Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

The Unrecognized Potency of Prayer

Let’s start here. Think about this thought:

“Too often we have stripped our single greatest asset of its power and hobbled it to the degree that it has come to be viewed only as a pathetic last resort. Yet despite our incessant meddling, this asset nonetheless remains a first resort so potent that it never needs a last one. And that asset is prayer.”

Prayer. You know, through our own lack of understanding and discipline, we’ve granted prayer the characteristics associated with some antiquated religious monk living in some secluded monastery off in the woods. For us, prayer sits on the far fringes of life as some traditional nicety that we toy with when we’re not wrestling with bigger things. It might serve a purpose in life’s special moments, or in the midst of life’s most dire emergencies, but even then we’re not all that confident that it actually brings anything to either. To varying degrees we’ve rendered prayer as culturally outdated, logistically outmoded, a backburner endeavor, and far too simplistic to grapple with the monumental realities that are part of living in the 21st century.

But I would challenge all of that by saying this:

“I am convinced beyond words to convey that prayer is infinitely more than the mindless ranting of some poor, delusional soul talking to some imaginary friend in some imaginary place. Oh, to the contrary. Prayer is the manifest pleading of a soul worn raw that, by the simple act of prayer, unleashes untold forces that we can’t imagine that surge in a descent so massive and so inconceivably powerful that the ground of everything before them shakes. And in this descent lives are changed beyond recognition, nations are transformed beyond comprehension, and history is brought to its knees in the face of a God who says, “be healed.” That, my friend, is nothing of a delusional soul or imaginary friend or any other such nonsense.”

That is what prayer is. But let’s build on that. Consider this:

“How do I tell you what prayer is? It is everything that I need every time I kneel in the practice of it. It shakes the infinite alive and sets its armies afoot in defense of me. It will never run aground or find itself drowning in the waters of the adversity that I bring to it. Nothing it faces is insurmountable, for to think that such an adversary exists is to run a fool’s errand. It will shield me in its advance, it will beckon me to anticipate the miracles that it is about to wield, and in the midst of it all it calms me as it whispers, 'Be still and know that I am God.' And because of these reasons and a million more, I find prayer the single greatest place that I could ever imagine being.”

That’s what prayer is. And if that’s not what prayer is in your life, or if that’s not what your experience of prayer is, then you’ve missed one of the powerful things that we have the privilege of engaging in. We’ve settled for this slumlord existence of spiritual impoverishment when we can be spiritually rich in ways that give light, and energy, and meaning, and purpose to life.

Enjoy LifeTalk's wide array of inspirational and timely programs on most podcast platforms. You can also enjoy his daily quotations on Facebook, Pinterest, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn. __________________________________________________________________________________

You will discover all of Craig's books on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

A World That’s Lost

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.

The New Year - Wisdom to Start the Year

New Years 2025

Wisdom to Start the Year

How do we live differently this year? I mean, with intentionality. With some sense of purpose and meaning that’s way beyond just living out our lives in order to meet some set of obligations that we’ve confused with real living? How we live with some deep sense of satisfaction and personal enrichment? How do we do it all differently?

Well, at the beginning of this New Year I want to share some simple, foundational thoughts with you. Some thoughts that we don’t think about because our lives don’t create any space for us to think about them. Or we’re afraid to think about them because they might challenge us to something better and we might not be able to achieve that. Or whatever it might be. And we end up the poorer for it.

So here’s some thoughts for you. And if you walk away from this podcast with only one of these on your mind as you head out into the coming New Year, this time will have all been worth it.

Let’s start with this:

“We are created for more than we’ve given ourselves permission to be.”

That’s you. Whatever lays ahead of you today, tomorrow, next month, or in the coming year, you bring to those things more than you’ve given yourself permission to bring to them. You are more than the challenges that lay in front of you. You have unchecked resources, untapped abilities, yet undiscovered capabilities that are waiting on you. This New Year, give yourself permission to be your fullest self.

Consider this:

“It is the doubt of success that insures the fulfillment of that doubt.”

Doubt is the cancer of great things. Our doubt takes the ‘achievable’ and pushes it so far out of our reach that we come to see the possible as the impossible. We become deluded that our greatest dreams, our fondest hopes, the things that thrill us will do nothing more tease us. We can play with the idea of them, but the reality of them is doomed to stay a reality because we doubt our ability to achieve them. Begin getting rid of your doubt.

Here's another thought:

“You were not made to tend to the grave of your mistakes because God removed the coffin and backfilled the hole.”

You are not defined by your mistakes, no matter how many of them you might have made along the way. No matter how bad they were. No matter how painful the repercussions of whatever they were. You are not defined by your mistakes. Mistakes are a sign that you tried. You might have tried in a way that didn’t work, or in a way that you shouldn’t have tried. But you tried. The key is to try differently. Try in a better way. A more thoughtful way. Try again, and when you do your tenacity, your commitment, your fortitude…that stuff doesn’t define you either, but it does reveal the qualities that you have within you.

And finally, remember this:

“Dead-ends are never the ‘end of the road.’ They are only the end of ‘this’ road.”

You may be facing the end of this year and the beginning of the next one feeling like your life has been a bunch of dead-end roads. Some roads do end. Some end harshly and abruptly. Some end unfairly and brutally. But a dead-end is never an end. Never let yourself believe that an end is an end. Somewhere there’s a ‘next’ road. A new path. It might be wide and easy, or it might be thin and tough. But it’s there.

This New Year, find those roads. Walk them. Don’t run from them, or sit by them, or let your doubt cause you to turn away. Believe in yourself. Don’t let your mistakes tell you that you’re not worth it. This coming year might be easy. It might be hard. It might be somewhere in-between. But I’m committed to walking those roads. And I hope that you are too.

As we walk those roads, tune into LifeTalk on most podcast platforms as well as YouTube.

Here’s wishing you a truly great New Year.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Tune into LifeTalk on most podcast platforms.

You can also enjoy our daily quotations on Facebook, Pinterest, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Visit LifeTalk's website at https://lounsbroughslifetalkpodcast.wordpress.com/?.

”New Year Reawakened and Reclaimed:” New - It Does Not Mean Better

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.”  

To Believe in a New Beginning

Have you ever gone so far in a bad direction that you feel there’s no coming back? Is there a point where we’ve screwed up things so badly that there just can’t be a new beginning? Is the carnage that’s a result of our bad decisions, or our poor relationship choices, or our career failures, or our financial mis-management…does the carnage of all that stuff reach a point that a new beginning can never (and will never) find a place to begin?

Because once we give up on the idea of a new beginning, at that point we’ve allowed our mistakes and our failures to define us. They become who we are and who we will always be. We become the ‘bad’ of whatever bad we did. And I’m here to tell you that no one is the sum total of their choices. You will always be bigger than your worst mistake. And because that’s the case, there will always be a place for a new beginning.

Think about this:

“A new start is not about a new day. Rather, it’s about a new attitude. And that can happen any day.”

So what’s your attitude? People get tired of hearing about the idea of attitude. But your attitude shapes your reality. The Bible has a really great verse in Proverbs that says, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” Think about that. What you think about yourself is what you become. That is the power of attitude.

And so, “A new start is not about a new day. Rather, it’s about a new attitude. And that can happen any day.”

So here’s how to change your attitude. Here’s what you need to think about if you believe that you’ve screwed up things so badly that there just can’t be a new beginning for you. Here’s what you need think about:

“It’s not about the ashes, for they tell a tale of what was. It’s about having a vision sufficient to understand that the tale that lies among the ashes stands ready to build the dream that will rise above the ashes.”

The ashes in your life are the things that new beginnings arise from. Ashes are the ingredients of your new beginning. They’re not just what’s left over of whatever it is that you burnt up. The ashes in your life are the essential materials of great beginnings. They’re the fertilizer that nourishes great dreams. That needs to be your attitude.

Let’s look at it another. Think about this:

“To evaluate the probability of a new beginning as held against the overwhelming number of our mistakes, or the suffocating gravity of our pain, or the immensity of our losses is to forget that the most spectacular new beginnings are forged from the raw materials embedded in these very things. Therefore, the greater the things that would destroy us, the greater the new beginning that stands in front of us.”

Think about that. The most spectacular new beginnings are forged from the raw materials embedded in our mistakes, in the suffocating gravity of our pain, and in the immensity of our losses. Your new beginning is sitting in the very places where your worst endings took place. And more than, the worse the ending, the greater the beginning.

Enjoy LifeTalk's wide array of inspirational and timely programs on most podcast platforms. You can also enjoy his daily quotations on Facebook, Pinterest, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn. __________________________________________________________________________________ You will discover all of Craig's books on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

”New Year Reawakened and Reclaimed:” Crafting the New - Birthing a New Beginning

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.

”New Year Reawakened and Reclaimed:” The New Year -Refusing to Be Relegated to the Sidelines

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!

”New Year Reawakened and Reclaimed:” A Clean Slate - The Possibility of a New Start

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 31^st over into January 1^st.  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.

The Frightening Call of Great Things

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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Thirty

“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.

”Christmas Reawakened and Reclaimed:” The Last Christmas - The Greatest Small Package

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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Twenty-Nine

“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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Twenty-Eight

“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.

Thought for the Day - Christmas #4

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

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Twenty-Seven

“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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Twenty-Six

“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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Twenty-Five

“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.

Christmas - Denying Our Need for Rescue

Rescue.  It is hard to admit that we need to be rescued.  We think ourselves to be smart enough, cunning enough, strategic enough, and enough of whatever it is that we need to be enough of to save ourselves.  We tediously craft an endless array of things to rescue us from the things that we previously crafted to rescue us that ended up stranding us.  We add problem to problem.  Dilemma to dilemma.  Disappointment to disappointment.  The very effort to dig ourselves out of the holes that we’ve dug only serves to dig them that much deeper.  We preach the commitment to the effort as the victory because the victory that we promised never materialized.  Therefore we are left having to save face and salvage the failure by believing that we’re accomplishing something by at least having tried.  We fancy ourselves as rather ingenious, but the outcome of our supposed ingenuity is anything but genius, even though we proclaim it as such.  Our efforts to rescue ourselves only serves to enhance our need to be rescued.   Rescue.  It’s hard to admit that we need it.

”Christmas Reawakened and Reclaimed:” Am I Listening to the Lyrics? - The Music of the World at Christmas

What am I listening to?  What is it that I fill my head up with?  Whatever we listen to is eventually what we will become.  We can pretend that's not the case, and we can lead ourselves to believe that we can manage the stuff that we let into our heads.  But the fact is, what we list to is eventually what we will become.  However, the worst of it is that we don't think about what we put in our heads.  We find some element of something as appealing or soothing or nice in whatever way it's nice, and therefore we grant all of it entrance into our lives without really stepping back and asking what it's saying to us.

What is the world speaking into your head?  What have you given it permission to say and in what way has that changed you?  At Christmas, we might wish to ask what that message is.  In fact, we might want to hold that message up against the message of Christmas and ask ourselves which one we would rather have shape our lives?  The message of Christmas is a message that no message formed by man can challenge.  The message of Christmas is the message that we're all looking for that we will never find in the messages of the world...despite how hard we might look.  The message of Christmas is "the message."  So this Christmas you might ask, "What message am I listening to?"

 

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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Twenty-Four

“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.

Thought for the Day - Christmas #3

“For the power of Christmas rests in the fact that we will never completely understand the vastness of it, but that will never stop its ability to completely transform the fullness of us.”

- Craig D. Lounsbrough

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Twenty-Three

“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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Twenty-Two

“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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Twenty-One

“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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Twenty

“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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Nineteen

“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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Eighteen

“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.

Thought for the Day - Christmas #2

“Christmas is a vivid and brilliantly revealing lens.  And if we dare to look at ourselves through this rich and telling lens, we are able to clearly see the majesty within ourselves that we’ve so foolishly forsaken.  But rather than leaving us saddened and forlorn by what we’ve abandoned, this lens also possesses ample power to give us back what we threw away.”

- Craig D. Lounsbrough

”Christmas Reawakened and Reclaimed:” Christmas In a Box

Christmas In a Box

As the snow began to quietly début winter’s arrival, I made my yearly descent to the basement.  Rummaging through the backwaters of the musty root cellar, I spied the dusty stack of aged boxes with the word “Christmas” hastily scrawled across their cardboard sides.  Inside of them lay the wonder of Christmas embodied in carefully crafted decorations and precious mementos of all sizes and sorts and types.  Staring at the boxes, I suddenly found myself entirely engulfed by the horrifying fact that we spend much of our lives boxing up wonder.

 

The Abuse of Boxes

Indeed, we put things in boxes.  The function of a box is to provide a set of distinct parameters designed to effectively contain whatever needs containing.  A box imposes restrictions.  It sets a limit as to how far something can go.  Things are assigned a defined space where they are on hold, typically because we have no use for them in the active part of our daily existence.  Therefore, they’re stored away until our existence grants them whatever tiny bit of space they are granted for however long our existence grants it.  We put things in boxes.

 

Boxes of Heart, Mind and Soul

But the majority of our boxes are not made of cardboard, or plastic, or metal, or any other such rudimentary substances.  Our boxes are not those things stored in the shadowy corners of our damp basements, or shoved into the tight confines of our suffocating attics, or crammed into the five-by ten of some self-storage on the other side of town.  These do not represent the vast majority of our boxes…at all.

The majority of our boxes won’t be found in basements, or attics, or some self-storage facility.  They are, in fact, within us.  Deep within us.  And we have made them.  We’ve tediously constructed them to protect ourselves from painful histories, or shut down truths that don’t set well with us, or eliminate the people in our lives who we find distasteful.  We build them to shield ourselves from ourselves (in whatever way that we feel we need to do that).  We build them to keep ourselves from the guilt of doing or being what we shouldn’t be doing or being.  We build boxes so that we contain those things that we would otherwise be running from, or we build them to give us a ready excuse not to run ‘to’ the things that maybe we should be running to.  We put things in boxes.

 

Why Boxes?

Some boxes might make sense.  “But why,” I asked, “do we put great things in boxes?”  Powerful things?  Things that can handily rescue us from the tangled messes that we make with such tedious perfection?  Why do we box up that which can heal our deepest wounds, wrestle our worst addictions into submission, grant us a sustainable hope that will stand against the most sustained darkness of a world gone dark?  What in the world would behoove us to box up the very things that can handily reign in all of the destructive things that we’ve cut loose that are constantly cutting us up?  What sort of insanity compels us to box up the very things that we spend the entirety of our lives searching for?

We are a stubborn bunch of people.  But that’s the message of Christmas that’s tough to swallow, and that’s the very thing that prompted the delivery of that message.  That we are stubborn to our own demise.  That we would be ‘the death of us’ unless God was willing to come and give ‘life to us.’  That the enemy is not necessarily something that’s prowling around in the shifting shadows that constantly circle us in some stealthy manner.  Rather, that we are the enemy and that it is from ourselves that we need to be saved.  That is the message embodied in the boxes tucked away in the musty confines of the root cellar with the word “Christmas” errantly scrawled across them.  That is the intent of Christmas.  That God decided to initiate the greatest rescue mission in all of human history at the greatest cost that any mission would ever demand…the death of His own Son.

 

Boxing Up Christmas

Despite the sour rhetoric of our times and the efforts of so many to massage us into complacent ignorance, this is the message that we as a culture have placed, pressed and imprisoned in boxes built by self-serving philosophies, special interest groups gone rogue, and platforms born of greed and power.  This is the message that we find so aversive and chafing.  It is our single salvation, but we box it up anyway.  It is the only light in the darkness that we have foolishly come to call light.  It is the only thing big enough to be able to course the turbulent seas of our times and throw us the lifeline that we refuse as we wait for other promised lifelines that never come.  This is what we box up.  And such an action is ignorance of the greatest sort that will insure a death of the most painful sort.

We must take Christmas out of the cultural boxes into which we have thoughtlessly crammed it.  We must free it of the confines of our stupidity, we must release if from the filthy hands of our greed that shaped each box, and it must be freed of the bane of special interests that attempt to seal these boxes tight.  And once we’ve done all of that, we must burn every box to ash and cinders.

 

Christmas Can’t Be Boxed

Yet, the oddity of it all is that we really can’t keep Christmas in a box anyway.  We might ignorantly presume such power, but it is only an assumption and nothing more.  Despite our most robust efforts to ignore it, deny it, render it a fairy-tale, play it off as the invention of misty-eyed dreamers, and press it far off of the edges of a blind culture, Christmas remains what it is.  It will forever remain the only rescue mission that set out with enough power to actually rescue us.  No matter the propaganda and hype that we grant them, all other missions will fail…miserably.  And I would hate to meet my own death realizing that I was ignorant enough to box up the only thing that could have saved me. 

When Christmas has concluded and the celebrations have stilled, when the songs have fallen silent and the parties have ceased, leave Christmas out of the box that you can’t put it in anyway.  Let it be what nothing else can be.  Let it rescue you, your family, your children, your marriage, your community, and your world.  And I don’t believe that any of us want to put in any box anything that has the power to do that.  

 

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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Seventeen

“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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Sixteen

“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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Fifteen

“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.

Thoughts to Enrich and Enliven Your Holiday Celebrations

The gift of Christmas (the gift of God’s Son) empowers us to do all of what we were designed to do, but will fail to God unless God empowers us to do it. It is the liberation from everything that we were ‘not’ designed to be and not designed to do. It is the opportunity and the power to finally, finally be our authentic selves. And then, how about the durability of Christmas? These things that Christmas does…but how long do they last? “Have we ever consider the boldness of Christmas? For to craft such a daring story and to do so in a manner that it is sufficiently sturdy to stand up under the relentless scrutiny that is certain to be brought to bear against such a story is boldness indeed. And when God pens a story He does so not fearing scrutiny, but inviting as much of it as any one of us can muster up, for God does nothing that is not bold. Such is God and such is Christmas.” What God writes and what God does has no expiration date attached to it. There’s no last page. No period. What He writes and what He does will never find an end in itself. He’s the Creator of eternal stuff, and only eternal stuff. This stuff lasts forever. And then finally, does it really transform, because a lot of things say that they transform, but they don’t. Does Christmas transform right down to the bottom of everything that needs to be transformed? Does it really change everything? Does it really make everything new? And if so, if it really does, why do so many people just walk past it? Think about this: “One of the things that vexes me to the point of near insanity is understanding the message of Christmas and realizing the potency of this message to transform the worst of our lives so that we can become the best of our ourselves, to shift the momentum of entire cultures so that the world is brilliantly enriched by each instead of destroyed by all, and to handily touch the hem of history itself so that history is changed in the touching. And while all of these are ours for the taking, I continue to watch the mindless hoards trudge past these things in order to embrace everything that is not the ‘everything’ of these gifts. And so I pray that God would grant them a heart ready to be captured by the ‘everything’ of Christmas.” Don’t miss Christmas anymore. Don’t. Don’t miss the immensity of what God did, and what God continues to do. Get out of your rigid and confined thinking. Look at what Christmas truly is and what it truly does. Let this Christmas be the beginning of a ‘forever’ transformation in your life. Here’s wishing you and yours all the power of this incredible gift. __________________________________________________________________________________

Enjoy LifeTalk on most podcast platforms. You will also find daily inspirational quotations on all of Craig's Social Media sites. Finally, visit Craig's website at www.craiglpc.com to discover an array of timely and thoughtful resources.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Fourteen

“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.

Christmas in a Box - Greatness Boxed

We must take Christmas out of the cultural boxes into which we have thoughtlessly crammed it. We must free it of the confines of our stupidity, we must release if from the filthy hands of our greed that shaped each box, and it must be freed of the bane of special interests that attempt to seal these boxes tight. And once we’ve done all of that, we must burn every box to ash and cinders.

Yet, the oddity of it all is that we really can’t keep Christmas in a box anyway. We might ignorantly presume such power, but it is only an assumption and nothing more. Despite our most robust efforts to ignore it, deny it, render it a fairy-tale, play it off as the invention of misty-eyed dreamers, and press it far off of the edges of a blind culture, Christmas remains what it is. It will forever remain the only rescue mission that set out with enough power to actually rescue us. No matter the propaganda and hype that we grant them, all other missions will fail…miserably. And I would hate to meet my own death realizing that I was ignorant enough to box up the only thing that could have saved me.

When Christmas has concluded and the celebrations have stilled, when the songs have fallen silent and the parties have ceased, leave Christmas out of the box that you can’t put it in anyway. Let it be what nothing else can be. Let it rescue you, your family, your children, your marriage, your community, and your world. And I don’t believe that any of us want to put in anything in any box that has the power to do that. ________________________________________________________________________________

Discover all of LifeTalk's programming on most podcast platforms as well as Craig's YouTube channel. Also look for Craig's daily quotes and posts on Facebook, Pinterest, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Finally, enjoy Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Thirteen

“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.

”Christmas Reawakened and Reclaimed:” Our Need for Rescue

Christmas - Our Need for Rescue

Rescue.  It is hard to admit that we need to be rescued.  We think ourselves to be smart enough, cunning enough, strategic enough, and enough of whatever it is that we need to be enough of to save ourselves.  We tediously craft an endless array of things to rescue us from the things that we previously crafted to rescue us that ended us stranding us.  We add problem to problem.  Dilemma to dilemma.  Disappointment to disappointment.  The very effort to dig ourselves out of the holes that we’ve dug only serves to dig them that much deeper.  We preach the commitment to the effort as the victory because the victory that we promised never materialized, and therefore we are left having to save face and salvage the failure by believing that we’re accomplishing something.  We fancy ourselves as rather ingenious, but the outcome of our supposed ingenuity is anything but genius, even though we proclaim it as such.  Our efforts to rescue ourselves only serves to enhance our need to be rescued.   Rescue.  It’s hard to admit that we need it.

But we live in adamant denial of all of this.  We put a good face on it all.  We spin it as the fact that things always get worse before they get better.  We encourage patience.  We preach endurance.  In the prolonged absence of any shred of victory, we shift our focus and hail fortitude as giving a battle lost the sense of a battle having had value despite the loss.  We proclaim the glories of the battle sufficient, so that we can soften the fact that there is no victory in which to glory.  We say that the light is on the edge of the horizon, and if we determine to draw on our last bit of energy, raise ourselves up one more time, and press forward, the light will dawn. Yet, night continues to rule the day as much as it rules the night.  Rescue.  It’s hard to admit that we need it.

Christmas is the greatest rescue mission in all of human history.  It is a breathtakingly tangible manifestation of the love of God.  The rescue of us meant the death of His Son.  That is a price that few of us would dare to pay.  But God did.  It was about His Son being born in the backwater of poverty to two teenage parents in a place far off of the map of commerce and influence.  It was largely a birth of obscurity.  A quiet entrance possessing nothing of the trappings of a King whatsoever.  This child was inserted into this world at the most impoverished point that can be imagined, so that He would know the impoverishment within which we walk.  And on the other end of it, the irony of it all was that He was executed at the hands of the very people that He came to rescue.  

Those He sought to save wished Him dead and fulfilled that wish in a manner brutal, heartless, and excruciating beyond imagination.  Rescue.  It’s hard to admit that we need it.  So we killed the Person who came to do it.  And too many of us continue to kill Him today.  Day in and day out, many of us kill the only Person Who can rescue us.

Christmas.  It stands as the greatest rescue mission in all of human history, and it came at a cost that will never, and can never be matched despite how long history might be made.  That is Christmas.  And we have the power to reject the only rescue that will ever really matter and therefore succumb to our own pathetic efforts to rescue ourselves.  Or we have the power to accept it and never, never need rescue ever again.  Rescue.  It’s hard to admit that we need it.  So, this Christmas, will you be rescued or not?

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

• John 3:16

 

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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Twelve

“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.

”Christmas Reawakened and Reclaimed:” What Is Christmas?

The Tragedy of Gutting Greatness

Have we forgotten Christmas?  Or more tragically, have we never really known it at all?  Have we embraced some pathetic derivative that is but a thin and emaciated shadow of something that we have found intimidating and demanding because of how grand it is?  And so, do we diminish great stories out of our fear of them?  More frighteningly, do we then come to believe those stories as ‘the story?’

Have we diligently re-crafted and recast some original story, beneficently leaving a few scattered themes that we thought to be profound, yet sufficiently diminishing the story so that it could not demand something of us?  Have we come to understand that the adventure of wonder is welcomed by us when it is safely held within the imaginative bounds of fiction, but that we fear it should it be loosed into our reality?

Have we discovered that we love great things, but we hold them in dread fear at the same time?  And have we come to understand that we fear them because they explicitly highlight in rather blunt fashion all that is not great within us?  Do we stand at great distance from things both marvelous and majestic so that our inadequacies might not be revealed should we step too closely?

Have we considered that great things call us to great things because it is in their nature to do so and that they cannot do otherwise?  And in the call to great things, do we prefer our own weak and tiresome agendas because we can control them and they ask very little if anything from us?  Have we come to understand that the call to great things is also a call to great risk, and that comfort too often has its way with us?

Have we opted for a storyline of our own making as it will neither push the boundaries outside of our boundaries, nor will it demand that we risk handing the pen and pages of our life story over to another author even if that author be far superior to ourselves?  Do we take scripts wrought of magnificent design and flawless penmanship, and do we edit them to suit the smallness of our agendas and confines of our worlds as we have created them?  And in all of these things and so much more, have we forgotten Christmas?

 

How We Forget

In doing all of these things, do we take great things and drag them down the dregs of our darkened minds and scantily clad worlds?  For it may be that we write off the majestic by relegating it to the misguided concoctions of misty-eyed dreamers or fanciful novelists who are far too much in their heads and far too little in reality.  Indeed, we may simply push the majestic aside once we have pounded it dead with our morbid rationalizations, our flagrant justifications and our stale realism.  Indeed, we may push it aside and with it we push aside everything that we’ve longed for but fear to long for.

Or, do we tame the majestic by making it our story?  Is it sometimes too majestic to push aside, for in the pushing we know that it remains irresistibly tantalizing and we must somehow dispense with it so that we don’t turn to run after it?  And so to tame it sufficiently, we meticulously re-write it and ardently editorialize it so that it retains a shallow fragrance of the majestic, but not enough so as to win the allegiance of our hearts or hold captive the depths of our minds.  Do we wish to make great stories our stories so that we can play with them but not be held by them?  Do we cut and paste the prose of the eternal so that we can read them at arm’s length rather than disarming everything that we are so that we can run the length of them?  And in doing these things, have we forgotten Christmas?

 

What Is Christmas?

Christmas is everything that God would do, and nothing that we would imagine Him doing.  It is the great story of a great God who refused to give up on everything that had given up on Him.  It was and it is selflessness and majesty of the greatest sort imaginable, where God inserted Himself into the very created order that ordered Him out.  And He did so knowing that salvation and redemption of even the remotest kind could never be crafted at the hands of men.  That the incessant rebellion of mankind to declare their sovereignty and proclaim themselves to be their own gods was an indisputable death wish because we are infinitely too small to be our own gods, and we are far too inadequate to ever save ourselves from ourselves.

Christmas is God refusing to abandon that which had abandoned Him.  It is selflessness that is unimaginable to the human mind, entirely unparalleled in all of human existence, and dolefully absent in human character.  It is a story that man cannot replicate either in the imagining or crafting of just such a story.  And if we could somehow raise ourselves up sufficiently to craft even a few scant lines of such a story, we have neither the power nor the courage to live it out.  Most profoundly, it is a story that never has and never will demand a response of any kind because it recognizes that the greatest transformations never rest in demands, but in invitations.  Christmas is God’s greatest invitation.

 

What Sets the Story Above All Other Stories

Finally, unless the Christmas story is something greater than a story, it has no inherent value greater than any other story.  Unless it is endued with the power to unapologetically transform those who dare to read it, it is just another tale.  And so to make it infinitely greater than simply a story, God did something no one else can do.  God penned His own death into the script. 

It may well be that the degree of sinfulness in us that would call for such a sacrifice is simply too difficult to look at.  Maybe we fear what such a great sacrifice might demand of us.  It may be that to acknowledge such a sacrifice is to acknowledge our inability to save ourselves.  And it may well be that such an offer is so grand, and it highlights our inadequacies so profoundly that we have re-written the story beyond recognition so that it does not prick our conscience or call us beyond ourselves.  And if we continue to do that, we will continue to write stories that spell our own demise.

We would be wise to cease our tampering, stop our editorializing, and quit vandalizing the story of Christmas, for in the end the one who is robbed is us.  God came, God died, and God rose from the dead.  That’s the story.  I thank Him that eternity is eternally secured, and that every day until then is secured in the same manner.  And I have no interest and certainly no ability to rewrite a story like that.

Wishing you all that is Christmas, and all that God has given you in this grandest of all stories.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Eleven

“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.

”Christmas Reawakened and Reclaimed:” Christmas - We Forget

Christmas - We Forget

We forget. In the middle of our own agendas, we forget. Consumed by the incessantly shifting tides of the culture, we forget. Caught up in the ever-changing maze of politically correct ideologies, we forget. With bills looming and jobs teetering and marriages faltering, we forget. With value systems crumbling and leadership charting a course to places dark and foreboding, we forget. With crime rising and hope dwindling and common sense disappearing, we forget.

We forget. When we fix our eyes upon the world around us, we will forget. When we vest our hope in man-made institutions and root the entirety of our confidence in the strategies of men, we will forget. When we invest our lives in hoarding material wealth and exhaust our resources in the pursuit of successes that catch the eyes and admiration of those around us, we will forget. Oh yes, we will forget.

We forget. When we demand our own way we become wayward. When we are swept up by the greed of our own minds we will be swept away by that very same greed. When we lay claim to life as ours and ours alone, we lay claim to the foundations of our own demise. When we resolutely state that we are the captains of our own ships and we flamboyantly declare that we need no other captain, we have set sail for rocky shoals and certain disaster. We forget.

We forget. When we declare that there is no God, we declare that the unparalleled ability to ponder something as vast as God, as well as our equally profound ability to reject something that magnificent is nothing more than an outgrowth of evolution. And if we forget something as great as God, we are well on our way to forgetting all other such things marvelous and magnificent for none are greater than Him. We forget. Oh yes, we will forget to our own detriment.

And in time, we will forget that we forgot. We will forget that there was anything to forget in the first place. And in the forgetting, we will take all of the marvelous things in life and we will slowly and methodically lose them. In the tragedy of losing them, we will distill our lives down to the rancid mediocrity of human beings who forgot everything they should have remembered. We will forget because we don't care. We will forget because we don't make time to remember. We will forget because it was more convenient and less demanding to forget. We will forget because we foolishly deemed other small and miniscule things as greater than truly great things. We will forget out of carelessness and will forget because of selfishness. We forget. Oh yes, we will forget and we will be the poorer for it.

 

Christmas is God Refusing to Forget

Yet, the beauty of Christmas is that God didn't forget. Not now. Not ever. Despite man's incessant proclivity to forget God, God never forgot. Despite man's demands for a faith that excluded God, God never forgot. In light of man's arrogance and the relentless insults hurled at God by both the actions and attitudes of men, God never forgot. Even though mankind has outright rejected God and cast Him into the realm of fairytales, myth and places of cultural irrelevance, God still never forgot nor does He forget. And when man declared himself as God and attempted to usurp God, entirely expunging Him from every conceivable area of life . . . even then God did not forget. Not now. Not ever.

Christmas is God remembering. Christmas is God's refusal to forget. Christmas is God's declaration that He will never forget. Christmas was God deliberately placing Himself squarely in the middle of humanity when that very same humanity sought to remove Him squarely from the middle of everything by any means possible. Christmas is God's greatest gift ever given to mankind despite the thoughtless abuses of mankind in their mad march to forget. Christmas is God's staunch refusal to forget, and it is His forever commitment to forgive. It is His commitment never to forget even though we are reckless enough to do so. No, God doesn't forget. And Christmas is a powerful and compelling proof of that reality.

 

We forget. Oh yes, we certainly forget. Maybe, just maybe it's time to remember once again.

 

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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Ten

“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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Nine

“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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Eight

“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.

Christmas Rescue

Welcome to LifeTalk

Christmas Rescue

“I’m not certain that the greatest thrill was actually being rescued. Rather, I think that the greatest thrill was finally realizing that I would be. And the cry of an infant two thousand years ago was that realization.”

That’s Christmas. It’s our rescue. It’s our prison break. It eliminates our need to erase, or rewrite, or edit, or rip out parts of the book, or pretend that they never happened at all. Christmas eliminates all of that.

How is that possible? It’s simple. God reversed Himself and became a human, reversing Himself even further by becoming a newborn human. He was born to an impoverished teenage couple in a barn that sat in the obscurity of a backwater town called Bethlehem that was located completely off the map of commerce or importance. He entered the world about as far from any kind of political stage, or religious hierarchy, or privileged status that He could find. And the endgame of His birth, of this thing that we call “Christmas” was the fact that thirty-three years later He would die to pay an infinite price to have us restored to an infinitely loving God that we had ignorantly walked away from. He made everything right when everything was wrong.

Or to put it another way: “Christmas is deliverance delivered.” Jesus is our deliverance. Our rescue. He is our prison break. He eliminates the need to erase, or rewrite, or edit, or rip out parts of the book, or pretend that they never happened at all. Jesus eliminates all of that. He takes your guilt, He heals your regret, He removes your self-hatred, He eliminates your jealousy, and He gives you hope. And all of that is His gift to you, given at the cost of His own life. A trade of Him for us. And that gift is ours today, tomorrow and forever. There’s no story that He cannot heal, and that includes your story.

Tune into Craig's podcasts on Apple Podcast, Player FM, iHeart Radio and more. Also, discover all of Craig's books at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Seven

“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.

Thought for the Day - Christmas #1

“Christmas was God deciding to do what we didn’t deserve in order to save us from what we did.”

- Craig D. Lounsbrough

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Six

“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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Five

“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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Four

“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.