role in our culture, and given that we presume there to be some golden definition out there, we must find a definition for it or at least write one that would be approved of. Otherwise we have no precise framework by which to determine our success or lack thereof. Once we feel we’ve landed on the singular definition of success, we throw ourselves into the chase for fear that our lives might devolve into obscurity, our legacy might be pathetic, and we ourselves remain contemptible. But what does this mean in terms of how we’ve come to identify who we are and in that, how we’ve attempted to determine the value of who we are?
What We Do or Who We Are?
As we have noted in a previous chapter, too often the yardstick that we use to measure our worth is defined by ‘what we do.’ What we do is measured by a series of accomplishments, the manner in which we have embellished life through those accomplishments, and the achievement of goals lofty behind the imagination of the common man and far beyond the reach of the hoards. It’s understanding what’s fundamentally achievable and then embracing the belief that our worth is defined as raising oneself significantly above that which is fundamentally achievable. It’s being intentional about ascending to some lofty escarpment that we ourselves had deemed impossible to surmount. Therefore, the definition of success is the measurement of accomplishment.
In applying this standard, we evidence our worth as held up against the enormity of the task itself and the manner in which the everyday person accomplishes the task. If we can eclipse both, we feel that we have established our worth by virtue of these comparisons. But eclipsing both requires determining what success is so that we know we achieved it. ‘What we do’ is granted credibility by whatever our definition of success is. Without the definition, we have nothing by which to measure ‘what we do.’ We won’t know if we hit it or not. And in our minds, if that definition hasn’t been met or if the bullseye hasn’t been hit, everything that we do becomes the everything that achieves nothing.
The Flaw of Success
Yet, the nature of such a mentality of success demands that we constantly achieve. It is an effort of insanely perpetual works that requires that we continually prove our worth as the previous success eventually fades sufficiently to demand a new one. Sure, we can define it. But success as used to determine our worth and value is always temporal. It’s always moving. Therefore, we become enslaved to successes that demand nothing more than other successes. It becomes apparent that success is a temporary aphrodisiac that will always demand more of itself without helping us develop any sense of worth regarding ourselves. Understanding this, success then might be best defined as breaking the need to be successful as a means of proving our value.
We need to break this need to be successful due to the fact that success becomes a morbid cycle where we become successfully defeated. As noted, success in and of itself is not a problem nor is it bad unless it becomes the standard by which we measure our worth and value. Success that evidences our worth must be repeated without an end to the repeating because there is no success great enough to grant us a sustained sense of worth and value. We are worth far more than any success might impute. Because that’s the case, success must be revisited again and again because it can speak little into something as vast as we are.
We Are Too Big to Be Defined By Any Success
As we noted in a previous chapter, our value is not based on ‘what we do.’ Rather, it is based on ‘who we are.’ If we remain stuck with the feeling that our worth is based on ‘what we do,’ the definition of success is what lends credence to those efforts. The definition of success gives ‘what we do’ a mark to shoot for and a distinct line to cross. It lends clarity to where we’re going and when we get there. Yet, we can hit the mark and cross the line and raise our arms in ardent celebration with our self-esteem none the better for the experience.
Success is irrelevant in respect to our self-esteem as any definition of success regardless of how lofty does not possess the power to sustain our sense of worth or feed our sense of value. When it comes to our sense of worth and value, success is the thing that’s not the thing. It’s been marketed as the snake oil for our self-esteem by the carpetbaggers of our culture, but it’s snake oil only. The quietly alluring aspect of success is that it promises a perpetual sustenance and feeding of our self-esteem. It whispers the message in a rather seductive and convincing manner. Given that the culture has fallen for its smooth talk and has subsequently run pell-mell after its message, its legitimacy is reinforced.
However, it is always in need of resuscitation. Success cannot do what it promises to do. It can’t deliver on time in any time. It comes with wild promises but empty hands. It spouts great platitudes that thrill the listener, but it crashes with such force that it shatters the eardrums. With such an apparently irreconcilable flaw in its makeup, it would be worthwhile to postulate that our worth must be based on something significantly more consistent and profoundly more fundamental than success.
We Want to Define What Defines Us
The great rub that keeps us from getting out of this rut is that we want to define what defines us. We can acknowledge that the definition of success does not grant us worth and value. We can understand that, believe that, and come to accept that. We’ve chased these imposed definitions long enough to know that the chasing never resulted in the catching. But instead of understanding that our value is not based on any definition of success, we determine that the definition is wrong and that we can right that.
When the promise of those definitions begin to falter, we secretly being spending our time covertly crafting alternative definitions. Since this other route has failed us, we can craft life, impose the values, shift the circumstances, and modify a host of other variables that eventually shape a fresh definition of success in order to give us a maximum chance of success.
The failure lays of all this in the fact that we did not learn from the failure that we just experienced failing at. We’re repeating the very thing that we said we’re no longer doing. We didn’t learn that it can’t be done. We just thought that it couldn’t be done the way that society did it or our families did it, so we will do it differently. We missed the fundamental lesson our value is not based on what we do as defined by the definition of success, regardless of who creates the definition or how appealing it might be. We lived the lesson, but we missed the very thing that we were living. We missed the lesson that maybe success is believing that we already are a success by virtue of our existence and that our calling is not to prove it, but to act upon it.
It’s the pursuit of success and the failure of what it promises that leads us to errantly believe that we are not successful. That we have failed being successful, or that we were not successful enough. That maybe we were deluded into thinking that we were successful when we weren’t and we just didn’t know it. That in some capacity and in some manner that we’ve yet to identify, we failed even though we honestly thought that we didn’t. In fact, we didn’t fail. Rather, success failed us because it cannot deliver what it promises. So, there must be another avenue.
Value Based on Who We Are
As we noted previously, maybe we should dare to consider that our worth does not need to be established either by effort or definition. Maybe we should consider the possibility that it has never ‘not’ been established. That success was achieved by the fact that God decided to designed us and then deliver us into a far larger design to make an impact in and upon that design. We’re here, and that itself is a success.
Everything that we do from here forward is not about success, for success has already been achieved by the fact of our existence. It’s about calling. It’s about fulfillment of the purpose that we’ve been given the privilege to fulfill. It’s about honing in on our purpose and purposefully carrying it out. It’s about obedience to the call, not the adherence to some definition that measures our obedience to the call. It’s doing all of that knowing that our worth and value exists by virtue of the fact that we exist. From there on out, it’s about the doing and not about the proving.
If this is the case, then the attempt to establish something that is already established is about attempting to prove something that is already true and has always been so. And if that is true, it doesn’t need us to establish its value. The need is for us to believe it. To work it out in our attitudes and live it out in our lives. To rest in it and on it even at those moments when we don’t feel it. To speak it into our existence when the world would speak something entirely different into our existence. And that rests squarely upon us.
Thinking a Bit More Deeply
It would therefore be wise to consider the possibility that our worth is based on something so profound and unerringly rich that its worth singularly speaks for itself. Something that does not need to be proven simply because it is established in a manner that the need of proof is the weakness of our vision and not the fact of reality. It would make sense that our worth should be, and in reality is based on something that cannot be proven for any other reason than its value lies forever beyond the most magnificent achievements that would serve to even remotely evidence it.
Could It Be That We Are More?
Could it be that we are more than we are? That we have a limit that has no limits? That in fact, we are not destined for limits, and that any that we have are those that we have taken upon ourselves? Are we set apart from the rest of our existence because we are not bound to that existence? We are forever pressing against the boundaries because we assume that something exists beyond them and that something exists within us to take us beyond them. We have this sense that our limits are nothing more than opportunities to expose these limits as the next step to the next place. We are always pressing ourselves outside of ourselves. The life truly lived is the life that is always calling itself outside of itself. Therefore, at what point do we reach this impenetrable wall that defines the end of whatever it is that we are? The answer is, we don’t. And we might ask why we don’t.
I would propose that next to God Himself, the thing of single greatest value is ourselves. The priceless nature of a single human life, despite the manner in which we’ve blithely degraded that worth, is wholly immense. And this immensity is utterly inestimable on so many indescribable levels that proof stands as entirely irrelevant.
Human beings stand as the most definitive accomplishment of creation, positioned as the pinnacle of a creation that is indescribably marvelous in and of itself. We are the final touch of the cosmos themselves. We are the defining brush stroke of a creation that encompassed the galaxies, raised up mountains, gouged out canyons, threw birds into flight, painted fiery sunsets, and spun the mesmerizing diversity of the seasons. We are the thing for which these were created and we are the things that have been vested with the most improbable but most privileged job of caring for them.
We are God’s defining work. There can be no shade of arrogance or darkening of pride in such a reality as that would only serve to sadly mar us and leave us with a diminished countenance. Indeed, we should be inordinately humbled that we are God’s crowning achievement and that alone grants us inestimable worth. It is not about proving our worth through the sweaty efforts of success or achieving some definition thereof. It is about realizing successes of even the loftiest sort and boldest character could not in and of themselves prove our worth, for our worth is entirely inherent, undeniably priceless, and established in the fabric of creation itself.
Achieving for Sheer Pleasure, Not Proof of Value
We would be wise to embrace the liberating reality that we can achieve in life for the sheer pleasure of achievement, rather than as a despairing effort to establish our worth. We can walk through life with vigor and tenacity out of a sense of worth, not out of some desperate effort to prove our worth. We change things and we change the course of things because we have been privileged to possess both the ability and the permission to do so. Life is engaged, energized and inspired by our worth, rather than depleted in the pursuit of it. Our days are lived embracing the reality that our value is based on who we are, and to embrace that liberating reality is to embrace a life liberated.
The Viciousness of Low Self-Esteem Explained
In light of this, low self-esteem is the antithesis of who we are. It is ourselves fully removed from ourselves. It is the ultimate scorched-earth mentality that leaves the massiveness of who we are engulfed in smoke and razed in ashes. Of course low self-esteem is brutal. It must be if it is to have any impact upon the immensity of who we are. We are a vigorous lot, despite our frequent ignorance regarding that fact. Therefore, a low self-esteem must be relentless lest we shake it and reclaim our authentic selves in the shaking. Our enemy is formidable. But our resources are more formidable yet. Self-esteem would tell us that this is not true out of the fear that we might discover that it is and therefore bring the full weight of ourselves against it. You are what you don’t see. You will always be what you don’t see even if you choose to never see it. This is who you are and this is what you are.
If we cannot embrace this indispensable reality, we will be irreversibly stunted by the limitations of the achievements we pursue. We will chain our potential to the baseness of achievements. When we do, the infinite worth that defines us will be forever overshadowed by the shallowness of achievements, for the greatest achievements will never come close to reflecting our true value. Your value is based on who you are, despite what you do. And that is a critical but glorious shift that we each must make.
Friday Apr 05, 2024
”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Ignoring Our Conscience
Friday Apr 05, 2024
Friday Apr 05, 2024
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:
“Disabling your conscience is like disabling your smoke detector. It doesn’t stop a fire. It just leaves you ignorant of the fact that there is one.”
Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Wednesday Apr 03, 2024
Podcast Short: It’s Time to Listen
Wednesday Apr 03, 2024
Wednesday Apr 03, 2024
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 and the world within us. And as insidiously dangerous as it is, in time this rather indistinct and somewhat dubious mosaic becomes our reality. In essence, it becomes our existence.
It seems that we tend to be busy about a whole lot of nothing. We can meticulously tally the tasks of the day only to be inordinately perplexed that for some reason the sum total doesn’t come anywhere close to reflecting the sum total of everything that we expended in accomplishing those things. So consumed are we in the tasks of ‘nothing’ that we don’t have time to think about ‘something’. Therefore, we have irreparably fallen in love with plug-and-play and pre-fab. We like things pre-packaged, prepared, and predetermined. We’re looking for answers that were already ingested, digested and reflexively regurgitated for our reflexive consumption by whatever source we happen to have happened upon. In essence, we don’t think. And in fact, there are few things as dangerous as that.
We’re going to ingest a whole lot of something. That’s inevitable. And if that ‘something’ shapes us with that much force, we might be wise to ask what that ‘something’ is.
We live in a world roiling with bias and flushed murky with politically-correct agendas. We have splintering splinter groups proffering philosophies of every shape and sort. We’ve got the thematic propagation of ‘diversity’ that’s more about a permission to be permissive. Too often it’s about the ‘spin to win’. It’s less about truth and it’s more about triumph. It’s about the resolute and rather gritty proliferation of the agenda to the degree that truth becomes the agenda and the agenda becomes the truth. Therefore, truth becomes negotiable and pliable in a forced and placating servitude to an onslaught of dubious agendas. However, truth in the service of an agenda becomes opinion. And too often opinion is bias off the leash and running wild.
So, we need to listen for a change. We need to question…aggressively and responsibly. We need to ruthlessly investigate and corroborate. We need to quit being complacent consumers and become invested investigators. We need to use truth as a steeled template, not as a fluffy convenience. We need to bring the sturdy compass of ethics to point out the true north in every decision whether that true north is to our liking or not. We don’t need to be worldly wise, for that’s an oxymoron of the most deceptive kind. Rather, we need to be wise in the ways of God and life. We need to be sufficiently stubborn to reject the pabulum of the masses, yet pliable enough to hear the beating hearts underneath the pabulum. We need to be bold and brazen in a manner stitched tight by wisdom and lent compelling by reason. We need to be beacons of light knowing that the crowd is apt to label us as sorely antiquated and ridiculously ill-informed. We need to listen in the bravest form imaginable.
It would behoove us to remember that to live passively is to live dangerously. To live inquisitively is to live wisely. To live boldly is to live robustly. And to live our lives based on timeless principles is to honor God rather than worship everything else that pretends to be God. May we choose to abandon the former and judiciously embrace all of the latter.
“Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.”
- Ephesians 5:15-16
Sunday Mar 31, 2024
Sunday Mar 31, 2024
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 the chasm of time into the present. The idea of slavery seems to evoke dusty black and white tin-type images of the Civil War, the expansive plantations of the Deep South, bloodied chains, inhuman whippings, lynching’s, and wild-eyed slaves fleeing through swamps, thick underbrush and the wilderness of their own fear.
Those kinds of pictures have become our definition of slavery; the visual that creates a picture of what slavery is. Slavery is seen as a physical captivity that coerces a forced service to an enslaving master. That’s how we view it. That definition is nearly exclusive, making our definition of slavery so incredibly tight that we can’t see any other kind of slavery at all. And if we don’t see slavery of this type, we assume freedom. That assumption in and of itself can be enslaving.
Slavery to Ignorance
Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” Ignorance is being oblivious, to one degree or another, to the obvious. Confucius said that “ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon and star.” Ignorance is walking around in the dark without realizing what ‘dark’ is, and having no understanding of light.
It’s not seeing what actually ‘is,’ to the point that whatever it ‘is’ that ‘is,’ isn’t . . . at all. It’s having no recognition of something that exists despite how very real and very powerful that thing might be. Ignorance is naiveté multiplied to blindness. It seems that living in blindness can be freeing in some cases, and horrifically dangerous in others.
The old adage that “ignorance is bliss” is blissfully ignorant of how much damage we can experience walking in that kind dark darkness. Despite all of that, the worst kind of ignorance is when we’re ignorant that we’re ignorant. It’s one thing to intentionally ignore something and turn a blind eye. It’s quite another thing to be so ignorant that we don’t even know that anything’s there to turn a blind eye to. Ignorance at its fullest is fully convincing. It sells us wholesale on the hypnotically appealing belief that there’s nothing to be ignorant about because there’s nothing out there to be ignorant about. We buy the whole sales job lock, stock and barrel because it’s what we want to believe regardless of whether it’s really believable or not. At that point slavery leaps out of tin-types and right into our worlds.
Ignorance can open the doors to a lot of things and give a whole lot of space for a whole lot of things to exist in our lives. Yet I think that ignorance of our enslavement is one of the worst types of all of the kinds of slavery that we can be shackled to. To be ignorant and to be enslaved at the same time seems to be the absolute worst kind of slavery since we don’t even know that we’re enslaved. We become ignorant to slavery and slaves to ignorance.
What Enslaves Us?
How many things enslave us? We tend to see that things demands things of us, that we struggle with certain behaviors or attitudes, that we have our holes to dig ourselves out of, and our mountains to climb over. We look at our lives and see what we need to change, what should be altered, where we need the proverbial “nip n’ tuck,” a bit of “cut and paste,” or maybe a little bit of Botox for the personality. We likewise see the pieces of ourselves that need to be entirely eliminated in some sort of wholesale, demolition-like fashion.
We see our foibles, the fallacies of false fronts, our warts and things that warrant our attention. We know that we’re not where we should be and that where we should be isn’t anywhere along the road of where we’ve been going. We know at times that our values have been compromised, our integrity has been marred, and that far too often our morality has had the air completely sucked out of it. We realize that we’ve crafted career strategies that have outright killed our marriages, and that we’ve sacrificed families to seize six figure incomes. We know that we haven’t been accountable when we should have been, we haven’t apologized when we should have, and that we’ve never restored even half of what we’ve stolen along the road of our lives. We know.
Ignorance in Action
Yet, we tuck these things in the deep file of ignorance and then we file it away in the filing cabinet of forgetfulness. Once we do that, we make every effort never to pull the file ever again. Yet, nothing is filed and no filing cabinet exists despite the ingeniously creative wealth of our imaginations to believe it to be so. In reality we walk with all of this stuff hanging on with claws embedded in our hearts, and roots thickly entwining our souls. Yet we ignore this. We skip and cavort through life to some sort of fabricated tune whose velvety verses sooth us with lyrics that all is good and our lives are squeaky clean and polished to a mirrored surface.
Or we manipulate ourselves into believing that whatever good that we have is good enough. That life is more about the business of survival which doesn’t afford us the larger luxury of introspection, personal evaluation and the sweaty rigor of change. We don’t see anyone else focusing on all that negative stuff and so we assume that it must not be all that bad or everyone else would be focusing on it . . . wouldn’t they? We find some comfort in the belief that overall we’re good people and at least we try to do the good thing even if we don’t end up doing the good thing.
We create expansive and ornate rationalizations to justify ignorance, and we do a bang up job of creating them. Once we create them we nail them to the walls of our conscience so that we have them for ready reference during the times when guilt handily rankles our souls. We lull ourselves into belief that in the end, all of that stuff really doesn’t matter all that much anyway and that it will sort of eventually fall off behind us and kind of blow off the road of our lives, somehow getting lost somewhere in the wilderness of our journey . . . so we think. Therefore, we settle in ignorance and let ignorance give all of these things space to enslave us.
Our Enslavement
We are a peculiar people indeed. We tend to focus on the tasks that will either achieve our goals or keep our heads above water, whatever our situation might be. We’re notorious for feeding, watering and carefully attending to all the superficial stuff, but we put the real stuff out of sight behind the impermeable veil of ignorance. And we live as slaves to that stuff.
We work to tactfully or not so tactfully counter the real stuff and we futilely attempt to offset it by managing and manipulating the superficial things and focusing on the things that don’t hit us too hard or upset us all too much. Yet all of our efforts to offset all of the things stored deep in catacombs of ignorance are wholly insufficient. We live trying to change things by ignoring them. We attempt to resolve them by countering them with something else that isn’t as difficult or problematic to deal with. Or we justify them with conveniently trite sayings or offbeat philosophies that act like cooling waters on the searing hot coals of our conscience. In all of this maneuvering, we try to cheat ourselves to health and wholeness.
The end result is slavery to those things we’re chosen to ignore. They drive us to futility attempting to compensate for them by ignoring them. They pound and thunder and bend us from behind the veil of ignorance. They dog our steps and flog our minds. They draw us down and drag us out. They impale us as they impact us. In short, we become subject to them whether we wish to acknowledge its happening or not. We become so enslaved by our own foolish and short-sighted vision that we become ignorant to that which enslaves us. When that happens, we become slaves in the most awful manner possible.
Refute and Refuse Ignorance
We refute and refuse ignorance by being honest about our weaknesses and failures. We need to cast off justification and we to torch rationalization. We need to frankly acknowledge and bring to the forefront all of those things in our lives that we’ve chosen to ignore. Once we do that, we work to work through them with diligence and beat them by resolving them. In that way our enslavement can truly end because that which enslaved us is that which we’ve enslaved through its elimination.
Saturday Mar 30, 2024
Saturday Mar 30, 2024
“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 living in awe of what God wrought within us. Rather, I think it’s more about creating something that’s culturally acceptable and that adheres to the contrivances of whatever trend is currently trending in the culture. It’s the creation of a self suitable to the world rather than discovering who we are as both in and above the world.
The question of ‘who we are’ suggests that we’re exercising our intellectual acumen to probe our existence. That exercise itself lends weight to the fact that we have an intellect to exercise and an existence to live it out in. By its very nature the question of ‘who we are’ poses the thesis that we are something other than being nothing, and that ‘something’ has relevance when ‘nothing’ doesn’t. By asking the question we reveal the need that we possess to believe that we exist and that our existence is purposeful. We want to believe that we are supposed to become ‘something’ rather than float around being ‘nothing’ going nowhere in the going. To ask the question is to evidence the fact that we are beings in need of asking the question. And that in and of itself evidences the incredible depth and unparalleled richness of our humanity.
In addition, the question of ‘who we are’ also suggests that a simple answer is simply not suitable. That some cheesy pabulum will not suffice. That the definitions proposed by innumerable philosophers and those who for centuries have probed the inner-workings of life aren’t quite enough. That holding ourselves up against everyone else in order to grasp some sense of who we are by comparing ourselves to who everyone else is simply repeatedly comes up short. That aligning with political hashtags or running off after a litany of causes that have caught the wandering eye of those without a cause don’t answer the question. That even though we’ve gorged ourselves on self-help philosophies and immersed ourselves in the rigors of mindfulness (or any one of the many other popular contrivances) we still don’t have the answer.
And that is not necessarily that all of these things are incorrect or that they don’t speak something of truth into our lives. It’s not that at some level they don’t have some sort of value. It’s that they’re not enough. The cumulative weight of their collected insights falls short. Mankind has asked the question of “Who am I”? for as long has mankind has existed. And yet in the end, we don’t have an answer that explains the whole of who we are. After untold millennia we are still on this search and we are still asking this question.
And if all of this evidences anything at all, it evidences the depth of our depth. It speaks to the innate and persistent complexity of who we are. Stored within the body, mind and soul of each of us there is a vastness that all of the combined explorations of mankind have yet to fathom, much less understand. And can we not correlate this complexity and depth with our value? Everything in existence has value for the place that it holds in relationship to everything else in existence. But we stand apart in complexity, intellect, reasoning and ability. We have been equipped for and tasked with the responsibility to care for everything else and nothing else has been assigned that role…except us. Indeed, does this not evidence our value?
How Do We Not Know?
The ever-baffling fact regarding the question of ‘who we are’ is that we live with ‘us’ every single solitary day of our existence. Yet, even though we live with ‘us’ with a transparent intimacy that no one else in all of existence ever will, we still don’t know ‘us.’ How could that be? How could we wake up every day and go to bed every night with this person that we are and still not know who we are? How is it that we walk through the myriad array of dynamics and demands of life and living, and somehow not see ourselves in the act of dealing with those things? How have we lived with ourselves yet missed ourselves in the living? Yes, as we have stated, we are phenomenally complex. However, is there something else?
We Don’t Want to See
One answer is that we don’t want to see. We don’t want to see because we fear that if we actually look at who we are, we might not like who or what we see. It may confirm our deepest fears about who we are. It may affirm the presence of something we desperately hoped wasn’t there, or it may confirm the absence of something that we hoped was. It may convince us that we really don’t have the capacity to achieve the dreams that we want to achieve. It may corroborate all of the negative things that people have said we are, when we’ve spent our lives fighting against believing that that’s who we are. We may choose ‘ignorance’ as opposed to ‘knowing’ so that we can continue wearing the weathered façade that we’ve found comforting, in whatever way it might comfort us.
Or, looking at ourselves might actually confirm that we are better than what we thought ourselves to be, which will result in some sort of accountability that we don’t want to be accountable for. It may highlight rather formidable parts of ourselves that we haven’t cultivated, or personal resources that we’ve wasted in the wasting. It may reveal potential that has languished in the pit of ignorance, or giftings that have been left to rot in the sewers of apathy. It may call us up to places that we don’t believe we can go, leaving us greatly vexed by the contradiction of it all. So, we don’t want to see because seeing is just too painful, or too demanding, or too burdensome, or it comes weighted with too much guilt.
Becoming What They Want
Or, we’ve spent our energies not coming to understand who we are, but vesting those precious energies in becoming whoever it is that everyone says we should become. There are demanding social pressures to adhere to. Heavy-handed societal expectations that press us for compliance. There are those who are committed to whatever politically-correct agenda they’re committed to who are easily aroused and readily enflamed to rage should we refuse alignment with their agendas. There are the voguish trends that demand adherence lest we be labeled as outdated or just plain ignorant. There are the expectations of parents that rest heavy upon us, and the voices of well-meaning mentors that too often called us to some vision of who they thought we were. Therefore, we don’t have time to see ourselves because we’re spending our time trying to become another ‘self.’
Pressured to conformity by these elements, we develop this sectarian view of what we should be. We’ve collected this societal and relational collage that appears to be a perpetually changing montage of what we’re supposed to be. Somehow this becomes the standard template in place of ourselves being that standard. Over time, we are lulled into believing that the pursuit of this template is the truest pursuit of self, when it is nothing of the kind. And we become what we are not.
Being What Circumstances Made Us
It’s possible that we might have determined that it’s not who we are, but who circumstances made us to be. Abuse as a child. Bullying at the hands of thoughtless people bent on propping up their own fragile insecurities at our expense. Jobs lost in acquisitions that sacrificed employees on the cold altar of budget and profit. Marriages that collapsed at the hands of spouses who decided that the trade-off for personal agendas as held against the life of a marriage and a family was legitimate. Enemies that we mistook for friends who slowly circled around behind us and stabbed us in one of the many ways that people stab others. For us, these answer the question, “Who am I?”
The wounds, the disappointments, the betrayals, and the losses both large and small have defined us. In addition, the process of healing from the wounds inflicted, as well as angst involved in waiting for the ones that are yet to happen further define who we are. The embracing of an existence defined by what happened to us, further shaped by what we fear will happen becomes the sum total of who we are. Our lives become a tragically circular story of being wounded and then healing only to be wounded yet again. The difficult issue in being defined by our circumstances is that to understand how all of that has defined us means that we have to think about how all of that has defined us. And in our mind, the pain of doing that far, far offsets any potential self-discoveries. So we don’t think about them (or at least we try not to).
There’s Nothing to Discover
Or, we don’t feel that there’s any identity to discover. That somehow we are the embodiment of a bunch of ‘nothing’ that will only add up to nothing. That because there’s nothing there, the need for some sort of pursuit becomes unnecessary and embarrassingly ridiculous. We are what we already know, despite how little that might be. Somehow we ended up at the shallow end of the gene pool, or we showed up late when things were being handed out. We got to rummage through the left-overs or we were looked over. There was no motivation to develop anything along the way, or the opportunities to do so simply never came our way. Therefore, we don’t know who we are because we’re pretty much nothing and we already know that.
From nothing you can only get nothing. So we become embedded in a sense of hopelessness regarding both the present that we live in and the future that we have come to dread. The journey of self doesn’t exist because there’s nothing to journey from, and nothing to journey to. There’s a settling of sorts, where we fall into a sedentary malaise. And in this place where everything is nothing, our soul slowly stops breathing.
Other Reasons
Or could it be something entirely different? Could it be that we are vast beyond comprehension? That we’ve mistaken this journey of ‘who am I’ for a destination that gives us a clear and solid answer verses seeing it as a journey where the answer is always fleshing itself out with ever-great clarity as we go along? That we are someone who is perpetually in the process of becoming more of whoever that someone is? That we are not meant to be something that’s stagnant in time and space, but we are something that is always evolving in a manner that we are constantly advancing into time and growing in space? And to understand that is to begin to build a sense of self that will effectively begin to disassemble our negative sense of self.
All of this implies that we are, in fact, created vast beyond comprehension. And this personal vastness is so vast that it gifts us with resources that are beyond the years that we have to live out those resources. We are bigger than our own lifespan. Therefore, ‘who we are’ is based on ‘who we are in the becoming of who we are.’ Who we are is not defined by some sedentary event such as an alliance, or someone’s expectations of us, or the events that have befallen us. And unless we understand that, we will have missed the process of becoming who we are by looking for an answer in all the other things that can’t answer the question.
The Size of ‘Who I Am’
We have been gifted with a depth that will invite exploration and make space for such exploration for the entirety of our lives. We will never discover something about ourselves that will be that distinctly final discovery that concludes the journey. New vistas, fresh insights, and breathtakingly vast levels of awareness always await. We are entirely fluid, having each thing we learn expand upon everything that we learned before it, and subsequently enhancing everything that we’ve yet to learn. We grow geometrically, moving out in every direction at every moment in a continual cascade of growth. The end of who we are exists only as a figment of our sorely limited imaginations and is an outcome of the fear that maybe we are more than we’ve allowed ourselves to be.
What we do know is that we are the sum total of what we know about ourselves, plus the infinitely larger part that we don’t know. There will never be the final question. That every answer to every question is an invitation to the next question and the next one after that. We are people made of horizons and for horizons, and if perchance we live within walls, it is we who have created them. The question of “Who am I?” is not one question answered by one answer. It is a robust collection of questions that slowly but deliberately reveal the tantalizing picture of who we are. It is an adventure of the greatest sort. The hunt for treasure that captivates all of our imaginations. It is discovering the genius of God as that genius was manifest within us without any hesitation of any kind. Hence the question, “Who am I?”
This search itself blatantly evidences the fact that we are bigger than ourselves, for if we knew everything about ourselves a search would be unnecessary and the questions unprovoked. There is more to us than we know, and even though we live in union with ourselves every day we remain a mystery to ourselves. Despite our low self-esteem and incessant deprecation, the question of who we are evidences that there is more to us than we realize. And if we walk this search for self out, at some inherently deep level we know that ‘who we are’ is so vast that we will spend the entirety of our lives in search of it, yet we will never know all of it. And if the whole of us is beyond the whole of a lifetime to discover, how indescribably grand must we be? And maybe this is what should shape our self-esteem. This is how we should view ourselves. This is what fires our imagination and fuels our journey.
Seeking the Answer Verses Searching for Peace
The question then begs the search, which can be unsettling for many. The penetrating angst and unrelenting curiosity generated by the question of ‘who we are’ is the impetus that sends us searching for some sense of peace about who we are. This peace is not necessarily obtained by having some answer to the question of who we are. To our own demise, the frenzied search to calm our souls in this grand search often sends us into the ‘plug-and-play’ of a culture ready to give us the once-over and then plug us into whatever the once-over has determined us to be. It becomes something of a search for the defining box that our careers hand us, or the identifying label that our social circles have crafted for us, or the place that our socio-economic defines as ours, or the role that our family or friends have etched out for us.
There’s a myriad army of people and philosophies and social structures ready to dress-us-up and deck-us-out in the borrowed garments woven of their biases and stitched tight by their sordid agendas. Should it have its way, the world would abscond with us, embezzling our resources in the service of its agendas. And while all of these might give us an identity, that identity is borrowed or imposed or both. Suffice it to say, an identity either borrowed or imposed is a costume parading itself around as something it is not. At best, it may grant us a fragile and fraudulent peace that we gladly mistake for the real thing.
However, it lacks sustenance and stability. Typically, it’s constructed to fit a space suited for those who created it, rather than knock down the walls that have constricted us. It’s what fits them, but what enslaves us. Therefore, we have to repeatedly adjust it as we might, tear it down when we tire of it, build it back up when we’re scolded for tearing it down, and repeat the worn out narrative of why this is us and why it works…when it’s not and it doesn’t. Subsequently, the question goes unanswered because we don’t have the time to ask it.
Because it doesn’t work, our low self-esteem sits on forlorn hands and tells itself that the search is impossibly complex and that we would wise to relegate ourselves to some static existence of some sort. We are either nothing, or we are something that we are not, or we are all things bad built upon all things bad. We end up in one of these places because we’ve come at this defining question from every possible angle except the right one.
Within Not Without
As patently simplistic as it sounds, we are defined by who we are. We need not reach out to everything around us in order to define that which is within us. If we reach out to something or someone outside of us in this search for self, whatever or whoever we reach out to needs to walk us back inside of us because that’s where we are. It’s about being intelligently introspective in a manner that is intentional, thoughtful and relentless. It is about peeling away the sticky layers of culturally imposed norms, digging through the impregnable strata of our histories, breaking out of all of the superimposed roles, and rigorously erasing all of the rogue messages that others have penned across the tablet of our souls. And in the upheaval of a process that grand, it’s then formulating the right questions hoping that we’re actually daring enough to ask them.
In this rigorous process, it’s not about evaluating what we see as held against some clandestine societal rubric or chafing personal bias. Rather, it’s more about accepting what we see and asking how it can be shaped, honed, cultivated and nurtured. It’s about believing that we were created with all the essential elements to become the essential person that we were intentionally and rather ingeniously designed to be. It’s about understanding that there is a specific role out there somewhere that’s waiting for us to show up and that it’s probably sitting a whole lot closer to us than we think it is. And the best way that we can show up for that role is to come as we are and not as the world says we should come. It’s presenting ourselves before the God that created us, stepping into the life He set in front of us, and believing that it will unfold if we just show up for everything to unfold.
This is not about giving ourselves permission to spin off on some ill-defined quest of self-indulgence, for our true selves won’t find themselves shaped for that kind of agenda. This is not about permission to become absorbed in a self-satiating endeavor where we suddenly realize that life is ours for the taking when we’ve spent our lives having life take from us. Rather, it’s respecting our authenticity as being something that adds to life rather than adds to self. It’s about realizing that our true self will never detract from the true selves of those around us nor will it ever impinge upon them. And if perchance it does, it wasn’t ‘us’ to begin with.
You are uniquely designed with everything you need to be everything that you are. And that design is sufficient to be able to do everything that you were designed to do. It is big enough to exceed your lifetime. You may not see it, but as have noted, seeing something does not evidence its existence or lack thereof. It’s coming against the lies that have been spun about us, the identities that have been forced upon us, and breaking the box that other more fearful people have crafted for us. Despite the nature of your self-esteem and the darkness that it has layered ‘round about you, may the quest to discover all of this be relentless in it’s scope, potent in it’s process, and blessed throughout.
Friday Mar 29, 2024
”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Forgetting What Love Is
Friday Mar 29, 2024
Friday Mar 29, 2024
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 surviving those expressions.”
Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Wednesday Mar 27, 2024
Podcast Short: Better or Worse?
Wednesday Mar 27, 2024
Wednesday Mar 27, 2024
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 choice that we are about to make will, in fact, make us better. They will look at us square in the face and say that without a doubt, this decision will improve our lives. And these people can put forth all kinds of reasons as to why it’s absolutely certain to do that. But do we see that kind of growth in their lives, or do we just hear that in their words? Are we hearing real life principles and sound values and a truly refined wisdom, or are we listening to flimsy agendas and self-proclaimed platforms and substance-less statements dressed in the finery of something that they are not? Will these choices make us better or worse?
Second, the question of whether a choice is going to make things better or worse can also be clouded by whatever is vogue or trending. We want to be in step with the culture around us so as to not look the fool, or the ill-informed, or worse yet, the rebel. And it is assumed that if we are in step with the culture, and if we align these choices with whatever is currently trending, these choices are certain to make us better. They will improve our lives. And while the likelihood is that any improvement will be superficial and fleeting at best, they will only serve us until that which is vogue is no longer vogue, and that which is trendy is now outdated and a burden to whatever has now been proclaimed as new and cutting-edge. The question then remains…will these choices make us better or worse?
Thirdly, the question of whether a choice will make us better or worse is also clouded by our own greed and short-sightedness. We ask ourselves questions of what a decision will get us, and not so much if the decision is right regardless of what it gets us. We ask if our choices will position us nicely in whatever way that we want to be positioned, rather than asking how the decision positions us relative to sound principles and a set of morals to which we too often turn a blind eye. We ask how it will make us look to those around us whom we wish to impress, rather than ask how it will make us look once time has peeled away everything that is false and less than admirable, all of which will eventually reveal the true nature of our choices. And the question remains…will these choices make us better or worse?
Will the choices in front of us make us better or worse? Will they improve our lives, or diminish our lives? That depends on who and what is informing those decisions. Is it people with questionable agendas, or is it a culture trending on a rogue wave of self-gratification, or is it our own lack of thoughtfulness and integrity? Whatever it might be, we might ask who and/or what is informing our decisions? And how much are they clouding that decision to the point that we will be set up to pay a potentially unimaginable price in making it…for we have all paid such prices before and we would be the fool to pay them again. For the wrong information, and the wrong motives, and the wrong value system will leave you on the wrong side of every choice, and choices that leave you on the wrong side never make your life better.
Will the choices in front of us make us better or worse? And if Godly principles and Biblical values are not providing the guiding function for those choices, we are doomed to live out a life of ‘worse.’
“Listen to advice and accept discipline, and at the end you will be counted among the wise. Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.”
- Proverbs 19:20-21
Saturday Mar 23, 2024
Saturday Mar 23, 2024
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 great things, or to hide from great things. Being driven grants us the ability to fly, but we can use it just as readily to die.
If we are bent under the weight of a low self-esteem, our drivenness is often exercised to our own demise. It’s used to create places to hide, excuses to run, rationalizations to justify the awful person that we are not, and the freedom to embrace beliefs about ourselves that have no basis in reality other than the reality we’ve crafted from the skewed messages of others. On the other hand, we might become driven to prove ourselves as worthy through various accomplishments and achievements. We work, we strive, we reach, and we relentlessly press on to show that we are more than what we’ve come to believe ourselves to be. If we fail in such an endeavor, we’re driven to convince ourselves that we are nothing of the sort so that we don’t ever take on such a preposterous task ever again. Either way, we possess a drivenness even if it isn’t used in our best interest.
Driven to Prove Our Worth
Maybe this whole mentality of drivenness has been a product of our life story; having to do it all ourselves because no one was there to help us. Maybe this left us with the need to prove ourselves and to establish our worth by whatever means we chose to prove that. Often we have the need to display our intellectual prowess, to exercise the muscle of our skill-set, or flaunt our expertise in order to secure our place in some sort of ill-defined and vague pecking order that defines our sense of worth and value. Our identity then becomes entirely defined by all of the things that we do to prove our worth and the efforts that we put forth in doing them.
In some instances this happens because we’ve lived in someone’s shadow and we need to show ourselves as bigger than the shadow that was cast upon us, or at least prove that we’re as big as whosever’s shadow that was. At other times we’re out to prove people wrong, to conclusively show beyond any shadow of a doubt that we’re competent even though people repeatedly said we were entirely incompetent. It can be the product of a deeply ingrained behavioral pattern where we grew up being affirmed when we performed, with such affirmation being clearly withheld when we didn’t. In the end, it’s typically ourselves that we’re really trying to convince simply because the toughest audience that we play to is ‘us.’
Driven to Prove Our Lack of Worth
Or we’ve done the opposite of all of this by being driven to surrender to minimums. We’ve decided to withdraw from it all and just do what we need to do to get to the next day. It’s about being driven to draw away and hide so that others won’t see us for who we are and thereby judge us, or we won’t see them and subsequently judge ourselves by comparison. We’re driven not to be driven so that we avoid failure, or anything might even remotely resemble failure. Or, we’re often driven to surrender before the battle ever shows up so that surrender was a choice and not a pathetic manifestation of our inabilities to fight the battle.
In embracing this mentality, we’re not driven to disprove this sense of worthlessness. Rather, we’re driven to prove it by not disproving it. It’s a battle of a different sort. It’s not a surrendering to any battle that we’ve fought. To the contrary, it’s a surrendering to the need to fight for something that doesn’t exist to be fought for. Surrender then indisputably evidences our worthlessness while simultaneously granting us full license to walk away without guilt or remorse. And while such a package seems marvelously relieving, it is in fact horribly life-killing.
The Failure of Trying to Proving Ourselves
Proving Our Worthlessness
The drivenness to prove ourselves is wildly relentless. But what are we trying to prove and in what way are we trying to prove it? If we wish to prove ourselves as inadequate or inferior, we do so by acting in ways that substantiate those things. Our lives become a reflexive response to the preconceived notion that we are worthless. Therefore, our actions reinforce what we have come to believe ourselves to be.
We can sabotage our own good fortune. We can take opportunity and destroy it, thereby declaring that it was never really opportunity in the first place. We can shrug off compliments, offset every positive with a blistering array of negatives, or endlessly compare ourselves to others by dramatically inflating them to be far more than what they really are so that we look far less than what we really are.
Proving Our Value
Or, we try to work against this despairingly negative sense of self by expending all of our energies to prove it wrong. Our lives devolve into these incessant tasks that never achieve their stated goal, leaving us convinced that despite our best efforts we are not worthy of our best efforts. Fundamentally, at the core of the desire to prove ourselves through achievement there lies two fundamental needs. First is the need for identity. And second, is the need for worth and value. If the basis of our identity and our sense of worth and value is rooted in achievement, (which is the stuff that we do), then we’ve always got to be doing. We’ve got no alternative except to always be on the run, always planning the next thing, always tediously mapping out the next endeavor to insure that it’s better than the last one, and always taking everything that we lay our hands on to the next level to the point that we eventually end up putting the next level entirely out of reach anyway.
Part of the perpetual frustration lays in the fact that the point at which we hope to gain this cherished sense of accomplishment to build ourselves or diminish ourselves is ill-defined. We have some vague and often wandering sense of it, or we’ve determined a general proximity of sorts. If it has sufficient clarity, we can be fairly certain that we’ve arrived. However, we’re often doomed to realize that what we wanted this to do for us upon our arrival did not happen. Therefore, there’s a sense that we failed on our way here, thereby robbing our arrival of what we hoped to gain from it. If our sense of it was unclear, we typically determine that we really have not arrived or we’ve arrived at the wrong place. Whether we are driven to prove ourselves worthy or unworthy, either way failure is certain.
Who or What’s Driving Us?
William Frederick Book wrote that “A man must drive his energy, not be driven by it.” We know that we expend energy, and typically we expend a lot of it. But we rarely question if we’re driving our energy or if our energy is driving us. Who’s in control here? We pound and we push and we perseverate and we plod along and when we get pummeled we pick ourselves up and press on. The relentless nature of it all rarely if ever gives us the time or the resolve to pull back, pause and ask who or what’s controlling the energy that we’re expending? And if we were to define success either in proving our worth or showing ourselves as worthless, defining what we’re doing and why we’re doing it would be a vitally important part of that process.
It would be reasonable to say that if we’re not controlling the expenditure of our energy, if we’re simply responding or reacting or being driven by something that we can’t in reality achieve through whatever our efforts are, then the energy spent is wasted. The deceptive nature of it all is that just because we’re expending energy we assume that something’s being accomplished. The fact that we’re doing so much could only result in some sort of goal attainment. Something good and successful (in whatever way we’ve defined success) must be coming out of this simply because the energy we’re putting out has to be resulting in something . . . doesn’t it?
Productivity as Value
Productivity is often defined by expenditure, even though the two may not correlate at all. We’re busy about being busy, and somehow being busy suggests purpose. We’re pounding out this thing that we call life, as if the pounding has a purpose other than the pounding. We’re fighting the battles, climbing the mountains, forging though whatever wilderness we think we’re in, and charting out journeys of glorious adventure. We’re pressing through the obligations of the day and the challenges of the week. Or, we’re working hard to believe that we’re not worth believing in so that we can finally lay ourselves to rest because we have no value to lay our lives upon. Either way, we’re busy and we believe that our busyness evidences our value.
Our value however, is not believed to be a constant. Therefore, to maintain our value we have to remain busy. Yet beyond that, there is some glitch in the human psyche that says that to have consistent value, we have to be consistently busier. That what worked today, will be inadequate tomorrow. That what was sufficient this week, will be woefully insufficient next week. That proving one’s worth through busyness requires a perpetual escalation of busyness to the point that there are simply not enough hours in a single day, or a collection of days to be that busy. We will fail. But we will view ourselves as the failure rather than understanding the sheer impossibility of the dynamic.
The Privilege of a Place
However, the things that we do, despite the positive or negative nature of them, illustrate the fact that life has crafted a place for us and therefore we have a purpose. Life has deemed us of sufficient value to carve out a spot that is uniquely ours. We have the privilege of having been gifted with this life and having been handed the authority to live it in out in whatever way we choose to live it out. In fact, we have been tasked with living it in a way that is entirely unique to us. We have been granted a privilege unlike anyone we will ever meet.
We might be using that privilege negatively. We might be using it to our own demise. We might be turning it against ourselves. But we have the privilege of having a place that is uniquely ours, regardless of what we choose to do with it. And because we have all of these things that life has granted us and subsequently called us to do, we obviously must have value. We have been granted the privilege of both life and choice because we have sufficient value to have been granted those privileges in the first place. We might misuse them, but we have them to misuse. And that means that we were good enough to be granted them in the first place.
What Drives Us Drives Our Energy
It’s the fact that we’ve been called. We have a purpose that is uniquely ours. We’ve been granted a niche. We have a place at the table. We have a place that has been specifically reserved in this eons long thing that we call life. Yes, deep down we want to be successful. As we have said, the reality that we have been granted this place is life evidences the fact that we are of sufficient worth to be there regardless of success or lack thereof.
However, having been granted this place does not appear sufficient for us to feel that we have real worth and substantive value. Our low self-esteem lulls us into believing that we don’t actually belong here…at all. It speaks to us in tones either loud and deafening or quiet and bedeviling that this is not our place. Therefore, we have to prove that we are worthy to be here. We have to show that this calling or these privileges weren’t a fluke, or something that we fabricated out of our desperation to feel that we have value. We have to make this real. We can’t simply bow in grateful appreciation for what life has bestowed upon us. Rather, we have to prove that we are worth the bestowing.
Because we have embraced this line of thinking, our energies are expended on our attempts at achieving something in order to prove our worth in the place that we’ve been granted. We’ve got to achieve, for if we don’t maybe we weren’t good enough for this place in the first place. We’ve got to earn our place. But while we’re expending energy holding our place through the earning of that place, we have to earn our way to the next place at the very same time. We have this sense that the place we’re at has limited value. That in the ever-incessant flow of life, wherever we’re at has a really short shelf-life. We know that soon it will become the place that we should have left in pursuit of the place that we should be going. The accolades of today’s achievement can quickly become the murmuring of tomorrow’s questions as people begin to wonder why we’re still sitting in yesterday.
Therefore, we fight to stay where we’re at while simultaneously fighting to move into tomorrow. We desperately want to solidify our current position, but not so much that we inadvertently lock ourselves into it. We must lay rigorous claim to the moment in order to preserve it as the step to the next moment, for if the former fails that latter will never exist to be given a chance to fail.
It Doesn’t Work – Wasted Energy
With that all said, whether we actually achieve what we’re out to achieve or not (whether that be good or bad), in reality it neither defines us nor establishes our worth. Whether we rise to some position of prominence, or achieve some step, or have a litany of letters stacked up behind our name, or cross some ill-defined finish line; none of these have any bearing on our worth or value. Our energies have all been about the achievement of whatever goals we’ve set for ourselves as a means of evidencing the fact that we are worth a place at the table. And while all of the trappings of doing all of this stuff appears to build us up, the trappings are in fact the very trap that will leave us living out our lives surrounded by successes, but engulfed in the forever question of “Am I good enough?”
The need to achieve these goals controls our energy, not us. We have this terribly rampant fear of not knowing who we are and subsequently having absolutely no grounding at all to effectively engage life as it roars at us, spins around us, and challenges us to do something with it and about it. Or, we have this terribly desperate feeling that our worthlessness has become completely exposed due to the fact that we stand here with nothing to hold up to show that we have value, and that based on our inability to evidence our value we have no inherent right to the place we’ve been granted. Therefore, we stand shamed before the whole world. Or, we do the opposite and we sabotage our situation to prove that we don’t belong here rather than working to prove that we do (which isn’t any more helpful).
And then we start asking ourselves a host of terrifying questions. What if none of this works? What if we don’t measure up? What if we fail life? What if we look the part but are nothing of the part? What if it was all energy spent and wasted in the spending? What if we were the fool and we just postponed the reveal? Living with ourselves in a manner such as this is dying dressed in the façade of living.
Easing the Panic
And so we default to achievement to rectify it all and get rid of the questions. If we achieve, it all goes away. If we achieve we can hold up the mirror of whatever we’ve achieved, point to it and say, “See, that’s me, that’s who I am, and therefore I do belong in the place life afforded me.” We can grab that mirror and gaze into it every time our self-esteem wanes or teeters on some precarious edge. We can carry it around with us and peer into it when this perpetually flagging sense of self starts to flag. We can do this until the mirror doesn’t work anymore and we begin to fall into the trap of believing that maybe we don’t belong here.
Achievement says we have value because we can point to the validation of the achievement; that we took nothing and made something from it which says that we do have a place and a purpose. That we stood in the face of both searing criticism and daunting obstacles, and in the standing we bested them both. That we overcame. We won.
And in reality, these things neither define who we are or substantiate our value. Our energies are horribly misdirected and tragically wasted because those precious energies are entirely controlled and completely disseminated by these convincing illusions that are destined to fade and die. We can’t prove our worth and value through achievement of any sort. And until we recognize this, we will live our lives very much ‘out-of-sorts.’
However, rather than understanding that these never work despite the best of our energies, we fall into the trap and we assume that ‘we’ didn’t make them work. We presume that we just weren’t good enough. We determined that we didn’t have the wherewithal and that we lacked enough of everything that was need to become something. It just wasn’t in us. Subsequently, we mentally and emotionally bury ourselves in a place that we never should have been in in the first place.
Our Value as Internal, Not External
Despite the screaming message of the culture and the declarations of those on lesser ventures, our value rests in who we are, not in what we do with who we are. Without a doubt, what we do with who we are has value, but it does not grant us value because that value already existed prior to any achievement. Our existence alone is the greatest statement of our worth and the clearest evidence as to our value. What we do with that existence is up to us. But the sheer reality of that existence evidences value. The fact I am writing this and you are reading this attests to the fact that we both have immense value because we both exist to do both of those things.
Have you considered the fact that without who we are, what we do would not exist? Every victory, every achievement, every accomplishment hinges on the fact that we were there to do it. Therefore, what we do is entirely dependent upon our existence. All that we do emerges from everything that we are; our gifts, our talents, our abilities, our qualities, our characteristics, our attributes and so on. What we do is simply a manifestation of all of those things expressing themselves in whatever we’ve put our mind to expressing them.
Deserving Our Place at the Table
That is why we were granted the place of privilege that we were granted. That is why we have a seat at the table. What we do is simply a manifestation of who we are working itself out in who and what God already knows us to be. We would be much better served to use our energies to bring growth and maturation to who we are, not to squander those energies in our attempts to prove who we are or establish who we are not. This is not to say that achievement is bad. In reality, achievement is very good and we are privileged to do it. Rather, it’s to say that achievement for the wrong reasons or misplaced motivations is damaging.
We don’t have to prove that we are worthy of the places that life has granted us. Yes, we need to be thankful for them. We need to cherish them. We need to hold them in high regard and never minimize them. But we’ve been given them because we’ve been deemed equipped for them. There’s nothing to prove. What’s the sense in attempting to prove what’s already been proven? There’s just the work that we’ve been blessed to do and the positions we’ve been blessed to have. And those are not granted to us to prove anything to anybody. Rather they are given to us to bless and maximize everything.
Mentally that’s a tough shift to make. It’s a reversal of epic proportions and the fact that it is evidences the depth of the lie that we’ve been living. Each of us needs to embrace the fact that our value is in who we are. And we need to widen that thought by understanding that this value that we carry within us exceeds our greatest estimation of it. It will readily eclipse anything that we do. That value is already there within us, even if we don’t see the far-reaching nature of it. Seeing something is not necessary to evidence its existence. It rests in exercising the faith that to be human is to possess potential. To be a child of God is to possess the infinite. And to possess infinite potential means that there’s a grand mission for the manifestation of it. Therefore we don’t need to create something or prove that potential. We only need to rest in it and let everything flow from it.”
Friday Mar 22, 2024
”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Running Away
Friday Mar 22, 2024
Friday Mar 22, 2024
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 driving the truck will distance us from what’s laying in the bed.”
Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Wednesday Mar 20, 2024
Podcast Short: Who Are You Giving Yourself Away To?
Wednesday Mar 20, 2024
Wednesday Mar 20, 2024
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 no longer engage this rare, but incredibly precious thing that we call common sense? What podium have you obediently sat in front of that has led you to believe that you cannot think for yourself, or maybe that you can, but that you don’t need to? Who has told you that facts are irrelevant, and that the truth is simply an irritating obstacle to be quickly discarded if they don’t neatly fit on the preferred end of some ever-changing political spectrum? Who are you giving yourself away to?
We would likely say that we have not given ourselves to anyone. That none of these things are happening, and if perchance they are, we have successfully and rather astutely avoided them. We would say that we are not so gullible nor so pathetically naïve as to fall for such trickery. But are we? Have we? Really?
How often are we deceived into believing that some shining leader has been intimately touched by the cry of our hearts, and has been so moved by those cries as to lay aside everything near and dear to them in order to respond to those cries, despite the cost to them to do so? How many times have we been fooled into believing that some cause been raised up because the collective voice of the people has been blatantly ignored by all of the other causes that purported to serve those people and heed those voices? How many times have we been beguiled by the rhetoric of power-mongers’ who are quick to prey upon the disadvantaged in the culture in order to build small camps that are then set to war against each other, for the way to control is to divide. Who are you giving yourself away to?
Are these ideals and causes and beliefs and values ours? Really? Or were they made to appear that way? Have we been bamboozled? Have we fallen for the old snake-oil sales pitch? Have we drunken the Kool-Aid not by the glass, but by the gallon? Have we been sold a bill-of-goods while believing that we have hit the mother-load? Have we been so deceived that we are living out someone else’s convictions that having nothing to do with us? Are we nursing someone’s else’s agenda we our life blood? Are we erecting podiums built for some leader who will soon forget every single person who built it for them before the leader themselves falls away from that very podium? Are we slaves who don’t recognize the fact that we have sold ourselves over to slavery? The question remains…who have we given ourselves away to?
What are you giving yourself away to? Into whose web have you fallen? For you were not created for the convictions, or the agendas, or the podiums driven by someone else’s self-serving purposes or self-glorifying agendas. You were created for greater things. Life-altering things. Things that make history as much as it changes it. You were made for much greater things than the slavery of deceit. So don’t squander your life falling for someone’s slight-of-hand, or slippery spins, or buttery smooth verbiage.
Rather, discover what God placed you here to do and refuse to do nothing less than that. Be who God created you to be and not what someone else wants you to be, for to be ‘you’ is to be the greatest person that you possibly can be. Do not give yourself away to those who are certain to throw you away. Rather, give yourself over to be the person God infused you with the life and the power and the authority and the wisdom and the privilege to be. Be you, for your greatest life lies in doing that.
“Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
Psalm 139:16
Sunday Mar 17, 2024
Sunday Mar 17, 2024
Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Two
Forgiveness often seems to be one of those things that’s a genuinely nice idea, but not really a life liberating reality. Life is full of nice ideas; those trite sayings, gentle stories and brave concepts that would make life a whole lot better if they were really real. Nice ideas often seem to be spun of the threads of idealism and the fabric of fanciful thinking. The reality is that they don’t really seem to work in the real world. Sometimes the very things that we wish were true simply dissolve and disintegrate when the reality of life hits them. Forgiveness seems to be one of those things.
Sometimes the greatest, most profound truths seem to be the very things that are completely removed from the reality of the lives that we live. In reality, it’s not that they don’t fit or are idealistic or naïve or far-fetched. Most often it’s simply the fact that we don’t know how to incorporate them. Sometimes the greatest truths are so big and so encompassing that we can’t figure out how to figure them in. And because we can’t somehow make them fit, we assume them to be irrelevant, weak, inadequate or just plain stupid. Such often seems the fate of forgiveness.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines forgiveness as “to grant free pardon and to give up all claim on account of an offence or debt.” The American Psychological Association expands the definition of forgiveness “as the process of concluding resentment, indignation or anger as a result of a perceived offense, difference or mistake, and/or ceasing to demand punishment or restitution.” Whatever your definition might be, forgiveness is about letting go in a manner so total that the offense and the restitution are released.
Obstacles to Forgiving
Forgiveness is a releasing which makes it difficult on at least three basic fronts. First, we typically demand restitution be obtained or that justice be meted out for whatever offense we have incurred. There is a deep sense of justice that demands correction of an offense through some sort of action that both compensates us for whatever loss we’re sustained while teaching the offending party that such actions are inappropriate and intolerable. The act of forgiveness works against this feeling, making forgiveness difficult and contrary.
Second, forgiveness creates a perceived sense of vulnerability. If we “grant free pardon,” do we then open ourselves up to have the same offense perpetrated upon us again? Are we giving space and opportunity for the offending party to do to us what they did before? In forgiving, have we relinquished power that we can no longer hold over the person who offended us in order to keep ourselves safe or make them pay?
Third, we see forgiveness as letting someone ‘off the hook.’ It’s a free pass, a mulligan, a turning away where we permit ignorance to erase that which should not be erased. We feel we do an injustice by not handing out justice and instead waving off an offense in a manner that seems both irresponsible and ignorant. Forgiveness is often seen as an easy way to resolve or bypass something that should be dealt with.
What Forgiveness is Not
Forgiveness is not saying that the offense was ‘okay’ or somehow less than what it really was. It’s not watering down the offense or somehow sweeping the whole thing under the proverbial carpet in some sort of passive gesture. Forgiveness has nothing at all to do with avoidance or passivity. There’s nothing placating or escapist about it. It’s not an act of weakness nor is it a means to maneuver around that which we find unsavory or downright scary. It is in reality an act of the utmost strength, the highest form of sacrifice and the deepest manifestation of our humanity.
The truth is, it’s simply saying that to hold the offense against the person is simply too toxic for the one holding it. We will be offended and we will take hits that are deep, searing and violently cutting. When that happens, we must have an alternative to holding them. There must be a release of some sort. Holding the offense stymies the one holding it, therefore not allowing the offended party to move on. Forgiveness makes nothing ‘okay.’ It’s not about that. It’s about creating freedom and release in manner that nothing else affords us.
Neither is forgiveness a means of giving the offending individual permission to reoffend. Forgiveness comes with the understanding of the nature of the offense, as well as the establishment of boundaries to keep the offense from happening again. Forgiveness is not permissive or passive. It’s not about being an inflatable punching clown that pops up for the sole purpose of taking another hit in an endless series of hits. It is an intentional act of release, not an act of permission.
What Forgiveness Is
The old saying is quite true . . . forgiveness is more for the one who forgives than for him who is being forgiven. In forgiveness, we choose to let go of the emotional toxicity that harboring anger over an offense breeds. We are not granting permission to the offense or minimizing it. Forgiveness is an act of personal liberation where we are setting ourselves free from whatever was done to us. It is not an action that invalidates the offense. Rather, it is an action that leaves the consequences of the action between a just God and the offending party while freeing us up to move on with our lives. Forgiveness is a choice to leave the past with those who created it so that we can move on to a future yet to be created. It has nothing to do with weakness and it has everything to do with strength.
The Hardest Person to Forgive
In all of this forgiveness stuff, the absolutely hardest person to forgive is most often ourselves. There’s some sort of blockage when we are the one in need of our own forgiveness. There’s something doubly binding when we are both the offending party and the one extending forgiveness all wrapped in one. The duality of all of that puts us in two roles at the same time, making forgiveness doubly difficult.
Despite the inherent difficulty, it’s right here that the greatest grace (unmerited favor) needs to be extended in that we embrace both authentic remorse for offenses we’ve incurred while extending ourselves the full release of forgiveness. Something about this dichotomy is terribly difficult, holding many hostage to mistakes far in the past that dim or even rob the hope of the future. Forgiveness is inherently powerful enough to extend itself wholly and completely to us even when we are the ones in need of forgiving ourselves.
Freeing Ourselves
What are you holding onto and why are you doing it? If you look closely enough you’re likely to see that the rationale for withholding forgiveness is far outweighed by the liberating release inherent in forgiving. Take stock of what you’re holding onto and consider the worth of holding it verses the freedom found in releasing it.
Friday Mar 15, 2024
”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Fear or Faith
Friday Mar 15, 2024
Friday Mar 15, 2024
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 resources I possess can handle what stands in front of me. If I stop at the former, I will change nothing. If I embrace the latter, I can change everything.”
Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Wednesday Mar 13, 2024
Podcast Short: Where Did All The Time Go?
Wednesday Mar 13, 2024
Wednesday Mar 13, 2024
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 of it. We get this block of time that has a distinct beginning that we’ve already experienced. We’re done with that part of it. But as for the ending, we’re not all that certain when that’s going to show up. All we know is that sooner or later, it’s going to show up. And we can’t buy more time to push that date out. Time’s not renewable so you can’t use it a couple of times over to stretch it out. You can’t manufacture more of it. You can’t store it away so you can go grab a bunch of it when you’re about ready to run out of whatever amount of time you had. Time is what it is. And whether we use it wisely, or foolishly, or selfishly, or sacrificially, it goes by at the exact same speed every single second of every single day.
We can’t mess with time or alter it. We can’t But here’s one major change that we can make. We can ask, what are we doing with the time that we have? Is there anything that we’re doing that’s constructive? At the end of a day, or an hour, or a week or whatever, do we have anything to show for whatever it was that we did with that time? Did we use it as a means to heal from something in the past, or lay a foundation for something in the future? Did we use it to solve a problem, or did we expend it running from a problem? Did we use our time to make amends in a relationship where we had made a mess? Did we use it to chart a course to a goal that will lift our lives to the next level, or did we squander our time charting a goal to not chart a goal? Did someone, somewhere get out of bed this morning better than they got out of bed yesterday morning because we added something to their lives in the course of the twenty-four hours between those two events? Is someone more hopeful about the future because we engaged them in their past? In whatever way today is better for you, or for me, or the world out there, is it better because we used the time to make it better rather than squandering the time making it nothing?
And so we ask, “Where did all the time go?” We ask that all the time, and the older you get the more you’re going to ask it. But remember, it’s not where the time went. It’s what we were doing while it was going. What did you do with it, because you did something with it. But was the “something” of value? Did it heal you, challenge you, move you forward, call you to right a wrong, prompt you to touch a life, lift a soul in distress, give a weary heart some shred of hope, guide a child, mend a relationship, connect with God, or anything else like this. Because these are things that mark time well. These are the things that make our time well-spent. And if we fill our time with these kinds of things, we won’t be asking “Where did all the time go?” because we’ll know where it went.
Tuesday Mar 12, 2024
Tuesday Mar 12, 2024
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 chasing. The whole element of timing seems critical. The more important something is, the greater the issue of timing seems to be. Timing can be so critical that at times we set out to minutely orchestrate the tiniest pieces and parts of whatever we’re doing so that everything is perfectly cinched, tightly in synch and precisely on time.
Falling Apart Just to Fall Apart
Yet sometimes it all falls apart anyway. I mean it disintegrates; something like Murphy’s Law times three or four. Sometimes it’s not just a matter of something being a bit out of step, or not lining up quite right. It’s not about tweaking something or gently nudging it back into whatever place it was supposed to be. Sometimes the wheels fall off the thing, which then causes everything else to fall off as well. We end up with the classic train wreck where we met a downhill train on an uphill grade. More than that however, there’s absolutely no rhyme or reason for the train wreck. It simply didn’t need to be, but it was. It was all way beyond any odds or all statistics. Whatever happened, it was a cruelly extenuated string of stupid, dumb luck.
Sometimes it just all falls apart . . . all of it. We’re left standing dumbfounded, mired in the confusion of it all and running our minds down a thousand roads of the classic “what could have gone wrong?” question. Sure, we’ll likely find some things that weren’t too well thought out or strategies that were a bit ill-conceived. We might unearth some rationales that now, in hindsight, weren’t quite as rational or shrewd as we originally thought them to be. We even might stumble over some misdirected motivations or less than ethical agendas that were part of the whole thing. The way we pasted it all together may have not been entirely seamless, and the stuff that we pasted together in the first place might have been less of a fit than we have originally thought. We may have even chosen to force fit some stuff that in the end really didn’t mesh all too well. Yeah, there are probably some quirks and a few flaws.
Yet, there are times when these quirks and flaws and other dynamics really represent only a small portion of the whole train wreck. We dig and scratch and scrape only to uncover a sparse handful of these dynamics. There are times when the sum total of them is far too small and far too innocuous to really explain why the wheels fell off and the whole thing fell apart. They don’t add up sufficiently to explain the mess that lays scattered, derelict, smoking and broken at our feet.
When Lack of Timing Makes Us Look Bad
George McGovern once said, “You know, sometimes, when they say you're ahead of your time, it's just a polite way of saying you have a real bad sense of timing.” Sometimes we just try to play it all off, or make light of it in order to make it lighter. We missed a step somewhere, or we lost our place in the script, or we missed our cue. We can make it all cute and cut up about it. We can poke fun at ourselves to lighten everything up a bit. We can make polite statements to take the edge off of our stupidity. But when we lose our timing and things go horribly wrong, there may be nothing remotely right that can be said.
No Answers
In the end we’re left with bushels of questions that rot for lack of answers. Things just didn’t line up. There’s no sustaining or compelling rationale other than it didn’t happen when and how it should have happened. If the timing had been good, it all would have all been good. But the timing was not and now everything lays wrecked and ravaged.
Sometimes the losses are marginal. At other times they’re catastrophic. Sometimes we can just pick up our toys, brush them off, head on home and play another day. Sometimes there’s nothing left to pick up other than the charred ash of incinerated dreams and the unidentifiable pieces of years’ worth of hope and sacrificial toil. Sometimes it’s no big deal, and at other times the whole thing is deal-breaker. Sometimes we can pick up and move on, and at other times there’s nothing to pick up and no place to move on to.
Better Questions to Ask
Maybe we should expand our thinking a bit. Maybe we should ask the question “is loss sometimes the best thing that can happen?” That’s a bitter and biting pill to swallow, on top of the fact that it’s a completely unsavory to even entertain in the first place. It suggests however that things in life don’t line up because maybe they’re not supposed to. Maybe what we were doing was in reality a whole lot more wrong than it was right. Maybe it would have been a whole lot more damaging than it would have been constructive. Maybe it would have been the thing that would have robbed us totally blind rather than enriching us beyond measure. Maybe it would have become the monster rather than the malevolent benefactor. Maybe the fact that wheels fell off of it and it derailed was one of the biggest blessings we’ve experienced in a very long time.
Is there room in our thinking to entertain the possibility that failure is sometimes preferred to success? Success does not always deliver a blessing and failure does not always deliver a curse. Life is far too vast to place success and failure into scrupulously neat and tidy categories that we aptly apply in each and every situation. Sometimes the best thing for us is the very thing that we feel is the worst thing. Sometimes in God’s grand scheme, pain and loss are the pavers to something grand and glorious. Sometimes a misstep is a nothing more and nothing less than a change of cadence to right a path right to God.
The Taxing Nature of Our Preconceived Outcomes
At the beginning, when we’ve started to head off into most of our endeavors we don’t have the perspective of what this will look like on the other end. All we see is what we have in front of us, how it all goes together, and then based on that how we guess it will all come out in the wash. We can take a shot at speculating outcomes and be pretty convinced that our conceptualization will indeed be what it will look like on the other side. We can do the math and project the numbers and point to what it should all add up to. We can play with our mental bell-curves and crunch the emotional numbers to calculate an outcome. But sometimes things don’t add up according to our calculations, despite how tedious they might be. Sometimes our best projections because our most haunting nightmares.
We’re typically not open to this kind of thinking because we’re angry about the loss and we’re licking our wounds because we feel gipped. We didn’t land where we projected we would land and we scour the minute fractions and infractions in order to get us to those ill-fated coordinates. We’re not in the mindset to think about the fact that maybe it blew up so that we wouldn’t. There’s no room in our heads to realize that we might have just been saved from ourselves. We’re too recklessly obstinate to realize that if we keep insistently goading the situation in order to achieve our preconceived outcomes there might come a point when we won’t be saved from ourselves anymore. All we tend to focus on is the feeling that we’ve been victimized, ripped off, audaciously cheated, short-changed and short-sheeted. The reality is that sometimes we are. But quite often this is life’s way of putting on the brakes.
Is It Untimely?
Are our circumstances untimely, or very timely? Do our situations appear untimely only because we’re seeing what didn’t happen, but we refuse to see the things that are happening right in the middle of what didn’t happen? Are we so myopic that we can’t see beyond the train wreck to the fact that the wreck stopped the train and that that might have been the very thing that compassionately saved us, or maybe graciously redirected us? To our chagrin, the exact time and place when we think something shouldn’t have happened may very well be the exact time and place when it absolutely should have happened.
Rose Kennedy said that “Life isn't a matter of milestones but of moments.” It’s not about what we achieve, but what we learn on the way to the achievement. We glue our eyes to the goal and we ignore the journey on the way there. And that journey will often involve our world’s falling apart despite heroic efforts to keep them together. Yet, our world’s falling apart have within those events great lessons that we would be well advised to embrace. Moments are not always nice, but they can be rich. So, when your world falls apart in the untimeliness of living, look at the wreckage. You just may have been saved and didn’t even know it. You just may have been mercifully redirected and missed it. Your world falling apart may in actuality be your world being put together.
Friday Mar 08, 2024
I Heard a Robin - Hope in the Dark
Friday Mar 08, 2024
Friday Mar 08, 2024
I Heard a Robin - Hope in the Dark
We all create expectations. But how often are our expectations a wholesale surrendering of ‘what could be’ to ‘what is?’ How often are they borne of a discouraged soul and a frightened heart that cannot see beyond the realities of the moment so as to envision a brighter reality standing at-the-ready in the next moment? How many times have we taken the darkness of today and handily projected it onto the landscape of a tomorrow that is in fact full of light? How many times have we expected that failure will be our lot, disappointment our bedfellow, and that this curse is somehow our due? We create expectations because that’s what we do, so we’d better be very careful as to how we create them.
What Shapes Our Expectations
There are an innumerable array of elements that mold and craft our expectations. However, there are several that seem to directly impact most, if not all of the rest. In and of themselves, these three are certain to kill our vision and utterly convince us that tomorrow will surely embody the darkness of today. Left unchecked to bleed into the other areas of our lives, they can leave us destitute.
First, we have a tendency to focus on the negative experiences that we have had for fear that the positive ones weren’t authentic, or if perchance they were, they’re unlikely to come our way again. Second, we build a faith that’s safe, which means that it’s ‘faith’ in name only and therefore it holds no power. Third, our vision is limited by the walls that we’ve meticulously constructed all around ourselves in order to protect us against imaginary enemies, or at least enemies that are not nearly as gigantic as we’ve given them permission to become. And while it’s obvious that far more goes into the creation of our expectations than these three ingredients alone, these would appear to be inordinately impacting.
Making ‘What Is,’ ‘What Will Be’
Because these appear to be an inherent part of us, we gather up the sum total of our negative experiences, we fall victim to them because the lackluster nature of our purported faith can do no other, and we hold them hostage to these incessantly compressing walls of ours. And in this ever-weary concoction of negativity, faithless faith and massive walls, everything coalesces to shape a distorted observation of ‘what is,’ which then goes on to shape these rather dark expectations of ‘what will be.’
Therefore, our expectations are constricted to what will ‘not’ happen verses being exuberantly expanded to embrace what actually might. We project the misery of the present onto the landscape of the future and render it such before we even get there to better ascertain what it might actually be. We live with this morbid expectation that nothing will get better, that the future is eternally doomed to be nothing more than the past in redress, and that any hope of something better would be yet another expectation disappointed when we feel far too fragile to bear yet another disappointment of any sort at all.
Hope Deferred
The morning was yet dark as if the darkness was purposefully lingering in spite of a morning that should have long been well on its way. The cold of a winter in retreat somehow remained fiercely undiminished, casting a biting edge across what was supposed to be a warming spring. The snow had secretly begun falling under the cover of a night now lifting, leaving a world elated by spring’s flowers laying helplessly encased in winter’s white. It was as if the coming of spring was a promise disappointed; a hope fallen prey to a winter that spring was supposed to be advancing against. That days tenderly warmed at the edges with hints of green breathing new life into winter’s impossible cold were a hope ripped away.
Sometimes we let circumstances of the moment create our expectations of the future. We altogether lose the vision of being able to see beyond what besets us at the moment. What we see is the ‘what is’ that our minds have interpreted as ‘what will be.’ And we throw the ‘what could be’ of a future yet unwritten into the straitjacket of a ‘what is’ that has all but consumed us. The ‘now’ is projected forward and the future is subsequently cast in its unforgiving mold. We create the shackles that bind us to the present and we fashion the blindfold that keeps us from seeing the future as anything but the present. Our expectations of ‘what will be’ are crafted entirely by ‘what is,’ and yet it is highly likely that neither are correct.
I Heard a Robin
Suddenly and without warning, out of snow and darkness I heard a robin. I heard the harbinger of spring call out into the dead of winter. I heard a single song that raised itself up against the dark and the cold and the anger of a winter being forced into retreat. It sat entirely at odds with everything that made that morning that morning, this bold song of this single bird off in the distant distance. As held against the power of the frigid morning, it seemed to be voice mocked by the morning itself. It seemed a lone prophet of spring that was ridiculed for bringing a such a song into such a morning. But it sang anyway. It sang until the sun rose. It sang the promise of something better that I could not see because I had errantly projected the ‘what is’ of a dark moment onto the ‘what could be’ of a spring already surging in my direction. This single robin was not deterred by the darkness and foreboding cold of my expectations. It sang. And that evening, it bid the cold day farewell by singing into the night of spring well on the way.
Expectations
It took a robin, this single harbinger of spring to remind me that the moment is just that…the moment. On the heels of any day or any event there is a robin singing in the distance. There is the hope of something coming, of the end of the darkness and the cold, of all things always moving on to new things. I cannot allow my expectations of ‘what is’ to create some sort of construed view of a future that in and of itself will not bow to my ‘what is’.
It might be dark. It might be cold. I might not see the horizon. But out on the horizon’s edge there stands a robin. There is something that is raising its song into the darkness and the cold, heralding the truth that something new has long been running in our direction. Such is the story of spring, and better yet, such is the promise of God’s redemptive plan. Something new is coming and the darkness of our expectations cannot stop it. It’s existence is undeniable and its arrival is inevitable. So you might take a moment, step into a darkness that is cowering before the light of a new day, pull your coat tight against a cold that is bowing in sure retreat, raise an ear and listen for a robin.
Tuesday Mar 05, 2024
Podcast Short: What I Would Say to the World
Tuesday Mar 05, 2024
Tuesday Mar 05, 2024
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 chance to even understand what life is, with eyes cast to a hopeless future that seems to become dimmer by the day…what would I say? What would I say? And as I speak to an audience of patients that day-after-day sit crumpled and bent, as I speak to those who tolerate my penmanship and read the words that I stitch together, as I come across the innumerable people wounded and bleeding in whatever way they are wounded and bleeding, what would I say? And maybe, just maybe I would share these thoughts with them. This, I think, is what I would say:
This is what I would say…You’ve spent the whole of your life filling your plate with the scraps that life has thrown your way. And even so, you feel horribly undeserving of these. But please understand that there is a glorious table generously spread with everything that you will ever need. And you might think about the fact that God sits at that very table staring at an empty chair that has your name on it. So, maybe you should step up and RSVP the God who is desperate to see you in that chair.
This is what I would say…You can possess every single bit of every single thing that you see, and yet you will still be insufferably empty. For you cannot be filled by the things created by the world. You can only be filled by the God who created the world. So my hope is that once you’ve gorged yourself to emptiness on the stuff of the world, you would reach out to the God who stands ready to fill you with the stuff of Himself.
This is what I would say…If you don’t believe that you are worthy of being loved, you won’t accept love. And it’s my conviction that the most unbelievable breakthroughs come when we step past our unbelief and act on the very thing that we don’t believe in. So my prayer for you is that you step and accept.
This is what I would say…You are worthy of every single thing that God patiently stands waiting to give you. And if He is waiting for you to allow Him to lavish every bit of who He is upon every bit of who you are, you would be wise to throw away every bit of everything else.
This is what I would say…Don’t think for a moment that God wouldn’t step up and save you from that which is consuming the very essence of your existence, for to save you is the very essence of His existence.
This is what I would say…I am praying failure into your life. And I am not doing that to harm you. Rather, I am doing that to so disgust you with the failed promises of the world that you can do nothing other than turn to the God who has never failed on any promise.
This is what I would say…God says that you are enough. You might look in the mirror with a million voices screaming something very different into the person that you see looking back at you. But voices and mirrors lie when God never does.
This is what I would say…You are not a mistake. Rather, you are a mass of living, breathing potential desperately begging to be unleashed. The only mistake is that you failed to recognize that this God of ours took the time to build into you something so phenomenal that you mistook the inability to see it for its absence.
And that is what I would say. To you. To fracturing marriages. To hurting teens. To those who have lost hope. To desperate patients. To those who graciously read what I write. To the wounded and the bleeding. To a culture dazed and living daily in fear. And even to those who have themselves created that fear. This is what I would say. And it is my hope that in saying these things, I have touched your life in whatever way God might chose to inject these words into your life and your situation. This, yes, this is what I would say.
Monday Mar 04, 2024
LifeTalk’s ”Thought for Life” - Leaving a Legacy
Monday Mar 04, 2024
Monday Mar 04, 2024
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 tend to forget until long after we’ve sent them.”
Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.
Friday Mar 01, 2024
Podcast Short: Digging Holes - Throwing Away Our Shovels
Friday Mar 01, 2024
Friday Mar 01, 2024
“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. We dig a lot of holes and we have all kinds of shovels to dig them with. We dig these holes through the decisions that we make, or the people that we tend to spend our time with, or the activities that we engage in, or the lifestyle choices that we’ve made, or the way that we spend our money, or the belief systems that we adhere to, or the habits that we develop, or the choices that we make to advance our careers, or the people that we marry and the people that we don’t. We dig all kinds of holes with all kinds of shovels.
And maybe what we should do with our lives is stop digging holes. And maybe we should stop all the digging by being thoughtful about what we’re doing. Maybe we should stop the digging by refusing to be reactive. By rejecting greedy impulses and refusing to get caught up in those impulses. By starting to ask who we’re listening to and why. Maybe we need to stop digging holes by asking where our ethics went, or who we’re hanging around with, or what habits we need to seriously consider getting rid of, or what principles we’ve left behind us that maybe we need to put in front of us, or the incessant denial that we live in and all of the rationalizes that we create to justify that denial. Maybe we need to stop all the digging.
So take a moment. Put down all of your shovels. Be brutally honest with yourself and ask yourself these questions, as well as some others that maybe you should be asking yourself. Put down the shovels, stop the digging, and get rid of the holes. Life is a whole lot less stressful when you’re not spending the better part of it trying to figure out how you’re going to get out of the hole that you’re currently in, and what you’re going to do to avoid falling into the next one. Take a moment, get rid of the shovels, and stop the digging.
Monday Feb 26, 2024
Podcast Short: What Is Success and What Is It Not?
Monday Feb 26, 2024
Monday Feb 26, 2024
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?”
Certain things are considered more valuable to achieve, or we grant them more weight, or we give them precedence over other things. There’s this pre-determined hierarchy of sorts that’s established by the culture, or by a certain industry, or a particular profession. There are things that are granted an elevated status by virtue of their longevity, or the difficulty involved in achieving them, or the sacrifices that have to be made in order to accomplish them. There are things that we define as success because few people achieve them, or maybe no one’s achieved them. Whatever the case, there are an array of definitions. But I don’t think that that’s what success is.
I don’t think that the definition of success is about achieving some goal, regardless of who defines it. I think that “success” is primarily defined by what success communicates to us about ourselves. The goal is secondary. It’s not the achievement itself, but the fact that we achieved. Striving for success is frequently an effort driven by our need to convince ourselves that we have worth, or value, or intelligence, or determination, or whatever we need to convince ourselves that we have. It’s about trying to overcome a failed childhood, or erase the messages of less than supportive parents, or wipe out previous failures so that they quit haunting us. Success is less about what we achieved, and more about who we are by having achieved. It grant us something that we’re missing. It fills a hole. It compensates for a deficit that we carry around within us (whether that deficit is real or imagined).
But here’s the key. Three thousand years ago a king said to God, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” We are made in a way that there’s no need to prove ourselves. Our design, our crafting, our gifting, our abilities, even our limitations are exactly what they should be. Everything that we are (all of our weaknesses and all of our strengths) are perfectly choreographed. They combine to create this unique, but potentially powerful balance. There’s an intentionality to us that’s perfectly shaped for the thing that we’ve been put here to do. So, it’s not about proving our worth and value. It’s about acting on it. It’s not about spending our lives proving something that needs no proof. It’s about living it out. You have nothing to prove, but you have a lot of great things you can do. So, believe in yourself and go do great things.
Saturday Feb 24, 2024
Saturday Feb 24, 2024
Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Three
The concept of sacrifice seems more suited to novels or epic movies. It appears more an ideal; a concept that when observed from a safe distance seems wonderfully heroic, deeply inspiring and chivalrous in a way that stirs up something powerful in us that seems to be forever held hostage despite the fact that it gets stirred. Sacrifice, as we watch it displayed from afar, awakens some internal passion that chafes against our souls in its quest to be unleashed within us.
Somehow sacrifice seems to be something that is entirely right, that is likewise entirely lost. There are those things that we believe exist yet are lost to mankind; the things we are ever in search of not because we are caught up in some sort of shallow fascination with them. Rather, there are those things that we know to be authentically real whose absence must be remedied by their discovery. There are those things that we are made for, yet which are entirely absent.
Sacrifice is one of those things. It’s something that we know we are all called to. It’s one of those things that we know is the right thing to do; that it’s part of our humanity and represents something undeniably central. Sacrifice is the totality of our humanity called upward and outward in a grand display of selfless behavior. It declares that we are not made solely for ourselves, but that we are made for others. It captivates our minds and catapults our actions to do things we never dreamt possible. Indeed, it defines the core of our humanity; representing the ultimate action that one human being can take on behalf of another human being. That’s sacrifice.
The Balance of Sacrifice
All of this doesn’t mean that our lives are always about other people. It’s simply about priority and the arrangement of things in our lives. Our culture, and in many cases our world seems bent on maximizing our personal gains in any situation. There appears to be an inherent mentality that the self can be sacrificed, but only to the degree that the self is not actually threatened, or threatened beyond likely recovery. Sacrifice is calculated and made clean. Certainly, we must exercise wisdom when we take actions on the behalf of others, but a clear set of priorities would seem to dictate the manner in which we act with others in mind.
Priorities
It seems that our actions are dictated by our priorities. There appears to be this inherent grid that we run decisions through. That grid seems primarily to hold the welfare of self above everything else. Clearly, that seems to be in keeping with the natural tendencies and behaviors of base human nature.
Yet, there is a sense of some deep sort that runs entirely contrary to human nature; that in putting ourselves first, we must by necessity put others first. There’s some sort of sense of community, of relationship and connection that deems us only a part of a much large whole. And as a part of that larger whole, we are obligated to preserve the whole above the preservation of self. That dichotomy all seems rather strange because it appears to run against our natural inclinations to make certain that we’re okay and that our personal interests are protected.
What’s the End-Game?
We all ask where we want everything to end up. At the end of it all, when our days are over and the fullness of our time, talents and energies are spent what will be left? That’s a terribly big, and in some cases, a terribly frightening question.
If our focus is upon ourselves, then the end results of our lives will be likewise focused on us. The benefits and resources that we will have garnered and spent will serve us and us alone. That might make for a life that we perceived as satisfying and a good ride, but it ends at our end. The service of self terminates at our own death. Therefore we will have left nothing that outlives us, nothing that serves the greater good, nothing for those who remain. It would seem that the end-game is indeed the end-game in a manner tragic and unfortunate.
What about Legacy?
What kind of footprint will each of us leave? Will it be big enough and broad enough that others are enriched by it and find both comfort and inspiration in it? Will it have changed lives, redirected people who were on crash courses to their own destruction, or given someone somewhere some degree of hope in a place where they saw none for themselves? Will our legacy live on, not just for the purpose of living on but for the purpose of giving others purpose? Are we committed to leaving something of value behind that will cost us, but will in turn be of inestimable value to someone else, someplace else? Or are our lives spent in the service of self which means it all begins, and more tragically ends there?
In leaving a legacy, we can’t be so shallow as to leave a legacy of who we were as some sort of monument to self. Monuments are not legacies, they are simply reminders. A legacy is leaving something to others for the sole purpose that it gives them something valuable and needed in their own journey whether we are given the credit for that or not. It’s a selfless detachment where we hand another human being something that may very well be life-saving without them knowing its origin or being able to credit the one who gave it to them. It’s a gift that is given for no other purpose than the nature of the gift and the recipient who will receive it; the giver being entirely lost in the transaction. That is sacrifice.
How Will I Live?
Sacrifice . . . it runs contrary to who we are, but it is in reality everything that we are. The pinnacle of our humanity is ascended when we descend in the service of others. We are raised up when we lay ourselves down. It builds us, it builds others, and it builds families, communities and nations. Sacrifice is the best of our humanity manifest in shining moments when everything that would diminish us is overcome and set aside. It is all of us at our very best. So how then will you live?
Thursday Feb 22, 2024
Podcast Short: Beating the Herd Mentality - Living With Our Eyes Open
Thursday Feb 22, 2024
Thursday Feb 22, 2024
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 us. And as insidiously dangerous as it is, in time this rather indistinct and somewhat dubious mosaic becomes our reality. In essence, it becomes our existence.
It seems that we tend to be busy about a whole lot of nothing. We can meticulously tally the tasks of the day only to be inordinately perplexed that for some reason the sum total doesn’t come anywhere close to reflecting the sum total of everything that we expended in accomplishing those things. So consumed are we in the tasks of ‘nothing’ that we don’t have time to think about ‘something’. Therefore, we have irreparably fallen in love with plug-and-play and pre-fab. We like things pre-packaged, prepared, and predetermined. We’re looking for answers that were already ingested, digested and reflexively regurgitated for our reflexive consumption by whatever source we happen to have happened upon. In essence, we don’t think. And in fact, there are few things as dangerous as that.
We’re going to ingest a whole lot of something. That’s inevitable. And if that ‘something’ shapes us with that much force, we might be wise to ask what that ‘something’ is.
We live in a world roiling with bias and flushed murky with politically-correct agendas. We have splintering splinter groups proffering philosophies of every shape and sort. We’ve got the thematic propagation of ‘diversity’ that’s more about a permission to be permissive. Too often it’s about the ‘spin to win’. It’s less about truth and it’s more about triumph. It’s about the resolute and rather gritty proliferation of the agenda to the degree that truth becomes the agenda and the agenda becomes the truth. Therefore, truth becomes negotiable and pliable in a forced and placating servitude to an onslaught of dubious agendas. However, truth in the service of an agenda becomes opinion. And too often opinion is bias off the leash and running wild.
So, we need to listen for a change. We need to question…aggressively and responsibly. We need to ruthlessly investigate and corroborate. We need to quit being complacent consumers and become invested investigators. We need to use truth as a steeled template, not as a fluffy convenience. We need to bring the sturdy compass of ethics to point out the true north in every decision whether that true north is to our liking or not. We don’t need to be worldly wise, for that’s an oxymoron of the most deceptive kind. Rather, we need to be wise in the ways of God and life. We need to be sufficiently stubborn to reject the pabulum of the masses, yet pliable enough to hear the beating hearts underneath the pabulum. We need to be bold and brazen in a manner stitched tight by wisdom and lent compelling by reason. We need to be beacons of light knowing that the crowd is apt to label us as sorely antiquated and ridiculously ill-informed. We need to listen in the bravest form imaginable.
It would behoove us to remember that to live passively is to live dangerously. To live inquisitively is to live wisely. To live boldly is to live robustly. And to live our lives based on timeless principles is to honor God rather than worship everything else that pretends to be God. May we choose to abandon the former and judiciously embrace all of the latter.
“Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.”
- Ephesians 5:15-16
Monday Feb 19, 2024
Podcast Short: There Is No God - Evidence
Monday Feb 19, 2024
Monday Feb 19, 2024
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, for we fear that the experiences that we crave will be snatched from us, the pleasures that we wish to indulge in will be made taboo, that we will somehow be punished if things feel too good, and that this doting judge-like figure will frown on most everything that makes us happy. So, we decide that we don’t want a God. And subsequently, we declare that there is no God.
Subsequently, we then become our own gods, for the absence of a God does not eliminate our need of one. So, we fill the role. But because we demanded that we be these little gods and become the captain of our own ships, sunken ships litter the seas of our lives and they lay strewn across the endless shoals and windswept beaches as far as the eye can see. Because we want to be our own gods, wreckage is everywhere. Everywhere.
And because the validity of our god-hood is thrown into question by the repeated occurrence of such disasters, we shake our fists and we declare that there must be no God because He would not have allowed tragedies of this magnitude to happen. How could a loving God permit so much carnage? We ask how a compassionate God could stand by and consent to devastation and destruction of this magnitude. Clearly then, our hypothesis that ‘there is no God’ is supported by the shipwrecks, when what we’re really proving is that we are no god.
So really, the issue is ‘not’ that there is no God. The issue is that we are trying to be god, and that we don’t do it all that well. In fact, we are reaping the consequences in monumental ways. And if we are enraged by the shipwrecks made up of missed opportunities, broken marriages, fractured families, financial destitution, crushed dreams, hopes gone hopeless, friendships aborted, a culture in demise, losses without number, and so much more, it is ourselves to whom we must be enraged. For we said, there is no God, and we presumed the power, and the wisdom, and the intelligence, and the discernment to take the place of the God that we said didn’t exist. And if we are actually going to do that, we also have to assume the consequences of that choice.
Therefore, maybe the greatest evidence ‘for’ God is the destruction that we have caused in claiming to be god. Maybe the thing that we should be looking at is the failure of mankind to be his own god and the captain of his own ship. For if you look around you today, all that we have done is to sink those ships. And we’ve sunk thousands of them. We’ve sunk opportunities, marriages, families, finances, dreams, hopes, friendships, and a entire culture. And does not the evidence ‘for’ God shout from every shattered hull and every broken bow. There is no God, we say. But doesn’t the evidence of our attempts to be god suggest the existence of the very thing that we deny? Does not what we have done evidence the God that we say doesn’t exist? Maybe we want to think about that before we sink any other ships.
“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”
Psalm 14:1
Thursday Feb 15, 2024
Podcast Short: Battle Fatigue - Fighting Life’s Battles
Thursday Feb 15, 2024
Thursday Feb 15, 2024
“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, because we don’t care. We’re not in a position to get hurt, because we don’t care. If things don’t go our way it doesn’t matter, because we don’t care. If something or someone fails us, there’s no loss to us because we don’t care. And this whole mindset of not caring is not about not caring at all. It’s about protecting ourselves from the pain that we fear we’ll experience if we do care.
But, by assuming this self-protective position, we’re doing something that we may not be thinking about at all. We’re retreating. Basically, we’re retreating from any situations that have caused us pain before, or from situations that we feel will cause us pain if we deal with them.
And in all that retreating, maybe there’s a stance that we should have taken, or some action that we should have engaged in, or some decision that we should have stood in opposition to or in support of. But we don’t. We don’t. Instead, we retreat. And we retreat because we’ve worked real hard to convince ourselves that we don’t care, and we’ve done that so that we won’t get hurt. And therefore, the battle that maybe should have been ours, or the battle that we should have contributed to, or the battle that was critical for us or someone else is fought without us being in it. Or worse yet, maybe it never got fought at all because we didn’t show up to fight it. And the loss that we incur, however we incurred it, is likely to cause a level of pain far, far greater than the pain that we were working to avoid feeling in the first place.
And in the end, there’s a good chance that we’ll end up caring that we didn’t care. And because we end up caring that we didn’t care, we’ll create a battle in the last place that we ever want to fight one…and that’s within ourselves.
Thursday Feb 08, 2024
Podcast Short: Am I Passionate for the Right Things?
Thursday Feb 08, 2024
Thursday Feb 08, 2024
“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.” And while I deeply admire his stirring passion for our country, I stood there wishing that my passion for the cause of Christ might someday be strong enough to lift me out of the many wheelchairs within which I sit.”
Am I passionate for the right things? Not just passionate. But passionate in the right way. Sure, there’s a lot of voices out there. There’s a lot of causes out there. There’s a lot of yelling, and screaming, and arguing, and hostile behaviors, and noisy propaganda, and a bunch of edgy people on more than one rant advocating for these causes. On top of that, the causes themselves shift depending upon the temperature of the culture, or the agenda of the people pulling long strings behind closed doors. There are causes that represent the demands of a handful of people who find the foundations of their cause so ill-defined or fragile that constructive dialogue is replaced with destructive actions. Greed is rampant. Power-mongering runs wild. Principles have been discarded because they impede the progressive thinking that end up resulting in regressive outcomes. And in this mess and in the midst of all of this noise, am I passionate for the right things?
Consider this. There are some things that are timeless. There are some things that are woven into this existence that you can’t remove. There are principles and ethics that are foundational. You can try and remove them, but there’s a huge cost to that. Civilizations throughout history have messed with them, or attempted to adjust them to suit a particular cause, or worked to rid their culture of them altogether. And the outcomes are never good. History will tell us that rather plainly, if we’re willing to be honest about history.
And so, I want to be passionate about something that’s timeless, because I want it to live on beyond my life. Something that this culture can reliably build on both today and tomorrow and for every tomorrow after that. Something that’s certain to sustain my kids and grandkids and great-grandkids. And nothing that we can create on our own will do that. What we create is too weak, and too fragile, and too shallow, and too lackluster to do that. That kind of stuff is only something that God can create.
And so, it’s this God and what He created and principles that He built it all around, it’s that stuff that I choose to be passionate about. Not man-made stuff because that doesn’t last. Rather, it’s God-created stuff. It’s the principles that shaped this existence at its core that I will surrender my passions to and be passionate about. Because if I’m not passionate about that stuff, passion won’t matter because very shortly nothing will.
Monday Jan 29, 2024
Personal Testimony - It’s Just Too Much
Monday Jan 29, 2024
Monday Jan 29, 2024
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 our addiction won’t go away. Or our career goals always stall no matter how much we’ve invested in what we’re doing. The medical issues just keep happening. We can’t hold onto a friend to save our lives, or our family just can’t get along long enough to actually look like a family. The bills never stop. It’s always bad news. Our self-esteem is shot, our dreams are dead, the kids won’t call us, and we’re dreading tomorrow because it’s going to be the exact same thing all over again. How many times have you felt that there’s just no use?
And when we’re at that point, life doesn’t really matter all that much anymore. It’s just something that we tolerate until we’re tired of tolerating. It’s not about living. It’s about surviving. And at some point, after we’ve done it long enough, surviving ‘becomes’ our life. It ‘becomes’ who we are. It ‘becomes’ all that we do. And then, over time, it ‘becomes’ all that we think we can do, or should do. How many times have you felt that there’s just no use?
And you know, we try all kinds of stuff to fix this. We immerse ourselves in some self-help philosophy, or we’re on a mad hunt for the right podcast, or we’ve ordered the latest breakthrough book, or we’re hanging on the words of some person of prominence. We try change our diet, or change our attitude, or change our social circle, only to realize that all of that really never changes anything.
So, we’re in a hole. We blew college, our marriage is long gone, the addiction keeps showing up, our career is stalled, the doctors can’t figure out our issues, friends come and go, the family bickering doesn’t stop and neither do the bills, our self-esteem is shot, our dreams are dead, and the kids won’t call. Yeah. How many times have we felt that there’s just no use. I have. And I’m guessing you have too.
For me, when I’ve been at those places, the only thing bigger than everything that’s laid me flat is God. Some would say that God has failed them just as much as everything else has. And in my own life I’ve discovered that when I feel that way, it’s really a whole lot more about the fact that I failed God. Because God doesn’t fail us. He might not show up in the way that we want Him to. He might not engage all of this stuff in the way that we think is best. We might think Him to be too slow in the way that He works. Or we might not believe in Him at all. But what I can tell you is that with God, you never have to feel that there’s ‘no use’ because He’s got a ladder for every hole that you’re in, and a solution for every problem that you have.
So get your Bible out and read it. If you don’t have one, buy one or download a Bible app. Go to church. Call a pastor. Pray. Listen to Christian music. See what happens. Believe me, God’s got a lot of ladders, and He’s got an endless supply of solutions.
Thursday Jan 25, 2024
Personal Testimony - Hope
Thursday Jan 25, 2024
Thursday Jan 25, 2024
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 that kind of question?” And I’ll tell you what, if you’re asking that question it’s because you’re in a really dark place. And I know how dark they are because I’ve been there…and so have you.
Think about it for a minute. Without hope, what have we got? What have we got? If we can’t apply some feeling of hope to our future, or a marriage that’s hanging by a thread, or a disease that could go really wrong really fast, or a child who’s gone rogue, or a career that teetering on the edge of some abyss, or an addiction that’s eaten up someone’s life or someone’s family…if there’s no hope that you can apply to any of that stuff…what have you got?
You know exactly what it’s like when life collapses. We both know what that’s like. When your dream just dies, and they can die for a lot of reasons that are just brutal. When your marriage vanishes, and you didn’t even see it coming. When you’ve run into so many walls just trying to get to ‘some next place’ in life, (any next place) that all you end up spending your life doing is waiting for the next wall to show up because you’re certain that it’s going to. When you begin to realize that the damage is just too much, and as you realize that it begins to dawn on you that it’s humanly impossible to ever climb out from under all of it. If there’s no hope that you can apply to any of that…what have you got?
If there’s no hope, what’s the sense in all of this? Why go on? Why try? Why invest? Why keep moving forward? If there’s no hope, nothing matters. If there’s no hope then this existence, living out whatever this is that we’re living out, all of this is meaningless. It just doesn’t matter. You’ve felt that. I’ve felt it. The world feels it.
Hope is indispensable. And I mean…indispensable. And if we’ve lost it, as we all have at some time, or some place, we’ve gotta find it because going on without it is simply impossible. It just doesn’t work. I know that, and if you’ve lived long enough, and if you’ve faced the darkness long enough, you know that too. Hope is indispensable.
But where do you find hope anyway? I mean real hope. I’m not talking about someone persons promises (because those break), or some passing fad (because those have no depth), or some vogue philosophy (because those are typically failed ideas that have been dressed up in new clothes), or political platforms (because those typically serve the platform rather than the people), I’m not talking about any of that because life is littered with that stuff. We’re drowning in it. I’m not talking about the latest book, or some trending podcast, or some ‘woke’ idea. And as far as I can tell, all of that stuff promises hope, but delivers nothing. If it did, we wouldn’t be here.
This is my experience. I’ve had times where everything seemed hopeless. Everything was dark…I mean really dark. Bleak. When all of the resources and all of the promises that this world made me, failed me…miserably.
And when the world fails you, where do you go? Well, you go where I went. I went to God. Now, that statement won’t sit well with some people, but if hope is indispensable and the world can’t give it to you, where else do you go? What other option do you have? But more than that, what other option would you really want anyway? I want an option that works, that’s sustainable regardless of what life throws at me. An option that delivers hope for my future, hope for my marriage, hope for a disease, hope for a child who’s gone rogue, or a career that teetering on the edge of some abyss, or an addiction that’s eaten up my life. And there’s only one place where you find that kind of hope. And that’s in a relationship with Jesus Christ.
Get a Bible and check it out. Go to church. Call a pastor. Give it a shot. If you do, you’ll find exactly what you need in the exact way that you need it, because that’s how the God of hope operates.
Thursday Jan 18, 2024
Personal Testimony - Dreams that Die
Thursday Jan 18, 2024
Thursday Jan 18, 2024
You know, I grew up with a lot of dreams. A lot of things that I wanted to do. We all have dreams. Maybe your dream was to have a great marriage. Maybe it was to start a company that changed a community, or a nation, or maybe the world. Maybe it was to raise solid kids, or travel, or write a book, or invent something revolutionary that made life better for other people, or live in some particular place, or achieve some level of financial comfort, or whatever it might have been.
And as you grow older, you actually find yourself kind of refining those dreams. You tweak them. You roll them over in your head. You begin to adjust them ‘here and there’ to fit the world as your understanding of the world matures and sharpens and grows and expands. And as that refining thing happens, you begin to figure out how these dreams might actually work. How you might actually be able to pull all of that stuff off. It’s a really neat kind of thing.
And in thinking out loud, I would guess that, at some level, you’ve had those kinds of dreams as well. That you’ve played with some really cool ideas. That there was something that you were excited about, that gave you some sort of energy or sense of excitement. That you had some sort of vision for your life that added something to your life that you needed.
But then life happens. In whatever way it happens, it happens. It happens to all of us. And many times, whatever happens ends up killing those dreams. They die. They just die. Sometimes they die before they were ever born, or sometimes the dream is actually beginning to unfold and then it dies. However or whenever it happens, they die.
And sometimes we try to bring them back, or resurrect them in whatever way that we try to do that. We try to figure out how to do them differently, or modify them, or come at them from a different angle. Or we decide to fight the thing that’s killed our dreams. We figure that if we can eliminate whatever killed our dreams, (or at least beat it up pretty thoroughly), that maybe, just maybe, we can get our dream back.
At other times we just let our dreams die. We either don’t know what to do, or we’re overwhelmed, or we can’t get past a sense of injustice or unfairness, or whatever it is. And because we let it die (because we feel that we have no other option but to let it die) we refuse to ever dream again because the death of a dream is just too painful. It’s just too much.
The world will kill our dreams. Life has no qualms about showing up and killing the very things that we spent a large part of our lives living for. Dreams die every day. They die at the hands of whole bunch of stuff. And for every dream that dies, something on the inside of the person dies as well. The death of a dream is just too painful because a part of us dies right along with it.
I’ve had many dreams die. So have you. And every time one died, something inside of us died too. But when my dreams died, here’s I’ve found. I learned that God has a dream for each of us that will never die. Never. It’s just too big to die, it’s place in God’s plan is just too important to let it die, and it’s backed up by a God who never dies.
There are many who would not agree with me. And that’s okay. However, I believe that God has a dream for your life that’s bigger than any dream that you could conjure up. God’s dream for you exceeds anything that you could dream for you. So, ask Him what it is. Talk to a pastor. Get into your Bible and start reading. If you don’t have one, buy one, or download a Bible app. Listen to Christian music. Find a church. God can and will use any or all of these to help you discover the dream that you were fashioned to live out. And that dream won’t die.
Thursday Jan 11, 2024
A Personal Testimony - Life
Thursday Jan 11, 2024
Thursday Jan 11, 2024
The odds that are we’ve never met, and if we have, I hope that I was able to leave something with you in the meeting as that is my passion and my calling.
My life has been devoted to helping people. You know, you start out with a vision to help people, and that vision is often pretty romanticized. In your mind you envision changing people lives, and because you are, you envision changing the world. It all becomes kind of heroic, and valiant, and courageous, and all of that.
But you soon discover that helping people (truly helping them), will ask everything of you. It’ll drain you. At times it will drive you to despair. You will look pain, and loss, and abuse, and hopelessness, and shattered lives, and addictions…you will look all of that stuff in the face, and you will find yourself questioning your ability to do anything about it at all. Sooner or later, helping people will leave you with some level of trauma, and there will come a time (more than one time) that helping people make you ask if the world and the people in it are simply beyond hope. Helping people will ask everything of you, and at times it will take everything from you.
As I sit with people day-in and day-out, I sit there with my own pain as well. My own life has been marked by pain, by personal devastation, by losses that I thought impossible to survive, by abandonment that left me devastated, and by disappointments that crushed me to the point that I thought that recovery (of any kind) was simply a fantasy that was too painful to fantasize about.
And so, I live the two sides of pain. Those of the people that I’ve served for over forty years, and that of my own pain. And there’s nothing heroic in that, as there are untold millions of people who set out each day to make the world a better place despite the wounds that they carry as they seek to heal the wounds that others carry. And to all of you who are the walking wounded who have given their lives over to help those others who are wounded, whoever or wherever you may be, you have my deepest admiration.
But here’s the point in all of this. Many people mock God as either someone who only exists in the feeble-minded or those who has to find security is some fabricated myth. Or if He does exist, he’s someone who’s incapable, or incompetent, or irrelevant, or out of touch, or outmoded, or inherently judgmental, or someone who’s failed us in entirely unacceptable ways…or however we’ve labeled Him.
But without hesitation, and without any sense of contrived religiosity, or syrupy idealism, or preachy verbiage, I can tell you that God is real. I can also tell you that I would not be sitting here without Him. And that’s not some cute or inspiring statement that’s supposed to trigger some emotion in you. It’s my reality. Life would have destroyed me without Him. God is my rock in every sense of the word. He is sturdy in the storm, both my own and those that I work with each and every day. He is in the turmoil, but He is above it. He is not the cause of our pain, but He is the solution to it. He is not some idealized myth created by weak people who can’t face the realities of the world. He is the greatest reality in all of the world. He is what you need. He is the everything in the middle of your nothing.
And I know this because I’ve lived it. More than once. In the pain. In the darkness. In the loss. In the confusion. In those moments of deep desperation. When hope is something that I just can’t believe in any longer because life has left no place for it. At those times in life when I can’t take the next step because I can’t get myself off of the ground so that I can try and take it. I know that God is all of those things because I’ve watched Him do the impossible in my life, and I’ve sat next to tens of thousands of people, and I’ve watched Him do the impossible in lives whose situations were nothing but impossible.
Our culture would deny this. In fact, it would ridicule it and do its level best to declare that all of this is the stuff of weakness, and foolishness, and stupidity, and ignorance. And all I know is that I’ve watched it work too many times, in my own life, and in the lives of others to know that it’s far more real than the culture that would say that it is not.
If you’re lost today. If your pain is deep beyond imagination. If you’re standing alone in the darkness that is always a part of being alone. If your dreams have died. If your spouse has left, or your child has rejected you, or your finances have collapsed, or hope has eluded you, or if you’ve come to the point that you look in the mirror and you despise everything that you see looking back at you…whatever your situation might be, there is a God that’s big enough to heal you, lift you up, restore you, grant you hope, lay a new future in front of you and grant you the energy to achieve that future. It is not impossible, for God is truly the God who pulls off the impossible.
And how do that I know that? How am I convinced of that? Because He’s done that for me. Because I’ve watched him do it for tens of thousands of people in over forty years of walking with wounded people. It’s real, and regardless of who you are and what you’ve done, or where you’re at, or how deep you’ve fallen, or how dark your circumstances might be, it’s available to you. Right here, right now. Today, tomorrow, and forever.
Grab a Bible. Find a church. Call a pastor. Get on your knees and pray. It will work. The road back might be long, but there’s a road. And God will walk with you every step down that road. Every step. May God find you in your despair, in your confusion, in your desperation, in your darkness, in your hopelessness. And may He create in you the life that you thought to be impossible, because that’s what He does. That is my hope, and this is my prayer for you.
Tuesday Jan 09, 2024
A World That’s Lost
Tuesday Jan 09, 2024
Tuesday Jan 09, 2024
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.
Let’s face it, we live in a world that’s lost. In one way or another (or to one degree or another), the world’s always been lost. There’s a pattern to our humanity that should cause us to wise up a bit, and that pattern is that (as a species) we’re pretty consistently lost. It just seems that we’re a bit more lost these days.
Of course we’re lost. We’re lost because the woods that we’re in are bigger than the resources that we have to get out them. And those woods become increasingly bigger the more that we convince ourselves that we can get out of them by ourselves. Where we are is too big for any map or any compass that we can create. And while we tend to bristle at the idea, God holds the map and has the compass. A sure map and a steady compass. And while we’re likely to continue to refute that reality, or work to ignore it in light of our incessant stubbornness, He’s got the map and the compass. And all we have to do (all we have to do) is ask Him for it. And I wonder (I wonder) exactly how lost we’re going to have to become before we finally ask Him.
Thursday Jan 04, 2024
”New Year Reawakened and Reclaimed:” New - It Does Not Mean Better
Thursday Jan 04, 2024
Thursday Jan 04, 2024
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 things “better.” We craft new policies, or we tear down old businesses, or we adopt new beliefs, or we upgrade this, or we downgrade that, and we label all those actions as “better.”
But “better” based on what? What’s the criteria that determines if something is, in fact, “better?” Is it based on the current cultural climate? Or, is it based on the trends that tend to be trending? Or, is it based on the desire to make a name for ourselves, or get ahead, or beat the opposition, or bring down a boss, or lift up a cause, or promote a philosophy, or demote anything that irritates us? Is it based on our desire to make a win-fall, or get ourselves out of a freefall, or just create a free-for-all? What do we base the idea of “better” on?
Labeling something as “better” is often a justification for something that’s anything but “better”. It’s that label that we attach to our actions, hoping that people will pay a whole lot more attention to the label, and a whole lot less attention to the actions that we’ve pasted the label on. Sadly, most things are not better. They’re certainly ‘something,’ but they’re not “better”.
But what should “better” be based on? “Better” is when others benefit, even if we don’t. “Better” is driven by the need of the common man, as the common man is the common cause. It’s something in the service of a hurting world, and not something that serves to hurt the world. “Better” is something that we do that leaves the world “better” than what we found it, even if we end up not being “better” in the service of that world. It’s sacrificial. It’s recognizing our responsibility to the lives around us, not the agendas within us. “Better” is when we end the day having gained nothing, but having given everything. “Better” is where love is given legs to run and greed can’t find its shoes. The world needs to be “better” in a “better” way. And that starts with you, and it starts with me, and it starts with rejecting anything that is not truly “better.”
Monday Jan 01, 2024
Monday Jan 01, 2024
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-four years later she would watch history repeat itself as millions of GI’s marched off in similar fashion to fight a dictator in something called World War II. In-between it all, she would face the economic depravity and emotional ravages of a devastating depression within which her husband would abandon the family and summarily vanish. She was left to support three children on a meager income of scant dollars earned in the hot kitchen of a small diner.
She never drove a car. She lived out most of her life on pocket change, making what seemed impossible possible. The furniture in her meager home was old, lending it the enchanting aroma of another era long vanished. It all was tenderly cared for in a manner that lent her home an indescribable, but wonderfully simple charm. The few appointments in her small home were tidy, clean, and above all cherished. She saw herself as marvelously blessed in the midst of manifold need, for Granny understood that ‘need’ was more an issue of attitude than a matter of circumstance. And I was privileged to be touched by this solitary life until her passing in 1985.
For over ten years, every month Granny would tease ten dollars out of her meager collection of dimes and dollars. And she would send it off to a young Hispanic girl whose father had abandoned her, and whose mother had placed her in an orphanage and summarily walked away. All Granny had was a single photo of a tattered little girl standing in front of a weathered hut. It sat in a slight frame on her tiny buffet. At the feet of the photo there laid a handful of yellowed letters that Granny had received from this little girl over that most precious decade.
Some years after Granny had passed, another letter came. In it were several photos bearing the striking image of a young Hispanic woman in professional attire standing in a small but simple office setting. On the back of one photo in stuttering script it said, “Thank you for my new life.” My grandmother didn’t live long enough to see the results of her sacrifices. However, while real sacrifice is committed to the result, it relishes the effort. Granny relished the effort and birthed something ‘new’ into the life of a young woman.
We Are the ‘New’
Each of us possess ample resources to be the ‘new’ in the life of another. It is not the execution of some strategy as we might think, or the happenstance of life that births something ‘new’. It is not about some level of tenacious persistence, or the right choices made at the right time. These things and many more can bring something ‘new’ to our lives and the lives of those around us.
But it is the raw power of that single human being stepping up and stepping into the life of another that can bring something ‘new’ in ways that nothing else ever can or ever will. It is the energy of our humanity shared. It is the hope that is released in the touch of another. It is the voice of another that calls out when all other voices have long fallen silent.
It is an investment that may cost us much, yet it is an expenditure that will cost us much more if we refuse it. It is pressing against the giant of greed and intentionally raising the eyes of our hearts past our own circumstances to focus on the circumstances of another. It is a passion that unleashes everything away from us so that it can be drawn into everyone around us. And it is this that sets the grand stage upon which to birth something ‘new’ in another that would never have been ‘new’ were it not for such a sacrifice.
Be the ‘New’
Might I suggest that this New Year, the ‘new’ in our lives is making the choice to become the ‘new’ in the life of another. In whatever manner we choose to do that, we all can change a life and in doing so change a world. Therefore, let us not contemplate ‘New Year’s’ resolutions. Rather, let us formulate ‘New Life’ commitments. And let us begin to do that by becoming the ‘new’ in the life of another.
Sunday Dec 31, 2023
Sunday Dec 31, 2023
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 world reeling from decisions that we don’t understand, actions that appear to border on the irrational, and directions that seem to have forsaken any mooring that the founding principles of our nation might have given them or a sense of mortality might afford them.
We stand on the listing precipice of this New Year with a host of political agendas and secular philosophies promising rosy tomorrows and a year brimming with the brightness of a world throwing off the old and seizing the new. We hear the words and they tickle our ears, but in many ways we don’t see the landscape ahead reflecting what the words say it should reflect. While many have taken hold of the words hoping that they pan out, deep inside, many of us aren’t certain that the promises made and the agendas outlined are deep enough, rich enough, transforming enough or solid enough to really accomplish what they say they can accomplish. The reality is, we’re not all that certain that we want them to accomplish what they say they’ll accomplish anyway.
Resting in Hope Because We Can’t Rest in Anything Else
So, we rest in the hope that hope is enough because we don’t believe in the people that are preaching hope. We hope that hope will be strong enough to drive the political agendas and secular philosophies; bolstering and empowering them sufficiently to do what they grandly visualize in their documented frameworks, but what they can’t do on their own. Or do we hope that they don’t work because the disastrous outcome of their implementation is only going to make worse the very things that they claim their efforts will make better. Often, we don’t even believe in ourselves and our ability to bring change, or in any manifestation of whatever this ‘self’ is that we are. Our hope then rests in hope, not necessarily in the viability of what we hope for and who we hope in. Somehow, we hope that it will all turn out okay.
But we might ask why do we do that? Why do we so often opt for something that’s really not going to do what we need done, out of the hope that hope will carry whatever this is when whatever this is can’t carry itself? Why do we settle like that? Why do we pin our hopes on something that will likely explode in our faces if we pin anything on it, much less hope?
Sidelined Bystanders
I wonder if at its core our issue is a fear that is actually a multiplicity of fears. Fear that we’re far too small to do anything but hope for the best rather than fight for it. Maybe it’s an issue of being unable or unwilling to realize that we can actually impact things sufficiently to change things, rather than seeing ourselves as being exiled to some distant sideline of life where we can do nothing more than sheepishly root for a life that’s far too far away to touch. Change is too often seen as an external thing that happens outside of our efforts, so we relegate ourselves to some periphery role where all we can do is hope with no means to exert any real influence. I wonder how often we see ourselves as hapless and helpless bystanders in a greater drama that we have no ability to impact, whether that’s the drama unfolding in our nation, or the drama unfolding in our lives.
We look around us at the wild spiraling of a culture relentlessly gyrating in some direction that appears unhealthy at best, and with no direction at worst. This massive “ship of state” or the various “ships” of our lives seem to be rolling on the churning seas of some wild societal storm with those at the helm announcing that the course is sure and the speed is steady. Yet, peering out from our obscure place on the deck of these enormous ships, it seems that their courses are entirely unsure and their speeds are anything but steady. Yet, despite the angst of the journey that we see before us, we feel far too small, far too irrelevant, and far too inconsequential to do anything about it. And so our best hope is to hang on and hope . . . or so we think.
Can You Make a Difference?
Are we simply bystanders living out some periphery role in some larger drama whose stage is far too massive for us to ever ascend? Are we doomed to haplessly sit by and watch our culture, our businesses, our marriage, our kids, our communities, or whatever it is that we might be watching spiral off into some cold, dark abyss? Will we engage the coming New Year without really engaging it because somebody else is already engaging it in a way that gives us no room to engage it?
Is it Actually Possible that We Might Have Power?
We might ask “what is power?” Is power derived from a collective of people whose numbers grant them power? Is it derived from a position of authority that’s derived from some established structure? Is power something granted to people by something bigger than the people to which it is being granted? Is power a product of social position, breeding, wealth, education, the ability to be relationally savvy, or culturally astute, or outrageously intellectual, or is it held by people possessing an elevated acumen of some sort?
Or, is it the average person who takes the ‘all and everything’ of what they have and engages their world with what they’ve got? That’s power! It’s the average person like you or I who realize that it’s the “little things” that change “big things.” It’s the small steps that ultimately result in giant leaps. It’s the average person faithfully living out lives of integrity in the everyday grind of everyday living that changes cultures, redirects nations, and rewrites history. Indeed, that’s power.
Ordinary People Who Do Extraordinary Things
Daryn Kagan wrote, “Bad things do happen in the world, like war, natural disasters, disease. But out of those situations always arise stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.” It is ordinary people who change the world because they’ve stepped up in situations both large and small, believing that whatever their situation might be they can make a difference either large or small.
It’s not about being ordinary. It’s about being available. It’s not about being ordinary. It’s about refusing to refuse opportunity. It’s not about being ordinary. Rather, it’s about recognizing that the great movements and moments in history laid on the back of ordinary people. It’s not about being ordinary. It about recognizing the power of the ordinary to be extraordinary simply by being ordinary. As Marco Rubio wrote, “America is the story of everyday people who did extraordinary things. A story woven deep into the fabric of our society.” The same story is woven deep into the fabric of our lives.
The New Year – Will We?
As we stand on the escarpment of this brand new “New Year,” we don’t have to relegate ourselves to some periphery role where all we can do is hope with no means to exert any real influence. We don’t need to be a hapless and helpless bystander in a greater drama that you have no ability to impact. We can live out intentional lives in our everyday worlds, being ordinary people of integrity engaging the world with integrity, and doing so believing that the smallest changes result in the biggest transformations.
And so, will we dare to understand that it’s the average person who takes what they have and engages their world with what they’ve got? Will we rise up sufficiently to grasp the reality that it’s the average person like you or I who realize that it’s the “little things” that change “big things?” Will we step out on the belief that it’s the small steps that ultimately result in giant leaps? Will we embrace the fact that it’s the average person faithfully living out a life of integrity in the everyday grind of everyday living that changes cultures, redirects nations, and rewrites history? If we do, if we faithfully embrace these truths and live them out, we will change our worlds and we will alter this coming year. May that be your commitment this New Year!
Saturday Dec 30, 2023
”New Year Reawakened and Reclaimed:” A Clean Slate - The Possibility of a New Start
Saturday Dec 30, 2023
Saturday Dec 30, 2023
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 from blood-sucking jobs and frantically flee the debt-feeding financial decisions that we made. The New Year is our time to use a whole bunch of elbow grease to clean up the horrendous messes of the old year, sweep those dirty little choices under the carpet, smooth over places where the carnage of our decisions tore the landscape of our lives apart, and precariously prop up the things that were blown over by the selfish choices we made. We’re wildly busy about the ‘spit and polish’ of getting everything tight and clean.
The Past Relished or Rejected?
We cross the threshold of the New Year without wanting to look back. It’s not that we want to reject the past, but we much prefer to leave it behind. We want a clean break, a new beginning, a fresh opportunity that’s in no way inhibited by whatever the past has been. Indeed, we do cherish the good things that have happened. However, we seem to celebrate them with a diminished sense; that they weren’t as good as good can potentially be. We engage the New Year holding out some hopeful hope that it will bring us twelve months of living that will be good in a way that we haven’t quite been able to achieve. That somehow this year will be what no year has yet been. So celebration is often less about what we’re leaving behind, and a whole lot more about what we hope will come.
The Seeds of Staleness
The New Year is the old year in redress. It’s nothing more than the final tick of the second hand of the clock that throws December 31st over into January 1st. It leaves nothing old behind and it takes nothing new with it. It’s a continuation of whatever was into whatever’s going to be. There is nothing inherently new about New Year’s.
Yet, because we ascribe a false newness to it, we assume that something has changed, that something has been left behind, that something has transitioned or transformed in the process of one day rolling into another.
So we celebrate and we ‘party.’ We raise robust toasts to the new opportunities that we’ve fabricated from the broken and desperate shards of the past year. We pen feel-good resolutions across our minds and across the pages of the calendar of the upcoming year. We tell ourselves that it’s going to be better, that we’re going to beat old habits and turn careers around. We shout down the corridors of the New Year, declaring in advance that we’re going to recommit to our marriages; that we’re going to complete college degrees, balance our spending, and watch our language. We assertively put the New Year on notice, telling it that we’re going to beat addictions, lose weight, change our attitudes, bury hatred, resurrect forgiveness, overcome fears, undercut bad attitudes and change.
Wiping Out Staleness
The New Year is an opportunity for reflection. We’ve set the calendar and flow of the year in such a manner that the New Year is parked at a place that affords us perspective. In reality, nothing changes. The truth is, we’ve been handed nothing new. But we can stop, catch our breaths, rub our eyes clear of the smudges that life smears across them, brush off the dust that’s caked on us from the long roads we walk, and simply look around. We have a chance to inventory and assess; to deliberately engage the reality of our lives, doggedly evaluate those realities, decisively execute strategies to change, and embrace an enthusiasm about the possibilities that these actions will bring to the New Year.
We can’t wipe the slate clean, but we can rewrite it. We can’t ignore things but we can change them. We can pretend that the New Year is something that it’s not, or we can persevere in learning from the past to change the future.
Friday Dec 29, 2023
The Frightening Call of Great Things
Friday Dec 29, 2023
Friday Dec 29, 2023
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 passive and our role in the lives of others is not passive either. Whether large or small, we are here to do great things.
However, our fear often keeps us from doing great things. The task is too large. We don't have the knowledge or the time. Our resources are far too inadequate. The task would be better left to others who could do it better than how it would be left if we did it. Great things are for those 'other' people. We might be called to do a few 'good' things, but great things are beyond the scope of who we are. Nonetheless, we are called to great things, and to avoid them or miss them would be one of the most tragic ways that a person would waste the wonder and potential of their life.
Monday Dec 25, 2023
Thirty Days of Hope - Day Thirty
Monday Dec 25, 2023
Monday Dec 25, 2023
“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 and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope. Real hope. Hope for a lifetime and more.
“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered. This is a story for our time, and every time. It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever. Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book. Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin your own journey of hope.
You will find “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. You can enjoy this thoughtful and inspirational book in paperback, Kindle, Nook, and audio book formats. It is my hope that this timely, inspirational, and moving novel will become part of your Christmas tradition each and every year.
Enjoy a brief video outlining this uplifting series "Thirty Days of Hope" at https://youtu.be/DiEUIcRm7vo.
Monday Dec 25, 2023
Monday Dec 25, 2023
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 possesses. It's not about how vast something is, but the potential that it has within it. It's realizing that great things find the best home in small things, for great things are always a compilation of small things anyway.
The God Who inhabits the vastness of this entire existence was born into the body of a single baby. Greatness in smallness. His plan to invade the world in order to save the world would not be to unleash all of the forces at His disposal in some strategic sweep. It was, in fact, the opposite. And therein lays the brilliance of it all. In the same way, we are small. Yet, because we are, we have the space for great things. Ample space. This Christmas, we need to celebrate the birth of this baby. But we likewise need to ask, "What does the greatness of God wish to do in the smallness of us?"
Resources for Your Holiday Celebrations
Discover an array of holiday resources designed to enhance your celebrations on our website at www.craiglpc.com. Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books make lasting gifts. Discover all of his books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.
Sunday Dec 24, 2023
Thirty Days of Hope - Day Twenty-Nine
Sunday Dec 24, 2023
Sunday Dec 24, 2023
“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 and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope. Real hope. Hope for a lifetime and more.
“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered. This is a story for our time, and every time. It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever. Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book. Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin your own journey of hope.
You will find “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. You can enjoy this thoughtful and inspirational book in paperback, Kindle, Nook, and audio book formats. It is my hope that this timely, inspirational, and moving novel will become part of your Christmas tradition each and every year.
Enjoy a brief video outlining this uplifting series "Thirty Days of Hope" at https://youtu.be/DiEUIcRm7vo.
Saturday Dec 23, 2023
Thirty Days of Hope - Day Twenty-Eight
Saturday Dec 23, 2023
Saturday Dec 23, 2023
“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 and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope. Real hope. Hope for a lifetime and more.
“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered. This is a story for our time, and every time. It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever. Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book. Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin your own journey of hope.
You will find “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. You can enjoy this thoughtful and inspirational book in paperback, Kindle, Nook, and audio book formats. It is my hope that this timely, inspirational, and moving novel will become part of your Christmas tradition each and every year.
Enjoy a brief video outlining this uplifting series "Thirty Days of Hope" at https://youtu.be/DiEUIcRm7vo.
Friday Dec 22, 2023
Thirty Days of Hope - Day Twenty-Seven
Friday Dec 22, 2023
Friday Dec 22, 2023
“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 and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope. Real hope. Hope for a lifetime and more.
“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered. This is a story for our time, and every time. It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever. Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book. Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin your own journey of hope.
You will find “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. You can enjoy this thoughtful and inspirational book in paperback, Kindle, Nook, and audio book formats. It is my hope that this timely, inspirational, and moving novel will become part of your Christmas tradition each and every year.
Enjoy a brief video outlining this uplifting series "Thirty Days of Hope" at https://youtu.be/DiEUIcRm7vo.
Friday Dec 22, 2023
Thought for the Day - Christmas #4
Friday Dec 22, 2023
Friday Dec 22, 2023
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