Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

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.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day 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 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 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.

Thanksgiving Thoughts - Changing Your Attitude

Welcome to LifeTalk Thanks for joining us for this Thanksgiving Edition

Here's some quotes drawn from today's podcast to help shape your attitude and enhance your sense of Thanksgiving:

“Thanksgiving demands that we set aside the cultural narrative and be thankful for all of the things that the narrative says are not enough.”

It’s not about the things that we possess as being enough. It’s that we have them in the first place.

“If I am swallowed up in the bowels of negativity, and if the world seems eternally dark and forever foreboding it is likely that I have recklessly abandoned any notion of thankfulness. It is entirely likely that I have set the whole of my mind on what I don’t have, constructed the essence of my attitude around what hasn’t worked, and fashioned a vision for my future on the cold corpses of the many dreams that died horrific deaths. Yet, if I dare to be thankful for the fact that what I do have will always outweigh what I don’t, that everything that didn’t work places me one step closer to that which will, and that the death of one dream creates a space for the birth of a greater one, negativity will perish, light will dawn, and I will never fall to any of these things again.”

Attitude. How are we going to think about things? How are we going to choose to think about whatever it is that our life has become. And finally, think about this: “I have learned that an attitude of thankfulness is not simply an attitude. It is a perspective brazenly empowered to shape the lens through which I look at the world. And I have likewise learned that such an attitude is one of the very few things in life that not only has the ability to clean such a lens to perfection, but it has the power to render it crisp and sharp. And once you look through a lens such as this, no other lens will suffice and neither will any other attitude.”

And so, as stated at the beginning, have you ever wonder why your life is so lackluster? Have you wondered why it’s always so flat? So unappealing? So bland and unfulfilling and empty and all of the things that you wish it were not? Maybe it’s your attitude. Maybe that’s why.

And maybe this is why Thanksgiving needs to be more than food and football and Black Friday and Cyber Monday, because that’s cheapening it in ways that are entirely unacceptable and completely irresponsible. Don’t do that. Let Thanksgiving be transformational in your life, because you need it to be that way.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Discover all of Craig's books at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Enjoy the video version of today's podcast on Craig Lounsbrough's YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkQbp1TPROU.

Thought for the Day -Thanksgiving #3

“Thanksgiving is an attitude that must be rooted in the ‘gift of life’ if we ever hope to be thankful for the ‘gifts’ of life.”

- Craig D. Lounsbrough

Thought for the Day - Thanksgiving #2

“It is my hope that despite the gravity of the trials, we will never forget that the privilege to live life always offsets the difficulties involved in the living of it.  This is the essence of thanksgiving.”

- Craig D. Lounsbrough

”Thanksgiving Reawakened and Reclaimed:” Being Thankful - Greed or Gratitude

Being Thankful - Greed or Gratitude

We all have personal agendas, and typically we have quite a boatload of them.  Many times when it comes to personal agendas, we can become so entranced and subsequently driven by them that the actual cost of achieving them often becomes a secondary consideration, or maybe not even a consideration at all.  When we’re in a feverish pursuit of our agendas, we can, and we frequently will rob, pillage and/or discard many things along the way in order to achieve our agendas.  Oddly enough, we can even destroy the very things that allowed us to pursue those agendas in the first place.  In reality, this kind of self-pursuit is personal and cultural suicide in the making.

It seems that’s we’ve done that with many aspects of our cultural traditions, values and foundational principles.  In the apparent insanity of 21^st century living, we’re ruthlessly gutting out of our society the very things that raised our society as a nation unparalleled in all of human history.  In the wild and ego-centric pursuit of rights, privileges, entitlements, selfish aggrandizements and self-centered agendas, we’re killing the very fabric of the very nation that afforded us those very rights and privileges in the first place.  It seems that we’re involved in a feeding frenzy that doesn’t preserve or extend the precious rights and hard-won privileges afforded to us, but that rather consumes them in our mad grab for all the things that we feel we’re entitled to.

 

Real and Reorienting Thanksgiving

I think that we would be quite wise to stop for a moment and take stock of exactly who we’ve become and exactly where we’re headed in this pell-mell rush of greed and ‘right’s grabbing.’  It would seem incredibly wise to begin the careful process of comprehensively identifying and reclaiming that which we’ve carelessly discarded along the way, understanding that reclaiming these principles, values, ethics and morals is not about returning to an outmoded past that will bring the future to some grinding halt.  Neither is it about an aversion to progressive thinking or constricting the scope of human possibilities.  Rather, it’s understanding that effectively reintegrating these principles, values, ethics and morals in our present breaks open impossible possibilities for the future in a way that nothing else can and nothing else will.  Despite opinions to the contrary, restoring these values is the most progressive course of action that we could hope to take.

Maybe the place to begin that process is right here at this holiday that we call Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving is grabbing and hoarding in reverse.  It’s not about getting more stuff.  It’s about being thankful for what we have without the underlying toxic agenda of being thankful only to get more stuff.  It casts a steady eye toward what we have and not toward what we don’t have.  Thanksgiving is not about some antiquated social courtesy or worn tradition.  Rather, it’s about a wholly liberating mind-set that probably fits within the wealth and cultural advancements of the 21^st century better than any other preceding century in our nation’s history.  Thanksgiving is free of greed, absent of agendas of acquisition, it has no hint of hoarding whatsoever, and it’s not concerned with conquering.  Thanksgiving realizes that if we’re not thankful for what we have, then whatever we have will never be enough.  And if what we have is never enough, we have doomed ourselves a mindset of impoverishment when we actually sit in plenty.

 

Thanksgiving as a Pause

Thanksgiving is a pause of the most precious sort.  It is a time to reflect on gifts, blessings, unwarranted successes and undeserved acquisitions.  Thanksgiving is a posture of both mind and heart where we recognize how terribly fortunate we are, and how much we’ve been blessed despite the fact that we haven’t been the blessing that we should have been.  It’s about realizing with a starkly humbling intensity that all of life is a gift, that absolutely nothing is deserved, that everything is an unearned privilege, and that every breath that we take is handed to us with the simple request that we live onto others rather than unto self.

Thanksgiving is a pause that reminds us that life is much less about the press of pursuit, and much more about the pause of thankfulness.  It reminds us that thankfulness is not shackled to the crippling confines of only the good things that happen in our lives.  Rather, in the quietness of such a pause we are reminded that even horrific pain and crippling misfortune have within them the unmatched building blocks for unparalleled growth and phenomenal maturation.  Thanksgiving reminds us that no matter what befalls us in life, we can always take the shards and shattered pieces, and from these charred remnants we can reconstruct a life unimaginably stronger and wildly richer than that from which the shards and pieces fell.  Without Thanksgiving, we miss all of that.

 

Thanksgiving as a Reorientation

Thanksgiving reminds us that life is not to be focused on acquisition and accomplishment, but on an attitude of thankfulness that we have the privilege and opportunity of acquiring and accomplishing in the first place.  It’s not about what we can get, but that the opportunity to get things exists at all.  It’s a mindful orientation that life is not about a mad dash to get as many toys as we can before the next guy does.  It’s not about “keeping up the Jones’s,” or a three thousand square foot house and a white picket fence, or having two and half kids, or building financially fat portfolios.

Thanksgiving focuses on the fact that we have the privilege to envision those kinds of things and that we have the ability to actually seek them.  When we embrace that kind of thinking, life takes on a preciousness.  We recognize that life is not something that we acquire.  Rather, it’s about something that we enjoy and savor.  It’s not about possession as possession only diminishes the thing that we possess.  It’s coming to the life-altering understanding that truly precious things can’t be owned anyway.  Truly precious things can only be enjoyed.  And the wonder of it all is not only realizing that we can’t we own them, but we don’t have to expend the energy in the maintenance of them in order to enjoy them.  Such an understanding is liberating indeed.

 

Thanksgiving Calls Us Out

Make no mistake about it . . . Thanksgiving calls us out.  In life, the greater the principle, the less people there are who will follow it.  It is always the case that the higher the calling, the fewer the followers.  Thanksgiving asks of our humanity what our humanity struggles to give.  It asks that we shift away from an attitude of selfishness to an attitude of selflessness.  It asks that we recognize that life is not something that we amass, but it is something at which we should be amazed.  It is not the possession of objects, rather it is the privilege to be granted ample provisions.  It is not the holding of life, but being held ourselves in the act of beholding life.

Thanksgiving is a titanic shift of mind and massive alteration of heart.  Yet, in the end it grants us the very kind of life that we’ve been seeking through endless acquisition.  It’s the sure path to the kind of life that’s deep, peaceful, content and rich, when the path we’ve chosen to get us there actually takes us anywhere but there.  In short, an attitude of thankfulness is transformational.

Change your attitude and your life will be changed.  Change your life and we begin to change our world.  Maybe Thanksgiving is the very place to start.        

 

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.

• 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

Thought for Today - Thanksgiving #1

“An attitude of thanksgiving will thrive and it will breathe life into any place where a heart of appreciation and gratitude refuses to give way to a brooding sense of entitlement, the scourge of greed, or any other lesser attitudes that keep company with such things.”

- Craig D. Lounsbrough

”Thanksgiving Reawakened and Reclaimed:” Thanksgiving - Contrary to the Culture

Thanksgiving.  To the destruction and detriment of those who live there, it will perish in an environment within which a sense of entitlement and greed rules the day.  Conversely, on the opposite end of that spectrum, a sense of thanksgiving will thrive and it will breathe life into any place where a heart of appreciation and gratitude refuses to give way to a brooding sense of entitlement, the scourge of greed, or any other lesser attitudes that keep company with such things.

 

But in whatever place we might find ourselves on this spectrum, we must understand that the remarkable power of Thanksgiving will live undiminished regardless of where we fall, simply because our determined adherence to it, or our blatant rejection of it cannot touch or in any way diminish something spun of things eternal. 

”Thanksgiving Reawakened and Reclaimed:” Thankful for the Possibility of Possibilities - Flying With the Geese

Flying with the geese.  Following the seasons instead of being left behind in whatever season that we are in.  Taking wing and launching ourselves off to new horizons, fresh goals, untainted opportunities, and unexplored places.  To live life as an ever-unfolding adventure that is always anticipating the next adventure.  We want to live life like this.  We really do.  We might fear it sometimes.  We might think that it takes too much energy or we don't have the time.  We might believe that we don't have the abilities to live a life like that.  We can think a lot of things, but we want to fly.

At Thanksgiving, we need to be thankful for the fact that we can fly.  Maybe not like the geese that head south every year.  But we have opportunities to fly in different ways that are even more magnificent and breathtaking.  We are only relegated to the sidelines of life because we have put ourselves there.  Life does present us with opportunities that are beyond the scope of our own understanding.  But we have to take hold of them.  We must press past our fears, refuse our desire for comfort, be willing to head somewhere that we've never been, and then we must then go.  I am thankful that all of us can fly.  The question is, will we?

 

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.

”Thanksgiving Reawakened and Reclaimed:” Rich Living - Climbing Trees and Mending Shoes

Rich living has nothing to do with wealth...depending upon the kind of wealth we're referring to.  Rich living is found far more frequently in impoverished lives.  It is in these lives that the clutter of material wealth is absent so that these lives are free to see what is truly precious.  Life is not about the pursuit of 'stuff.'  Rather, it's about the pursuit of the everyday experiences that are handed to us without cost or obligation.  It's about 'being thankful that we can be thankful' and that such thankfulness is not based on possessions, but on the privilege we have to be possessed by life itself.

Rich living means that we live with a sense of gratitude.  Life may be easy or it may be difficult, but we find a space for gratitude in either place.  It's recognizing that life is a privilege, even at those times when it doesn't necessarily feel that way.  It's an appreciate for the little things that we lose in the search of bigger things.  It's realizing that thankfulness is not about great accomplishments, but little gifts.  That all around us are things that we can savor and enjoy because God scatters such things every place we go.  It's about climbing trees and mending shoes.

 

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.

”Perspectives For a Culture in Crisis:” We Are Better Than This - Missing the Essence of Us

Rarely do we rise to the pinnacle of our capabilities.  However, all too often we readily descend to the dismal pit of our inabilities.  We’re remarkably human, but we’re terribly primal at the same time.  We have the ability to access an intellect that has no equal in all of creation, yet we defer to something more animalistic that’s all too common in all of creation.  And that primal, animalistic side of us is more often than not the “primary” side of us.  And that’s primarily a problem because “we are better than this.”

It seems that we’re relatively slow to think and dreadfully quick to react.  We’re sluggish to methodically strategize our actions, while we’re reflexively quick to strike out in some sort of impulsive reaction.  Rather than draw upon the expanse of our intellect and the depth of our wisdom, particularly in the difficult times, we too often grab the closest thing to us and start swinging.

Too often we’re not prudent and we’re anything but judicious.  We’ve too easily abandoned our intellectual capabilities and we react in less than thoughtful ways.  And when we do that long enough, we tend to forget that we have the ability to be and to act in ways that are far above what we’re being, and far more judicious than how we’re acting.  We’re slowly led to believe that we’re a bit more primal than anything else, and that a keen discernment and a prudent approach is either “beyond us,” or that it “takes too much work” to get there when in reality “we are better than this.”

 

Is It Beyond Us?

Too often we use the whole mentality that something’s beyond us as an excuse to avoid using what’s actually within us.  We don’t want to be all that accountable, or we’re not really all that interested in stepping up, or we don’t want to extend ourselves, or a million other excuses for the inexcusable attitudes of mediocrity and apathy.  “We could never do that,” we incessantly tell ourselves as a means of lulling ourselves into some sort of stale complacency.  And in doing so, we penalize our spirits, forfeit our abilities, and levy a heavy fine on our capabilities.  “We are better than this.”        

 

Is It Too Much Work?

The fact that acting with wisdom, prudence and discretion takes some time and requires a bit of energy is quite often something less than appealing.  To act wisely and thoughtfully means that we purposefully rally our intellectual resources, apply those resources in order to carefully ascertain the situation, make judicious decisions based on our observations, and then engage the situation with wisdom, balance and discernment.  That all takes time and energy, and often it takes a lot of it.  Too often we’re not really all that interested in expending that kind of time and energy because we’d much prefer to speedily dispense with whatever we’re facing, or all we’re really interested in is driving an agenda and nothing more, and in reality we probably want to get on to something that’s much more fun and much less demanding.  So we do what we have to do to simply get it done in order to just get it done.  “We are better than this.”     

 

It’s Everywhere

Sadly, these behaviors aren’t exclusive to us.  In fact, they seem to be becoming a whole lot more prevalent in our culture these days.  We watch individuals at all levels in all kinds of roles and in an endless variety of occupations doing the very same thing.  Frequently we have an expectation that individuals in certain roles should obviously be acting wisely, thoughtfully and with an astute judiciousness.  To us, it’s clear that people in certain positions of authority or in critical situations should be acting with a keen degree of prudence and reacting with an unbiased discretion.  Yet, often they don’t.  And so we see this malaise and indifference populating the actions and behaviors of people everywhere.  In time, we devolve into the assumption that it’s just the way it is.  And over time, we tragically lose the understanding that “we are better than this.”

 

Reclamation

“We are better than this.”  We are better than how we behave.  We are better than the ways in which we act.  We are better than what our decisions would suggest and what our actions would portray.  We are better than the image that we have projected into the world around us, and the reflection of ourselves that we see within us.  “We are better than this!”

I would rather pointedly suggest that it’s time to reclaim the fact that “we are better than this.”  It’s time to step up and refuse to be less than what we are.  And in reclaiming the fact that “we are better than this,” it’s time that we not only believe it, but it’s high time that we deliberately act upon it.  It’s time that we get past the errant idea that it’s “beyond us” and that it takes “too much work” to do it.  It’s time that we step into the mind boggling expanse of who we were created to be, recognize the enormity of what that is, and live it out with a stubborn intensity and intentionality.  It’s time to wake up and realize that we are “better than this.”

 

How’s it Done?

As with any great things in life, simple answers are simply insufficient.  But let me propose a place to begin.

First, I think that we need to recognize that we are more than what we’ve come to believe ourselves to be.  We might not necessarily know exactly what that is or exactly what that means, but it’s developing the recognition that we are “more.”  That recognition creates the awareness of a space that’s largely uninhabited, but entirely available to us.  That reality fosters a compelling willingness to move up and move out from wherever it is that we are because we’ve recognized that there’s place to do that.

Second, it’s about intentionally being better and deliberately doing better.  It’s about recognizing the limitations that we’ve habitually embraced, confronting those limitations when they pop up, and asking ourselves how we can take one step beyond them this time around.  It’s about identifying that this is how far we’d typically take something, and then purposefully taking it one step further.  It’s about persistence and purposefulness in the pursuit of something better.

Third, once we’ve taken a step further, it about recognizing that it actually worked because it typically does.  It’s about reinforcing the fact that we actually felt pretty good about it because we typically do.  It’s about pondering the fact that we went where we typically don’t go and in going there it went really well, because it typically will.  And it’s about feeling that we’re better than what we’ve historically chosen to be because we are, and now we’re actually experiencing it!

Fourth, it’s living it out right in front of the very people that we encounter every single day.  “We are better than this,” and we want that reality to become rampantly contagious to everyone that we meet.  We want to create this infectious influenza that causes people to step up, step out, and step into of the belief that “they are better than this” because they are.

“We are better than this.”  It may be that we are living in a time in history where that message and that reality needs to be broadcast with all the intensity and every bit of emotion that we can muster.  We appear to live in times that beg each of us to passionately live out of the conviction that “we are better than this.”  And in doing so, we rally those around us to embrace and live out the very same conviction.  Indeed, if we respond to this reality we can change the world because the indisputable truth is that “we are better than this” which will make the world that we live in “better than what it is.”  How about being part of the effort?

 

Additional Resources

Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational 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.

”Perspectives For a Culture in Crisis:” The Soul of the Soul - Game Changers

We quite naturally and quite appropriately presume that to live in the world, we must understand the world.  We know quite well that to navigate this complicated and frequently fragile existence of ours, as well as have any hope of emerging on top in some form or another, we must understand what we’re navigating.  If we don’t understand the terrain around us, and if we’re not acutely aware of the nuances both large and small that cut across it we risk not only being irreparably lost, but we also risk being destroyed in being lost.  Such a perspective is certainly sound.

However, we feel that we must do far more than just understand the world that we live in.  Knowledge is information, but it is not necessarily transformation.  In reality, having knowledge alone is to live as nothing more than an alien with knowledge.  Yet, to keep up with the world, or to get to a place where the world has to keep up with us, we have to be far more than aliens.  We must throw off that which is alien and become more of that which is the world.  Subsequently, our lives are bent and spent on becoming what’s around us, rather than becoming what’s within us. 

 

What Is Within Us?

Whatever’s within us, whatever it is that we are at our core, whatever that is often takes a backseat to what we feel we should become.  What we should become, or so we think, is a spitting image of the world.  We rigorously cultivate this image, assuming that such an image most effectively fits the world and therefore can most effectively navigate the world.  Therefore, we become what we see around us, rather than becoming what’s within us.  Subsequently, what’s within us eventually becomes lost to us.

Nonetheless, there are those people who plumb the depths of their souls and press into the innermost caverns of their hearts.  There are those most robust adventurers who realize that the greatest adventures of all don’t lie without, rather they lay within.  There are those who have come to the priceless realization that to effectively navigate the world is not to become the world, but to become the fullest self living in the world.  And these are the world-changers that we would be wise to admire, and to which we would be equally wise to aspire.

 

The Thoughtful Rebels

I have been munificently impacted by many such thoughtful rebels.  I have seen the many who build inward-out, rather than outward-in.  There are those who daily stand in the gap and create the space for others to find out who they are so they’re not told who they are.  There are many who have challenged the norms, rejected the trends, stood firm when others fled, and held the line on an intruding world so that those around them could be in the world, but not of the world.  There are those wisely rogue people who run against the world in order to change the world.

 

The Game Changers

And these are the game-changers who were birthed by those who themselves first changed the game.  These are the movers and the shakers that walked in the footsteps of others who were constantly moving things and shaking what was left.  These are astutely discerning people who understood the world, but differentiated themselves sufficiently from the world so as to not be shackled by norms, swayed by trends, bullied by fads, baffled by the mediocrity, and capsized by the ever-changing currents of culture, societal expectations and politics.

Many of these game-changers were game-changers because of others who refused to let them be anything else.  I applaud those bold people, the fearless people, the sacrificial people who refused to bend to culture or trends so that they’re friends and children might grow into who they are, verses turning into what the world is.  I can count innumerable men and women who created the space and ran interference at great cost to themselves to guide others who knew who they were, verses being children who were trying to figure out who the world was telling them that they are.

So who will we be?  How will we live out our lives?  Will we be what the world demands we be, or will we be what our soul invites us to be?  And in making those decisions, will we look beyond ourselves to create a space for others to do the same?    

 

Additional Resources

Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational 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.

 

”Perspectives For a Culture in Crisis:” I Believe - What I Want to Believe

We always have, and we always will have the intrinsic need to believe in something.  Life is a journey whose demands will always exceed whatever personal assets we might possess in an attempt to meet those demands.  Life always has and life always will require more of me than I have within myself to give it.  All of my accumulated resources meticulously gathered and shrewdly coordinated in the most strategic manner possible will always fall achingly short of meeting even the most primitive and pared down demands of living life.  And because that’s the case, I’ve got no alternative but to extend myself outside of myself and believe in things that are bigger than me.  I not only need to believe, I want to believe. 

I want to believe, especially in a world that seems to be falling apart in places that I never believed it would fall apart.  In the midst of all of the unnerving unraveling that I am helpless to stop, there are things I’d like to believe to calm my heart and steady my soul.  There’s some sustaining and comforting beliefs that I doggedly want to hold onto that provide me a sense of desperately needed peace in the tumultuous storms that seem to be roaring across the landscape of our culture.  I want to believe. 

Yet, peace is not enough.  To believe in something that can bring me peace, but whose power and reach ends at peace is simply not enough.  I need more than that.  I need something that can do more than just weather the storms of life and bring me out on the other side with as few bruises as possible.  I want to believe in things that have relentlessly stood the test of time, every time, throughout all of time.  I want to believe in things that won’t fall to the abject recklessness of our times, this time or any time.  But far more than that, I want to believe in things that can handily wrestle any storm into full submission.  And I want to dare to believe in things that are so pristinely confident and courageously authentic that they could keep the next storm from ever daring to roll across the landscape of our culture again if we all simply chose to believe in those things.  I want to believe.

I want to believe in things that have the breathtaking power and the unobstructed reach to reconstruct and reclaim whatever’s left when the storm is over.  I want to believe that storms are part of life and that they come into the sinful and fallen world that we live in as a natural part of our fallen existence.  But far beyond that, I want to believe in things powerful enough and audacious enough to transform the wreckage of the storm right in the middle of the very storm itself.  I want to believe in things that can reconstruct and reclaim in a manner that handily resurrects implausible beauty out of what seems to be unredeemable carnage.  I want to believe that no storm ever conceived can come close to having the force or the power to dislodge or destroy the things that I believe in.  I want to believe in believing because if I can’t believe in something, what do I have?

 

What I’d Like to Believe

I Want to Believe That Mankind is Inherently Good

In the storms, I’d like to believe that mankind is inherently good.  I want to believe that even though mankind can act in gruesome ways that push the edge of evil out to appalling places and reign destruction in ways previously unfathomable, that even then there is still some thread of something good weaving itself undaunted through the core of our core.  I want to believe that we’re lost, that we’re drowning in greed and selfishness, and that we’ve taken to treacherous paths that descend to gaping depths of great atrocity.  But I want to believe that those things don’t define us.  Despite our frequently heinous behaviors, I want to believe that we’re better than that because I want to believe that there is no point that we could ever reach from which we cannot be redeemed.  I want to believe that mankind is inherently good despite all the apparently inherent evil that would scream otherwise. I want to believe that there is enough good in all of us to be marvelously good if we’re daring enough to ruthlessly rid ourselves of everything that keeps us from being marvelous.  I want to believe this.

 

I Want to Believe That a Single Voice for Good is Never Too Small

I want to believe that a single voice for good has a vibrant tenor, a wholly unsullied tone, a dynamically firm volume, and a magnetic quality about it that it will always be heard above, and around, and beyond any chorus of evil despite how loud it might be.  I want to believe that voices for good always have an undeniable and unapproachable genuineness about them that renders all fraudulent voices completely exposed and entirely drown out.  Too often it seems that a single voice for good is quickly submerged under the surging tsunami other voices which are anything but good.  Evil and treachery seem to be boisterous and arrogant, bellowing with an unashamed narcissistic quality that aims to quash any voice with even the remotest hint of good in it.  I want to believe that a voice for good will incessantly rise above the most bellicose volume that evil can produce, and that it will always render evil frustrated in its inability to drown out a single voice for good.  I want to believe that single voice can do exactly that.  I want to believe this.

 

I Want to Believe That Good is Eternal and Evil is Temporal

I want to believe that evil is not part of what this was originally all about.  I want to believe that evil was not an original component of creation as it was sketched out on the original drawing board innumerable eons ago.  I want to believe that evil is an infestation that wormed its way into our existence and as such can be eradicated because it is an infestation, and only an infestation.  I want to believe that it is a cancerous plague that has no claim of originality in the original design.  I want to believe that evil is a temporary foe that lives on a short leash of time, and that every battle finds that leash shortened one more constricting link.  I want to believe that good will ultimately exterminate evil in a manner so complete that every battle will be forever laid to rest, and that the memory of those battles will likewise be laid to rest, and that good itself will be able to securely rest for the rest of eternity.  I want to believe this. 

 

I Want to Believe That God Uses Evil to Advance Good

I want to believe that God will not be thwarted by the greatest exploits that evil can conjure up.  I want to believe that evil will always find itself obliterated by its own evil as God seizes it, shapes it into invincible good, and then sends it hurtling right back into the heart of the very evil from which it came.  I want to believe that the greater the treachery and the more profound the wickedness, the more substance God has to mold good from.  That in the hands of God, everything vile is the raw material from which He can forge something astonishingly marvelous.  And that everything foul provides the very flames within which these good and great things are forged.  I want to believe that in the firing, that which God has forged becomes something so hardened that the most intense fires of evil itself cannot even remotely singe it.  I want to believe that as evil escalates in intensity, it only creates a greater abundance of raw material from which good is forged, fired, and fired against evil.  I want to believe this.

 

I Want to Believe that Believing is Not Childish

Believing is not childish nor is it naïve.  It’s not some escapist refuge where the weak flee in the face of the daunting cultural upheavals that now beset our culture and hound those of us who believe.  Believing will make us a ready target for those who don’t believe, and it will draw skeptics and naysayers to us as bees to honey.  Believing means that we invest in what we can’t see, we hand ourselves over to that which we can’t control, and we cast our lot with the eternal verses the less demanding demands of the temporal.  Belief is not for the frail or faint-hearted as belief will demand belief of us, which is a demand far beyond most anything else in our lives.  And because of those realities, I want to believe. 

Believing is being courageous enough to relentlessly hold onto the truth even when the derogatory actions of everything around us would attempt to entirely discredit the truth, smear the truth, and completely supplant it with falsehoods dressed in the look-a-like garments of truth.  By making the uncompromising commitment to stand on our beliefs, we declare that the truth on which we have chosen to stand is nothing of unreliable myth or childish fantasy.  And that will certainly draw the ire of many.  Believing is standing on the truth even when everything else around us has fallen into cinders and ash, and the truth on which we’re precariously standing continues to be pounded by everything that hates the very truth that we’re standing on.  And for all of those reasons, I want to believe. 

 

I Want to Believe in God

Believing is costly.  Believing is sacrificial.  Believing is what the majority of the world doesn’t have the guts to do, but it is the only thing to do.  I want to believe this.  And of all the things that I want to believe, I want to believe in God above and beyond all of them.  To believe in God in the face of everything that would tell us not to believe is the highest calling of mankind, and the greatest feat of our existence.  To believe in God is to extend ourselves beyond our finite existence and cast our belief out into the unfathomable reaches of the infinite.  To believe in God is to stake our lives on something that the world declares as a mistake.  But to believe in God is to wager everything on the person who created everything, and no mistake could ever arise out of that.  Without God, I don’t have the capacity to believe in anything else anyway as everything emerges from Him.  And so, I want to believe in God, I want to believe in every one of His promises, and I want to believe in all of the things that He allows me to believe in.  I want to believe.  With all my heart I want to believe.  And I want you to believe as well.          

 

Additional Resources

Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational 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.

”Perspectives For a Culture in Crisis:” I Am Only One - Expanding Our Impact in the World

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

I am only one in a mammoth sea of surging and foaming humanity within which my main and often single goal is simply to survive.  The winds will blow and the tides will roll in whatever way they spuriously and often callously choose to blow and roll.  And whatever choice they make will dictate the ways that I will go because I’m far too small to swim against them, and far too weak to even dare chart a different course from theirs.  I am only one, and being one doesn’t appear to be enough.

I am only one, and because I am, even the reality of my existence is of little note.  In the span of this minute, or this hour, or this day, or in the span of history itself my existence will not only be largely disregarded, it won’t even register enough to acknowledge that I was here in the first place.  Even the briefest notation that I have made or will make on the pages of history will be entirely lost in the seemingly infinite volumes of tightly written copy that stretch from mankind’s earliest moments to his eventual demise because I am only one.

Living as Being Only One

And so, because I am only one, I relegate myself to being only one.  And in relegating myself to being one and only one, I unwittingly embrace the limitations that I perceive are part and parcel of being one and only one.  I suit-up in the pathetic apparel of powerlessness, I chart a path of capitulation that’s dictated by the insensitive winds and tides of life, and I bow to the lamentable goal of surrender because I figure that that’s about as good as it gets.  And then in some sort of tense angst, I hunker down and wait for whatever’s going to happen to me, letting my mind spin in wild gyrations as I frantically attempt to figure out how I’m going to deal with whatever’s going to happen when it eventually happens.

What Does Being One Really Mean?

What will I do with the fact that I am only one?  I am only one in a world that’s spiraling.  I am only one in a world that’s rapidly redressing itself in garments that are far from the ethics, morals and values within which it was clothed at birth.  I am only one in a culture that’s lost its moorings and is finding itself on a dangerously churning sea that the culture has cleverly labeled “progressive thinking” or “cutting-edge” or “liberal thinking” in order to avoid the implications of living on such perilous seas.  I am only one in a world driven by the insatiable gluttony of selfishness rather than the spirited nourishment that comes from selfless living and self-effacing choices.  I am only one in all of that.

But I Am One

But I am one, and that is infinitely better than being “none.”  I am one, which puts me on equal footing with everyone else.  Every single person in human history who impacted history in ways either large or small faced the same exact dilemma that I am faced with: they were “one” and no more than one.  I am only one, but I do not stand as empty or hollow or void.  Quite the opposite.  This “one” that I am comes tightly packaged with innumerable gifts, talents and abilities that stand at the ready.  I am only one, but that “one” that I am is entirely and irrevocably different from any other “one” that has ever lived in the entire expanse of human history.  I am only one, but I have inspiring dreams and vitally rich visions for life that are unlike those held by anyone else.  I am only one, but I have unbridled access to everyone other “one” around me.  Oh yes, I am only one, but I am “one.”

The Opportunity in Being “One”

I am unbelievably privileged to be one, particularly the “one” that I am.  I don’t think I’d really want it any other way.  But I only get one shot at being “one.”  I get this one single, sole opportunity to take this “one” that I am and use it to make a difference in all the other “ones” around me.  I have the privilege of impacting the “ones” around me, who will in turn impact other “one’s,” who will in turn impact yet other “ones” . . . and on it goes.  I can be one person who impacts the world “one” person at a time, and in doing so I can potentially impact all of the “ones” in all of the world.  That’s not a bad deal.  So, I’d be wise to take advantage of this one and only one shot I get at this. 

It might be wise to consider that I am only one, yet I live in a world of “ones.”  That means that I am uniquely suited to impact other “ones” like me.  I am what they are.  They are what I am.  We are all the same.  And because that’s the case I have the unique advantage of speaking into their lives because I’m living out their lives, and they’re living out mine.  Our existence is shared, our experiences are similar, our joys are pretty much the same and our pain is familiar to all of us.  We walk through the same life, with the same experiences and the same challenges.  As one and only one person, I am perfectly suited to speak directly into the lives of all the other “one’s” around me.  So, why don’t I?

The Fears of Being “One”

The Fear of Not Being Enough

I think that we fear that being “one” is not being enough.  Being one is too often seen as being inadequate.  The world out there is not some massive mass of people.  It is a collection of individuals.  By and large, those individuals experience life pretty much the same way that we do.  The world is a collection of “ones.”  It’s a collection of people that are each one individual just like we are one person.  While being “one” makes us perfectly suited to impact all the other “ones” around us, we fear that being one is not enough.

The Fear that We Can’t Be Loud Enough

I also think that we fear that our single voice is not loud enough.  We don’t have the volume to be heard over the raucous, roar and interminable noise in our world.  We can’t possibly scream loud enough or long enough to be heard in the ruckus and racket that defines the world around us.  So our voices are drowned out.  Yet, we need to remember that we’re not speaking to the world around us.  We’re speaking to the “ones” around us.  And because that’s the case, we’re plenty loud enough.

The Fear of Being Rejected

I think that maybe our greatest fear is that we will be heard, and that in being heard we’ll be rejected or discounted or blown-off.  It seems that our single biggest fear is rejection.  What if we’re heard and in the hearing, we’re labeled as stupid, naïve or ignorant?  What if we’re heard and then we’re slapped with accusations of being politically incorrect, culturally ill-informed, or being something of a faith-based moron?  What if we take a stand?  What if we refuse to compromise?  What if we speak against the toxicity that’s seeping into the lives around us?  What if what we’re saying isn’t popular or trendy or politically correct? 

The Opportunity of Being “One”

I am only one in a mammoth sea of surging and foaming humanity within which my main and often single goal is simply to survive.  But I am one, and my oneness is sufficient to forgo surviving and embrace living.  The winds will blow and the tides will roll in whatever way they spuriously and often callously choose to blow and roll.  And whatever choice they make does not have to dictate the ways that I will go because I am one, and because I am I can swim against them, and dare to chart a different course from theirs.  I am only one, and being one is enough.

I am only one, and because I am, the reality of my existence can change the reality of everyone around me.  In the span of this minute, or this hour, or this day, or in the span of history itself my existence can be noted, and because I am one it can register enough to acknowledge that I was here.  The briefest notations that I have made or will make on the pages of history will add moving lines of inspiration in the seemingly infinite volumes of tightly written copy that stretch from mankind’s earliest moments to his eventual demise because I am “one.”

You have one chance at being “one.”  You have been granted one life to touch the other “ones” around you.  Being one is being enough.  Life’s about being intentional about being the best “one” that you can be, and intentionally touching all the other “ones” around you in a manner that transforms them “one” at a time.  In transforming the “ones” in our world we will eventually transform our world.  So, go be the “one” that you are.  Step up in a world that’s spiraling, confront a culture that has redressed itself, and seize the tattered lines of a nation that has lost its moorings.  Be the “one” that you were designed to be and change the world by being that “one.”            

 

Additional Resources

Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational 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.

Podcast Short: Integrity - To Understand and Live It

Integrity - To Understand and Live It

Integrity.  You’ve heard that “Integrity is doing the right when nobody’s watching.”  It’s not about being a crowd pleaser, or working to get some sort of edge.  It’s not agenda driven, other than we do the right thing for no other reason than it’s the right thing…and that’s not an agenda.  That’s a conviction.  It’s not about the cost of doing the right thing, or the long-term effects, or the short-term effects, or whether it will be popular or not so popular.  It’s not about the response of a person, or an organization, or a certain cultural group, or some philosophical leaning, or anything like that at all.  It’s doing the right thing for no other reason than it’s the right thing.  That’s it.

Now, a lot of people ask what the right thing is.  And in our culture, the right thing is too often based on the wrong criteria (or at least a terribly skewed one).  In the culture today, the right thing is typically based on its level of acceptance, whether that’s in our social group, or among our co-workers, or in some organization that we’ve aligned ourselves with, or it fits the current cultural climate.  Is it politically-correct, or tolerant, or does it embrace diversity (whatever that might be at any given moment).  Often it’s these criteria that define something as the right thing.  But the right thing is never defined by whether it adheres to an agenda or not, and it’s not driven by whether it happens to be popular or vogue or trendy.  The right thing will always be bigger than any of that, and it will never succumb to any of our puny definitions and our fleeting agendas.

So, what is the right thing anyway?  Well, here’s an idea that’s probably not all that popular or vogue or trendy.  But here’s an idea.  Jesus put it this way.  He said, “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

Now, maybe you’re not a religious person, or maybe you’re not really a people person, or maybe you’re not either of these.  However, the principle is basically the same…am I acting out of love?  Love is not tolerance.  Love is not permissive.  Love is not about diversity.  It’s not about embracing some cultural ethic because it liberates people to chase what (in the end) is going to destroy them.  It’s not about liberty defined as permission to indulge in behaviors that will do nothing but indulge us to our own demise.  Love isn’t about any of that.

It’s about understanding that there are an immovable set of ethics, morals and values that in the current culture have been labeled as constraining, antiquated, irrelevant, out-moded, or any other number of other definitions that have been assigned to them.  And love understands that we can incessantly label these ethics, morals and values in these ways, but those labels won’t change the fact that what these ethics, morals and values are trying to protect us from remains unchanged.  Love will not give ourselves permission to destroy ourselves, even though we give ourselves permission to do that.  Love understands that in the scope of this existence there are principles that if ignored or defied will send us to our own destruction.  And while our culture would ignore such truths, love with not.  And it is this stubborn refusal to ignore these truths, and to commit to abide by them regardless of the cost that are the hallmarks of this thing that we call ‘integrity.’ Integrity is the refusal not to love, despite whatever that might cost us.  Be advised, being a person of integrity comes a great price.  But the price of not being a person of integrity is infinitely greater.

 

Additional Resources

Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational 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.

”Perspectives For a Culture in Crisis:” A Noble Calling - A Noble Response

At times, the innumerable dialogues regarding the state of our nation appear to be less dialogues and more something akin to agenda mongering and rights crusading.  It seems that we have hijacked the solemn rights and sacred liberties afforded us and have forced them into servitude around our ego-centric agendas and myopic special interests.  The altar of self is where nations perish.  And on that altar we have too often found ourselves tediously picking apart the fabric of liberty and meticulously editing the founding principles of this nation so that we might justify those agendas and rationalize those interests in the name of the very freedom we are abusing.

In response to these actions, leaders and heralds of debatable origins spout bold platitudes and chart even bolder courses that often have little substance and are void of the balance achieved through the merging of wisdom seasoned by time, the vision gifted through deep struggle, and the astuteness afforded by heritage.  It seems that we are adrift on the tides of whimsy instead of the currents of calling, and that the sails borne by this ship of state are too often driven by the fickle winds of politically-correct agendas and bane opportunists instead of buoyed firm by the hard-core values born of faith and legacy.

And has the insanity of such realities been adopted as our norm?  Has our identity as a proud people become the mess that we’ve permitted it to become?  Is this who we are, and are we satisfied with those who of their limited vision and selfish notions run on anemic platforms that perpetuate this very mentality while at the very same time saying those platforms do not?  And in the mess of it all, have we chosen to follow those who talk about what has perished with themselves having little to no idea of what has actually perished?

 

A Longing Undefined

There seems to be a longing born of a great absence.  And there is likewise a passionate searching arising from that absence that appears to be seizing this nation today.  In a malaise spawned of comfort we have increasingly distanced ourselves from the founding principles of our nation, yet we have not distanced ourselves so far that we fail to feel the bruising impact of this profound absence.  And it is within this perplexing state that the soul of an entire nation of people are finding themselves plagued by a sense that something has perished that should never have perished.  And in this, there is an ever-stirring sense that it is somehow our solemn duty to find this thing that has perished and restore it so that this cherished nation might rise to heights that excel those summited at even at its most glorious moments.

 

The Core Challenge

While it may appear simplistic, I would suggest that we begin with something simply powerful.  I would suggest that this grand undertaking might begin by reclaiming two simple yet potently unifying principles upon which this nation was rigorously founded. 

First, I would suggest that freedom that is not exercised for the common good is freedom absconded and assaulted.  Freedom exercised for self is nothing more than greed in disguise, for to hoard assets of any kind is to simultaneously move someone else somewhere else into a deeper state of impoverishment.  And to create scandalous agendas driven by self-interest is to sequester others with the shackles of our unrestrained ambitions.  Therefore, freedom rightly exercised on behalf of the person standing next to us is impoverishment decisively crushed under the heels of liberty, and spurious agendas wholly exposed under the piercing light of principle.  And when these things transpire, freedom is free to be free.  And nothing man can devise can stand in the way of that.

Second, I would further suggest that morals abandoned as a means of granting ourselves permission that these morals would not have granted us is freedom traded for license.  Such a trade-off is nothing less than cultural suicide.  Freedom is never license, and we would be wise to understand that the distinction between the two is so utterly profound that they cannot exist in proximity to one another.  Rather, freedom is the manifestation of a deeply held confidence that if we are afforded choice, mankind is innately principled by morals and sufficiently sacrificial in nature due to an adherence to these morals that we will fight all lesser impulses and consistently choose with selfless integrity.  Without these timeless morals, decay and anarchy will be our lot.  With them, the impossible will be our servant.

 

A Noble Calling

It is my belief that we are a far greater people than we have chosen to become.  I would stand by the conviction that we are not what we have fallen to, and inherently we know this.  And in the carnage of freedoms abused and morals abandoned there yet lies tremendous potential.  And that potential lies not in legislative bodies, or towering institutions, or stirring platitudes, or political platforms of any design. 

Rather, this potential resides in each of us.  For great nations are built on individual people all of type and sort who seize the principles of freedom for all, who zealously hold to timeless morals despite the cost, and who join with other like-minded people in an indomitable march of mankind that nothing in all of mankind can stand against.  It is the common man and the common woman who intentionally lives out these principles in their sphere of influence, whether that be large or small, that changes lives, awakens nations, and alters history.

May we all take such stands.  And as a result, may there emerge a ground swell of epic restoration unprecedented that sweeps our hearts, seizes our souls, and restores the greatness that has been the enduring hallmark of this great nation.

 

Additional Resources

Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational 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.

Podcast Short: It’s Not About Being Ordinary

It's Not About Being Ordinary

It’s not about being ordinary, because we all are.  In talking about myself, I’m about as ‘ordinary’ as they come.  But, it’s not about being ordinary.  It’s about recognizing that being ordinary does not limit us to ordinary things.  That’s the beauty of it.  We’re all ordinary, which gives us everything that we need to be extra-ordinary.  God granted you and He granted me all of the elements, all of the ingredients (if you will) to do what we never thought we could do.  You come packaged with resources that (if used correctly) can accomplish things that are greater than the sum total of those resources.  And if there’s some tragedy in all of that, it’s that people don’t use them correctly, and therefore they never accomplish the great things that were theirs to accomplish.

The incredibly disappointing thing is that people look at who they are through the lens of who ‘they’ are.  And through that lens (which is incredibly limiting) we don’t see all that we are.  We have this vague understanding of ourselves, which leaves a whole lot of ourselves unknown, or ill-defined, or misunderstood, or mis-defined altogether.  And we walk through our lives with this less-than-accurate understanding of who we are.  And that understanding (whatever it happens to be) is typically a horribly marginalized and minimized view of who we really are.  So we might be ordinary, but we diminish the incredible abilities that are inherent in being ‘ordinary.’  Remember, “being ordinary” (as much as we diminish it) “does not limit us to ordinary things.”

I think that God wants you to see who you are.  The whole of who you are.  Not just the good, but everything that’s maybe not so good as well.  Not just the stuff that we’re proud of (if we even have anything that we’d say we’re proud of) but all of the stuff.  Not just the successes, but the failures as well.  Not just the bright and shiny things within us, but the dark places too.

Because all of that is the stuff of the ordinary.  And God waits to take everything that’s ordinary within you and do something extra-ordinary with it because “We’re all ordinary, which gives us everything that we need to be extra-ordinary.”  That’s what God does.  He takes whatever we are and He makes it into everything that we are not.  He’s not looking for us to build all that up so that it eventually adds up to something that God can use.  He’s looking for us to surrender all that’s ordinary about us to Him (in whatever condition it’s in) so that He can build it up to something He can use.  “It’s about recognizing that being ordinary does not limit us to ordinary things,” because we have an extra-ordinary God who wants to birth a bunch of extra-ordinary things in your life.   

 

Additional Resources

Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational 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.

Podcast Short: We Are More - Understanding Our Capacity

We Are More - Understanding Our Capacity

“Whatever you see within yourself, let it be the whole of yourself.  For too often we have been brutalized by our own sense of inadequacy and we’ve been held hostage to the lesser choices born of such a debilitating sense of self.  Know this, that latent within you there lies more than ample resources begging to be called forth to smash the chains forged of such an incapacitating sense of self.  And it is my prayer that you would press against everything within you that would hold you back, and that you would raise whatever voice you have and extend that call.”

You are more than you realize.  A lot more.  You’ve probably heard that before, and if you haven’t, you’re long overdue.  You are more than you realize.  But the thing is, we don’t feel that we are ‘more.’  If anything, the things that happened to us would suggest the opposite…that we’re less than what we hoped we were (and probably a whole lot less).  Whether that’s failure (in any of the million different ways that we fail), or ridicule, or jobs lost, or relationships that blew up, or dreams that went up in smoke, or friends that walked away, or opportunities that drifted away, or family members who were critical to the point that we wished they went away…or whatever it might be.  The statement that “we are more than we realize” just doesn’t seem to fit this stuff.

 

In my recent book, “The Self That I Long to Believe In,” I wrote this:

“The majesty of our humanity and the capabilities laid out within us are nothing short of marvelous; so much so that we are barely cognizant of it.  That in and of itself may be why we don’t recognize them and therefore don’t believe that they exist.  All of us run deep with untapped potential that is rustling just under the surface of our lives waiting to be unleashed.”

We are ‘more.’  Our circumstances don’t have the power to refute that or change that.  For sure, our circumstances can lead us to believe that we’re not ‘more,’ and they can be very convincing in doing that.  Our circumstances can also lead us to believe that we’re a whole lot less than we thought ourselves to be, and those circumstances can be incredibly convincing as well.  But our capacity exceeds the failures that we experience and the criticisms that are thrown in our faces.  Our abilities are not defined by what people have said, or the choices that we have made.  Our abilities exceed all of those.  They are greater than the limits of our imaginations, and they are not limited by people or choices that have proven to be less than imaginative.   

That “more” will always be there whether you use it or not.  It sits at the ready whether we recognize it or not.  We are ‘more.’  That’s not the issue.  The issue is will we understand that we are ‘more,’ and will we allow that ‘more’ begin to shape us into ‘more.’ 

 

Additional Resources

Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational 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.

”Perspectives For a Culture in Crisis:” A Bigger Person - Reclaiming the Majesty of Our Humanity

The majesty of our humanity and the capabilities laid out within us are nothing short of marvelous; so much so that we are barely cognizant of it.  All of us run thick with untapped potential.  We are rich with possibility and formidably equipped to tease the cusp of the impossible and to overcome it in the teasing.  The essence of our being is immense beyond words and the breadth of it eclipses any syntax to frame it all.  Despite the incomprehensible complexity of it all, the entirety of this essence is precisely consolidated and ingeniously joined so that the full measure of it might be released without any of it wasted or missed in the releasing.  We are crafted to enhance all that exists around us and to make everything immeasurably more than what is.  We are marvelous in ways so grand that such marvel escapes us although it resides right within each of us.  Indeed, we are created in just this way.

This potential is not something of muse, as we might presume it to be since we tend to see so little of it.  It’s not some hollow ideal that is more the trappings of some imaginative author who spins such ideas because they don’t have the courage to face the realities of who or what we really are.  This is not about some feeble attempt to bolster our belief in ourselves as we watch the worst of ourselves create a world that we’re turning into the worst of itself.  This potential is real.  Very real.  It may visit us rarely as it is much easier to access the lesser side of ourselves.  But, it is real and it is always waiting.

 

Playground Feuds and Turf Wars

We have misplaced the majesty of our humanity in the lesser battles that we readily (and rather ignorantly) join.  We cast ourselves as heroes selflessly battling for the soul of a community, a family or a nation when in fact we are engaged in playgrounds feuds of no greater importance than those played out on elementary playgrounds.  We lay claim to some turf, which is less about what the turf might actually be and more about the fact that it’s turf (whatever it might be).  We see ourselves on some colossal pilgrimage born of calling or destiny or the rallying of the masses against some great evil, however we have justified it.  It must be pointed out that at times the pilgrimages are in fact colossal and of significant importance, but too many times what’s colossal is the appetite of our egos verses the worthiness of the venture.  And so, too often we engage in these dirty little mongering turf wars that are more the stuff of mud-slinging than anything that might raise up humanity or change the course of history itself.

We wallow in the bane of blustering banter and then we gorge it fat on reckless arguments whose goal is to win, with us long having forgotten what exactly it is that we’re trying to win.  Everything becomes a tit-for-tat circus of push and shove that might be attributed to two toddlers fighting over a toy that neither of them really wants in the first place.  The focus becomes on finding some weakness, some point of hidden vulnerability, some crack in the proverbial armor that we can exploit in the pursuit of pursuing.  We want to posture ourselves as some sort of valiant and sturdy victor, and if perchance we fall to the throes of defeat we then position ourselves as the victimized victim whose defeat clearly illustrates the impenetrable validity of their cause.  And in the depravity and insanity of all of this we have misplaced the majesty of our humanity and we have wholly abandoned our calling.

 

To Reclaim Our Majesty

Might it be time to be accountable to who we’ve become so that we can make ourselves accountable to what we can be?  Are we willing to divest ourselves of all the lesser things that we have elevated as greater things and engage in both a pointed and painful evaluation of who we’ve become?  And once we’ve done that, are we brave enough to look at the damage that we’re incurred in the becoming?  Can we relinquish our claim to whatever bit of turf we’ve claimed and lay our playground feuds to rest in deference to a cause far greater than the tiny space that we occupy?  Can we shake ourselves out of ourselves sufficiently to wake up to the far greater things that lay ‘round about us?  Can we begin to see others as less enemies and more people whose differing views may inform our own?  At what point we will understand that partnership and camaraderie must be preserved even when differences of beliefs or opinions would do their level best to blast us into warring camps?  When will we forfeit what we’ve become in order to become something so vastly superior to what we’ve become?

It’s not that such a shift is impossible (despite the fact that the behaviors exhibited in our world might suggest otherwise).  But in the face of the reckless insanity all around us, will we dare to dare?  Will we raise ourselves up to embrace the fullness of our humanity?  Will we cast off the scourge of selfish agendas and the saber-rattling born of insatiable egos?  Will we be what we’ve chosen not to be at whatever cost we might pay to do so, recognizing that the cost of not doing so is far, far greater?  Will we shed all that we’ve become to become all that we can be?  In essence, will we reclaim the majesty of our humanity as it was created and tenderly fashioned to be?

 

I Believe

I am utterly confident in our ability to do all of those things.  I have great hope in humanity.  I have even greater hope in the God that bestowed us with abilities that in fact mirrored His own.  And for that reason, I have a pervading and insatiable hope.  Though some might say so, I do not believe that kind of hope to be misplaced.  I believe in us; in you and me.  I believe that we have not done well, but I believe we can yet do very well.  I believe in something better.  I believe that we can join together in a mutual assault on the mounting challenges in our world instead of engaging in mounting assaults on each other.  I believe, and I hope that everyone of us might join me in that belief.  And in that joining might we rigorously inventory how we can be different.  And then let us go and begin the process of making things different.  Let us reclaim the majesty of our humanity in the care of humanity.

 

Additional Resources

Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Finally, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

Podcast Short: Thinking It’s Over When It’s Not

Thinking It's Over When It's Not

It’s over…we tell ourselves.  It’s over.  Whatever it might be (or might have been) it’s gone and there’s no getting it back.  The loss is too big.  The obstacles are too daunting.  Things have changed so much that whatever we lost no longer has a place in the current reality that we’re living in.  We’re one person (just one person) trapped in a downward spiral that’s far more powerful than all of us put together.  The glass isn’t half empty.  The fact is, there is no glass.  We can’t pick up where we left off because where we left off...left. It’s over…so we think.

In processing all of this for myself, I wrote this quote:

“The last time I saw it, its hull was crushed and it laid helpless against the incessant swells that rolled up upon the shallows within which it laid canted and broken.  Yet, in the hands of a seasoned sailor who saw potential in the carnage, it was hauled out the swells, lovingly repaired, and the next year it pushed out past the swells that had held it helpless and it sailed again.  And although our hulls are crushed beyond hope of repair and we find ourselves helplessly awash in the incessant swells of our sin, with God we too can sail again.”

Sometimes things are ‘over’ only because we believe them to be over.  We’ve been told that they’re over.  Or everyone around us says that they’re over.  Or the cultural climate seems to say that they’re over.  Or those without vision have never realized that they lost anything because they never saw what they had in the first place, so they tell us that nothing’s over because nothing was lost to begin with.  Or people have chosen to believe that they’re over because that’s easier than hoping that they’re not.  We don’t want to look the fool and try to save something that’s no longer there to save, so we tell ourselves and those around us that it’s over…so we think.  But we can sail again.

Is something really over?  Have we actually lost something that we can’t reclaim?  Is it gone forever?  Or, is that what we’ve chosen to believe.  It’s my sense that most things aren’t over (at all).  Rather, it’s our belief that they are (which is a ‘belief,’ but not necessarily a ‘reality’).  It’s more our attitude, or our fears, or our unwillingness to challenge popular thinking, or our unwillingness to risk grabbing hold of a vision, or a lack of belief in ourselves, or more importantly, a lack of belief in God.  In the Bible, Jesus said, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”  Do you get that?  Do you understand what that opens up?  Do you understand that our perception that something is over does not take into account that with God, nothing is over?  That our families, our communities, our dreams, our relationships, our nation can sail again?  That there are always possibilities, even when all we see are massive impossibilities?  That what we feel we have to walk away from are things that have a ton of possibilities still living and breathing within them?  Is something really over?  Really?  You might want to think about that because you’d be amazed at all of the things that can sail again.

 

Additional Resources

Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational 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.

Podcast Short: Becoming Accountable

Becoming Accountable

Accountability…might it be time to be accountable to who we’ve become so that we can make ourselves accountable to what we can be?  Are we willing to divest ourselves of all the lesser things that we have elevated as greater things and engage in both a pointed and painful evaluation of who we’ve become?  And once we’ve done that, are we brave enough to look at the damage that we’re incurred in the becoming?  Can we relinquish our claim to whatever bit of turf we’ve claimed and lay our playground feuds to rest in deference to a cause far greater than the tiny space that we occupy?  Can we shake ourselves out of ourselves sufficiently to wake up to the far greater things that lay ‘round about us?  Can we begin to see others as less enemies and more people whose differing views may inform our own?  At what point we will understand that partnership and camaraderie must be preserved even when differences of beliefs or opinions would do their level best to blast us into warring camps?  When will we forfeit what we’ve become in order to become something so vastly superior to what we’ve become?

It’s not that such a shift is impossible (despite the fact that the behaviors exhibited in our world might suggest otherwise).  But in the face of the reckless insanity all around us, will we dare to dare?  Will we raise ourselves up to embrace the fullness of our humanity?  Will we cast off the scourge of selfish agendas and the saber-rattling born of insatiable egos?  Will we be what we’ve chosen not to be at whatever cost we might pay to do so, recognizing that the cost of not doing so is far, far greater?  Will we shed all that we’ve become to become all that we can be?  In essence, will we reclaim the majesty of our humanity as it was created and tenderly fashioned to be?

I believe that we have not done well, but I believe we can yet do very well.  I believe in something better.  I believe that we can join together in a mutual assault on the mounting challenges in our world instead of engaging in mounting assaults on each other.  I believe, and I hope that everyone of us might join me in that belief.  And in that joining might we rigorously inventory how we can be different.  And then let us go and begin the process of making things different.  Let us reclaim the majesty of our humanity in the care of humanity.

 

Additional Resources

Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational 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.

Podcast Short: Dead-End Roads of Our Making

Dead-End Roads of Our Making

We chart these paths.  We set these goals.  We ponder where we are, and from there we determine where we want to go.  There’s some sort of road that we’re walking, whether that’s a road of our own making, or it’s a road that everybody is walking, or it’s the road that culturally vogue or socially trending.  Sometimes that road is well defined and clear.  Sometimes there’s very little definition to it all, and we end up wondering if we’re really on any sort of road at all.  And then some of us are just plain lost in the woods.  “There’s some sort of road that we’re all walking.”

Whatever kind of road that we’re on, it’s both amazing and frustrating how many of those roads end up at dead-ends.  It’s stunning that there are millions of people who are standing at the end of some road (or what they thought was a road) and it ends.  It just ends.  They had visualized it going somewhere great, or exciting, or meaningful.  It was the path to their dreams.  It was the road to a life-long relationship.  The highway to fiscal wealth or career advancement.  The byway that led them to everything that everyone else said that they could never do or never be…but it doesn’t go to any of those kinds of places at all.  It dead-ends.  In the middle of nowhere.

A dead-end is likely the product of being on the wrong road.  And if I created the road, it’s probably going to dead-end because it’s probably the wrong road.  Frequently, the dead-end will be up out of sight from where we started this journey (so that we won’t have second-thoughts taking it).  Or, we can actually see the dead-end, but we live in denial of it because we want what we want.  Or, the people around us took it and were too embarrassed to tell us that we would run into a dead-end because they were embarrassed that they ran into a dead-end.  Or, the culture has deluded us into believing that it’s not a dead-end at all (even though it looks strikingly similar to a dead-end).

Dead-ends.  The only road that I know of that has no dead-ends is the one that God lays out for us.  Those are roads of no dead-ends.  Rather, those are roads of endless beginnings.  Forever beginnings.  Perpetual beginnings.  Where the world says that the road will stop, the roads God creates keep right on going.  When the mountains become too high, or the valleys become too low and the roads come to a screaming halt, God has already constructed a bridge or leveled the valley.  “There’s some sort of road that we’re walking.”  And if God didn’t create it, your dead-end is just around the ‘corner.’  If He did create it, you don’t need to worry about the ‘corners.’

 

Additional Resources

Discover an array of additional resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Find all of Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational 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.