Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

”An Intimate Collision - Encounters With Life and Jesus” - Part Four

He was four years old . . . barely.  Boyish innocence was tightly stitched and held fast to a deep zest for living.  He was a mosaic of the threads of a splendid tapestry whose fibers were being woven into a soft spirit that reveled in life.  I love Corey.  I love him for what he is, and what I see in him that I am not.   He is innocence untainted and unsoiled, a young boy that catches the essence of living through windows of the soul yet unsullied by life.  Splendidly exuberant, he draws in all the energy of life and expels it freely out to anyone who will embrace its gift.  He is both a repository of living and the embodiment simplicity.  One without the other would dramatically diminish him, as it would any of us.

“I have seventy cents,” he said.  Sitting at a red light, I had no idea as to the nature, purpose or rationale of his comments, arising it seemed from the incessant babbling and spontaneity that frequently marks him.  “Dad, I have seventy cents.”  Attending to the blur and bustle of the marauding traffic that rushed around me, I attempted to placate him, hoping that he would drift on to something else.  “That’s nice,” I replied.  He was irritably insistent.  My verbal pabulum was blatantly insufficient for him.  “Dad, I have seventy cents!”  His voice was emphatic.  I glanced in my rearview mirror and watched him squirming in his car seat, obviously possessing some agenda of great importance to him that was swallowed up in the supposedly greater agendas that dictated my day.  Catching my eyes in the mirror, he held out a clenched fist clutching seventy cents and with sordid determination said, “Dad, I have seventy cents!”

 

What We Miss

I am occupied, attending to the congestion and myriad events around me.  The traffic of my life is made up of frustrating red lights, a rare green one, and irritating yellows that flash across a myriad of my intersections.  All of the congestion of commerce and career, the snarls of success and the raucous rhythm of rush hour that I embrace as essential and necessary to achievement.

I am caught in the blindness of believing that living life means winning, being horrified that an opportunity missed is an unredeemable loss that creates a permanent setback and lifetime diminishment.  I must master life by gouging and gorging myself on its complexities at every opportunity, without having time to savor the tender exquisiteness of its intricacies.  Mine is a hoarding of life, rather than a delicate sampling.  In and through it all I miss the minute details in the mayhem, the subtleties that are the very essence of the larger things that I gorge and feed upon.  In essence, I miss simplicity.  “I have seventy cents Dad!”  It was a statement of simplicity, and so I missed it.

Crystal blue eyes and romping blonde hair, his small hands cradled two quarters and two precarious dimes.  They were clenched so firmly that his tiny fingers turned shades of red and white; holding them valiantly in front of him with arms outstretched.  His face was chiseled with a squared hint of boyish determination, the manifestation of four year old eyes apprehending the core of life and living when I could not see it.  His perceived with a crystal clear soul what really mattered when all I saw was an annoying red light and thick traffic.  “Dad, I have seventy cents!”

And then I saw it.  Quite accidently it caught the barest edge of my mind.  Out of the corner of my eye, from the farthest fringes of my life it stirred.  The simple intruded upon my chosen world of complexities.  A solitary figure sat on the margins of my wild world, passing by me except for a four year old attuned to the wonder of simplicity, hoping that the din surrounding me might ebb just enough to catch a glimpse.  I finally saw it.

Scrawled by an unsteady hand across a tattered piece of discarded cardboard, stained and bent were a handful of words.  The edges of cardboard were torn, frayed and mutilated, much like the man who held it.  It was stained and bent.  Primitive letters etched out the silent plea of a lost life.  He was no more than ten feet away, and I missed him.  The sign read, “Need help, please.”  “Dad, I have seventy cents!”

 

Simplicity Missed and Reclaimed

“Don’t push these children away.”  Jesus’ voice was purposeful, highlighting an eternal principal violated by stumbling men who chased after life and missed living in the pursuit of living.   “Don’t ever get between them and me.  These children are the very center of life in the kingdom” (Mark 10:14, The Message).  Simplicity is central to the infinite, which is an odd and incomprehensible dichotomy.  That which is complex beyond comprehension embraces simplicity at its core and derives all that it is from that core.  The infinite invites us to simplicity as that which is of eternal value is best seen in that which is simple and uncluttered.

Simplicity is the key that turns the tumblers to the door of the eternal.  It is the single and sole passport to an audience with the infinite.  We must suspect then that such a concept is built into the fabric of the finite as well.  Simplicity is the essence of life and living from which all else springs.  Without it complexity loses it roots, it has no grounding, no boundaries and no identifiable point of departure that defines it and shapes it.  And it is here, with the cluster of children swirling around Him in innocent admiration that Jesus declares simplicity as simply central.

The Pharisees and their malicious attempts to trap Him were barely hours old, still resonating in His mind.  God incarnate, the Creator of the universe had been asked to justify Himself.  It was indeed the absurdity that arises when simplicity is missed.  The rich young ruler and the stench of materialism were only moments away.  Face to face with God, the rich young man would prove himself unable to see Jesus in the tangled web woven of wealth and the complexity inherent in the sordid accumulation of power.  He had too much of this world and too little of the next; all of which leaves no room for simplicity.  The walk to Jerusalem, betrayal, spikes, a splintered beam, oozing blood, death . . . all of that was only a mere handful of days away.  Awash in the many manifestations of man’s sin and on the threshold of abolishing it, Jesus “gathered the children up in His arms and He laid His hands of blessing on them” (Mark 10:16, The Message).

 

Simplicity Lived

As you look at this picture of Jesus, do you see it?  It too is on the margins of our lives, sadly so.  Jesus is sitting, gingerly drawing an armful of giggling and squealing children into His lap.  The thick hands of a carpenter run calloused fingers through mounds of curls gracing a tiny head, drawing a smile out of a timid child with a playful and slightly bemused stare.  Embracing their innocence and simplicity as so far removed from the world He faces, the world that He will die for.

He sees in their impish and innocent faces the simplicity that keeps the world from seeing Him.  He is at the vortex of His earthly life.  In a matter of days all of history will be rocked by His death.  The universe will itself reel.  Hell will fall.  Satan will flee.  The immensity of the powers of darkness will suffer complete and uncompromising defeat.  He will defiantly tread the bowels of Hell itself and then He will rise and He will, in His resurrection, change the entire course of human history for the full course of human history.  What He is about to do is monumental beyond anything that has ever transpired in the whole course of existence.

But here, at this moment, sandwiched between these cataclysmic events, He laughs with children who have no sense of Who He is, or what awaits Him.  But, innocent they are.  And so He plays for a moment.  He tickles and gets tickled.  He tells a joke and the air is filled with the squeal of childhood laughter.  Eye to eye with gentle intensity He tells them of their immense value and of a Father’s love for each of them.  He will die for them shortly, their innocence maybe making that sacrifice more bearable and more compelling.

It is the Creator connecting through simplicity with the created in a way that is entirely unabated and unobstructed.  It is the treasure of the deep soul finding connection with the vast God through the conduit of simplicity.  The mayhem of life’s traffic, all of the red and green and yellow lights that had dogged His ministry were laid aside so that He could immerse Himself in life’s real purpose.

 

The Door of Access

From this adoring pile of romping children His gaze shifted, directing his words to the twelve standing about the scene.  It was not to be a lesson for children, but one from them.  Tussling with their youthful energy, He says, “Unless you accept God’s kingdom in the simplicity of a child, you’ll never get in” (Mark 10:15, The Message).  The contrast is numbing, even paralyzing.  The key to complexity is simplicity?  But how can simplicity ever hope to grasp complexity?  Simplicity would suggest intentional ignorance through the abandonment of the acquisition of knowledge.  It was a stunning and completely puzzling reversal.

The complexities of life and living, the minute intricacies of the Law and the sacrificial system, the unfathomable breadth of the cosmos and starry hosts that beg exploration and contemplation, the mysterious yet striking predictability of nature, the grandeur and the magnificent majesty of God as the incomprehensible “I AM” (Genesis 3:14, NIV) next to which all of creation fades and pales into oblivion is accessed through simplicity?  Here, in the laughter and play of these children laid the incalculably priceless key to kingdom access and the sole passport to the infinite?  It was simply too simple, so simple that grasping it was, in itself, complex.

Peals of laughter drew them back from contemplation, being a sweet elixir to a sullen life.  They were the voices of those who had seized the keys to the kingdom through simplicity.  Accepting as these children accepted, with innocence and simplicity, humility and obedience, through trust that never asks if there is anything else other than trust.  Engaging in a raw embracing, a simple acceptance free of attempts to determine how to shape one’s life so that it might find a shred of acceptability before God.  Freely accepting the unconditional as exactly that . . . unconditional.  And so it was in the children.

Jesus stood, the lesson now having been taught by example and by word.  He stooped, placed His hands on the children for a brief final moment and blesses them, extending into their simplicity the blessing of God.  He was able to do so because of the massive and free-roaming space created in and by their simplicity.  Access to the kingdom was granted to such as these, its evidence seen in the blessing.  It was all so simple, yet so magnificently transforming.  Lives have expended lifetimes trying to achieve what these children achieved in but a moment via the vehicle of innocence and simplicity.

A final hug, a parting embrace and the children dispersed, running into the arms of waiting parents.  A pair of them skipped off holding hands.  Sticks trailed curlicue designs in the gritty dirt.  Several ran around parents in errant circles of delight and innocent mischief.  A small cluster gathered mounds of wildflowers, pressing their nectared petals deep into their faces, inhaling their perfumed ecstasy.  The sound of laughter faded and then dissipated on the soft winds of the day.  The bevy of children scurried off to the next adventure, not realizing that they had just had the greatest adventure of all.  But simplicity embraces all life as an adventure.

 

Getting Back

A honking horn exploded into the moment.  The light was green.  I instinctively punched the accelerator and drove off.  “But Dad, I have seventy cents!”  How our hearts are drawn to simplicity, yet how difficult it is for us to allow it to remain so; how painful when we cannot respond to it.  Life caused me to drive by him, and to do this day I am irritated by that action.  Corey and I talked about that man, and we talked about how we could help someone with his seventy cents; seventy cents of simplicity.  Could I please have seventy cents of simplicity!  Enough to see my world like Corey does.  Oh God, could you please grant me seventy cents of simplicity!

 

How Do I Find Seventy Cents of Simplicity?

How do I balance complexity with simplicity?  How do I rectify the God of the universe playing with children and incorporate that principal into my world?  How do I correlate the melding of the infinite and simplicity?  Where is that common ground where I can embrace simplicity with a relentless vigor and yet live in a world of complexity?

It is not the absence of complexity, for creation is woven of it and it is the embodiment of God Himself.  It is the example of the infinitely complex God playing and romping with simple children that we must seize, hold fast to and draw from.  The key is the full embodiment of both simplicity and complexity where neither is lost or sacrificed at the expense of the other, but where the complete embrace of both brings fullness and balance to life.  The challenge is to hold to both equally.  We assume that complexity is the absence of simplicity.  Rather, is complexity not the very thing that highlights simplicity and makes simplicity so very obvious and so deeply cherished?  Is it not in the holding of simplicity that complexity has a point of origin and a benchmark which dictates it shape, tenor and tone?  And is not the fullest embrace of the two, with each holding the other in balance the very thing that maximizes life and living?

We need to live with seventy cents of simplicity, clutching it in our fists and refusing to let it go.  Allowing it to hold and ground our exploration, acquisition and understanding of life’s complexities.  It is our task to apprehend an understanding of the world God has put us in, but to likewise to maintain eyes of simplicity that keep us centered on that which is central to all of life.  Complexity that is not continually grounded in simplicity is apt to be errant, causing us to be consumed in the complexity itself.  For that brief moment, following a confrontation with the Pharisees, a pending confrontation with a rich young ruler, and only days away from death, Jesus centered Himself in simplicity.  So should we.  

 

Pondering Point

“I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of” (John 10:10, The Message).  Could it be that this “more and better life” is in part the ability to embrace complexity while holding tenaciously to simplicity, allowing simplicity to ground us and center us in the complicated and detailed facets of life; each providing a balancing effect for the other, thereby allowing us to embrace the fullness of life without sacrificing anything that a single focus would cause us to miss?  And is such a balance the work of God in our lives, His grace and power allowing us to achieve this dual embrace?  Indeed, I think it is.

 

 

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.

 

The Five Big Lies - Effectively Building Your Self-Esteem

Think About It

You are what you choose to be.  Life is not a dictated script.  It’s far from being something to which you have to surrender.  Yes, there are things that we did not ask for that we have to deal with.  Regardless, whatever our flaws there is always room to do something about them.  Always.  Some option always exists.  There are always possibilities.  Life affords us choices and chances.  The human spirit is tenacious, and powerful, and wonderfully creative.  Don’t underestimate your capabilities and your resources.  Realize that the resources that you possess outclass and outweigh any flaw, perceived or real.  Choose to view yourself differently and more accurately.  Choose to choose you for despite your low self-esteem, you won’t be disappointed.   

“The Self That I Long to Believe In” is a bold, timely, and inspirational book that will help you to effectively build your self-esteem. Get your copy at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. 

Thanks for joining us on LifeTalk today. I hope that you take the time to enjoy all of the many programs on our podcast. You’ll find us on most podcast platforms as well as YouTube. See you next time.

”An Intimate Collision - Encounters With Life and Jesus” - Part Three

Dean was deaf.  It was that simple, but it was inordinately complex at the same time.  Life can have its sinkholes.  Sometimes there’s a bunch of them, enough of them to cause a broad and crippling implosion where things just cave in all around us.  Life then becomes a litany of foggy responses to trauma where we move zombie-like through whatever the day or the moment holds.  There is no forward movement in times like these.  When our worlds collapse it all becomes about survival because often that’s all it can be about.  Soon survival becomes the norm where we strive to survive for the sake of survival itself.  Life becomes abjectly meaningless other than getting through the day to fight the meaningless that will face us again tomorrow.

Dean was deaf.  But he was mentally retarded as well.  Tenderly kind, compassionate and invitingly soft underneath it all, he was the by-product of the sink-holes that had scattered themselves all around his life.  In the end, it all imploded and he retreated into his deafness and his mental retardation, finding there some seclusion away from it all.  He sat along the roadside of life watching some of it go by and ignoring the rest of it.  He surrendered to isolation and held the world at bay, barricading himself many fathoms deep within himself.  He effectively placed himself out of reach of anything.  He was a treasure lost in the stratified subterranean layers of his fear.              

He had never mastered his deafness.  Some lean into their disability and shape it to serve them.  He never leaned into it.  Some work to compensate for their handicaps by strengthening the things that are not handicaps.  He never compensated.  Rather, he decompensated down into a silent oblivion where he sat hunched and utterly alone.

Sign language and the reading of lips never broke him out of the prison that deafness had thrust him into; that place so many fathoms deep that no one could get down there.  He was somehow held inside with the world held outside.  Each could see the other from their variant vantage points, but neither could bridge the gap nor plumb the depths.  Whatever separated him from the rest of us seemed intractably immovable.

 

A Conviction of Greatness

Life sometimes persuades us to believe that there is so much more to something or some person even though we can’t see it.  We engage that thing or that person with a certainty that there lies within them something profound despite the fact that it’s completely hidden.  It seems that we walk circles around them, looking and probing for some crack or tear that will grant us a peek inside.  We look for some chink to wriggle through or a knob that we can wrestle with long enough until some hidden door opens and grants us entrance to the riches within.  There emerges a dogged persistence about it all because we dare not bypass what lies within even though it’s held away from us.

That was Dean.  He was a kid that I could not let go of even though there was nothing to hold onto.  His mild mental retardation put him even further away; a young man of riches unearthed that always provoked me back to him.  He was frustrating and abrasive at times, being unable to break through his own deafness and reach up and out to everything outside of himself.  His coarse and sometimes rash behaviors seemed to be an expression of his deeply engrained trepidation of the world, combined with his own frustration of choosing to seclude himself.  Because he couldn’t break out, he reinforced his isolation from the inside out, pushing everything away so that he would have a sense that it was he who was locking it all out.   Somehow he found solace in thinking he controlled it because it gave him a sense he could get out of it.  He couldn’t.

I didn’t choose to be relentless with this kid.  I had no choice but be relentless.  Sometimes what you see in another is far too convincing and too terribly compelling to let it go of it even when you meet with nothing more than outright rejection and ever-thickening walls.  And walls there were; thick, fortified and towering.  I found myself relentless in pursuit and then disappointed into withdrawal, only to do it all over again because this kid was somehow just too precious to let go of.  He needed to hear, maybe not with his ears, but at least with his heart.  I prayed that God would pull Dean aside and open up something that would open him up.      

 

Deaf to Life

Rejection and scorn was his lot due to the assumption of sin that others had about him.  The world was loudly silent for him.  Something was missing that he could not identify because he had never known it.  Life is indeed an orchestra full and complete, absolutely masterful.  But for the deaf man it was absolutely silent.  The musical pieces and masterful renditions for which life was created were soundless for him.  Notes and scores that were casually written across the faces of friends, that were penned in the raucous flamboyance across bustling open air markets, that found subtle notation in droning bees gently drifting from blossom to awaiting blossom all gave the faintest hints of the melodies they illustrated, but the sounds were never there.  The sheet music ran in front of him in endless reams, but they didn’t spawn a sound.

The haunting call of myriad geese aloft, the pounding surf throwing itself against a forever beach, or the fingers of the wind rustling through listless treetops were silent for him.  The roll of a distant summer thunderstorm on a humid horizon, or the raucous laughter of life rising from the soul of humanity itself was nothing more and nothing less than the sound of silence.  Entombed in a vacuum of deafening silence, the orchestra had always played soundlessly for this deaf man; vigorously indeed, but vigorously silent.  He was deaf and he was starkly alone.

He attempted to interact and engage with the music and the melodies.  But to try to participate in a world you can’t hear leaves you ever outside of that world despite how hard you try.  His lips were slow and drawn with words that were ill-formed.  He arduously attempted to wrap words around voice and syntax and intonation that he had never heard.  He spent himself in perpetually frustrating efforts to do what he couldn’t conceive and could much less imagine, to put sounds to words he’d never heard.

His words were slurred, distorted, verbally twisted and linguistically bent, readily inviting and successfully garnering ridicule, mockery and confusion from those that lived in the world of sound.  His was a life forced out onto the fringes of life, exiled there in a lonely land where silence is a hated, but forever companion.  There was no breech in the wall to slip back through in order to touch humanity so as to belong to something other than the silence.

Rejection by others was based on the errant assumption that some sin had caused his deafness.  This conclusion was elevated as full-fledged fact, rendering him an outcast on the falsest of premises.  Rejection and silence are both isolating, the difference is that one is a choice, the other is chance.  What they have in common is that the person upon whom they both fell chose neither.  It was something like a full emasculation of everything it is to be human.  This is what it was to be deaf and mute.  And so his life went.

There was a rumor that circulated.  A distant murmuring unheard by deaf ears, but caught by others said that Jesus was in the Decapolis.  This prophet and miracle worker had come.  The verdict as to who this Jesus was remained a point of discussion and debate.  Some of that was quite heated and some of it was really rather innocuous.  Yet, He was coming and the captivating risk that He was something more than a mortal man was compelling.

Had those around this deaf man tired of his dependency, these friends of his, or did they care for him?  Was he little more than an object that could be used to entice a miracle of this prophet?  Was their intent little more than a ploy for a cheap thrill?  The text is unclear.  The motive is foggy and indistinct.  But they take the deaf mute to Jesus.  It didn’t appear to be an action of the deaf man’ own accord as there is no hint of self-determination or self-initiation.  There doesn’t appear to be any sort of remote inkling that the possibility of being ushered into the world of sound is a distinct possibility.  How can you possibly know what you’re missing if you’ve never had it?  How can you desire something if desire has no place to be cultivated because we’ve no idea that there’s anything to be desired? 

Sometimes we see in and through others what we could not otherwise see because it’s not within us to see.  Sometimes we experience the passionate and vigorous pulse of desire vicariously through the heartbeat of others and we sense the pulse in them.  Sometimes our vision of the possible is only possible because we see that vision reflected in the eyes of another and we watch it listlessly dance about in their smile.  Sometimes we actually end up dancing because others have caused us to believe in the dance and have ushered us out on the dance floor even when we can’t hear the music ourselves.  Such were the deaf mute’s friends.      

And so, the rumor draws them to Jesus.  Soon the embedded mass was found.  Ushered by these friends, the deaf man pressed through the crowd.  The small entourage cuts a swath through a fluid array of assorted humanity that swelled and eddied around Jesus.  The clamor of a world of never-ending needs simultaneously sought relief.  The world clamored around Jesus seeking some shred of hope and some healing that arises from that shred of that very hope.  The crowd swirled around this wandering prophet as if in the grip of the undertow of all creation, an irresistible current from which all other currents find their sole source.  Passing through a cultural morass of assembled humanity the deaf man is drawn toward the center.

The aged, stooped and shuffling in the grip of long years wandered about in a cloudy curiosity.  Children darted in and out.  The blind walked about groping, stretching trembling arms outward, substituting touch for sight and sound for vision.  Stumbling, they made their way to Jesus.  Crutches that were terribly crude and deeply weather-worn were nothing more than primitive prosthetics that sought a miracle for an absent leg.  A cripple, his fingers clawing the arid soil drug useless appendages and tattered garments that trailed in the talcum dirt behind him.

Limp in his mother’s arms an infant teetered on the chilling precipice of death, the pallor of death strangely awash across the face of newborn life rendering his skin hues of suffocating purple.  His mother stood on panicked tiptoe, stretching her neck to catch a glimpse of something, anxiously groping toward the center of the mass.  It was all silence to the deaf mute.  It was all wildly alive, vibrant, turbulent and wonderfully riotous, but deathly silent.  From his vantage point, the drama was only partly revealed.

Pressing onward and inward, it was more of the same.  The scene was packed tight with shifting layers of broken humanity, the curious, the destitute, the rich and poor alike.  Finally the last layer of jostling, clamoring humanity parted like the parting of some glorious tapestry.  A man of silent stature stood in the crowd, yet infinitely above it.  The nucleus of the swirling mass of people and their needs was deafening in silence.  Jesus back was to them.  Slightly stooped, His hands gently rest on the shoulders of an elderly woman.  The look of astonishment was set in her eyes and splashed across her face.  A worn cane lay abandoned at her feet.  Something unusual had transpired.  It was immediately clear that there was thick compassion in His touch, His stance, and His mannerisms.  A parting word to the woman and He turns.

His gaze shifted and panned the crowd.  Mussing the hair of a playful child, both smile deeply and invade the heart of the other in a superbly divine intersection.  Another step and this Jesus was drawn to the outstretched arms of an ecstatic infant.  He moved toward her, His face electrically alive with love and aflame with anticipation.  To squeals of laughter He took her, held her high, pulled her to His chest, ran His hand across a misshapen leg and it was straight.  The convergence of two souls, He drew her deeply to His face.  And then He handed her back to an elated set of parents who now held a daughter who was wholly whole.  All of it was too much for words; it was too inexplicable to embrace in the confining catacombs of human understanding.  The only question that one can formulate is “Who is this?”

Before the answer can be formulated Jesus is drawn to the pleas of those who have brought the deaf mute, pleas the deaf man cannot hear.  The man, this Jesus stepped toward them, fastening His attention on those who had brought the man.  He seemed discerning and listening with some sort of intuition and understanding that superseded anything they could comprehend.

He then turned intense eyes and fastened His gaze on the mute.  His eyes were more than human, although they appeared to be something that was fully human at the same time.  They were infinitely deep, profoundly thoughtful and intensely focused.  A soft but chiseled spirit enamored the crowd and drew the deaf man to Jesus.  It was all a terrible yet inviting contradiction of commanding power and gentle softness.  Jesus’ eyes had the breath of infinity behind them.  The deaf mute found himself becoming entirely lost in them until Jesus took his arm, gestured and began to move out of the crowd.  God was afoot; the Creator of the universe in intentional motion toward an intentional destination.  It was all terrifying but exhilarating at the same time.

This fluid mass of humanity parted a second time, but from the inward out.  Shifting layers of broken humanity sliced a swath to the edge of the mass.  Jesus breeched the fringes of the crowd, walking with a man whose life had been lived on the fringes of life.  Jesus was in the process of isolating a man who lived isolated in deafness.  In a moment, the crowd was far behind them, their voices falling into a distant murmur.  Those that advocated his healing were absent.  Suddenly, inexplicably, this deaf mute was alone with God.

Ears and tongue; the world is drawn in through one with the self being released through the other.  They both engage in a partnership of exchange, drawing in and letting out.  They draw in the world to process it and then release it back into the world with part of the person attached; adding to life, flavoring it, affixing yet another unique note to the chorus of the ages.  There, in the world of the deaf, this dance was never initiated.  The deaf man was isolated from the world and to the world.

Drawing the man along, Jesus sought isolation.  It was within isolation that isolation would be broken.  One on one, God and man in relationship echoing back to a lost garden.  The Creator and the created rectifying lost creation in an act of recreation.  In this joint journey they walked past the rancor and raucous of an open air market filled with bartering and bantering, scales and sweeping gestures.  They skirted around scurrying children and walked past stray dogs milling close to tables spread with red meats.  A pair of centurions laden with weaponry strode past in the service of oppression, granting Jesus and the deaf mute no notice.  Passing priests in ceremonial robes stepped in pompous cadence on errands of perceived righteousness.

And then, an unexpected turn into a vacant alley made up of basalt stones that cut a manmade canyon.  The sun found scant room to watch the making of a miracle.  It casts angled rays, canting itself to catch the pending phenomenon.  The din of the open air market and the jostling of the vendors was put at a sufficient distance, becoming gradually muted and fading soft and indistinct into the background.

Then, a miracle was wrought with gestures that were so familiar to the mute.  Gestures were the very means of understanding and the way in which the deaf mute had navigated his world.  Jesus was not a God interacting in mystery, but in intimacy.  There were no methods cloaked with indiscernible actions or unfamiliar rituals.  All was simple, direct and familiar; fingers in ears and a touch of the tongue.  Saliva was a symbol of the fullest sharing of self as a participant in the miracle right along with the deaf mute.  Jesus engaged the man not as a distant entity cloaked beyond recognition in some sort of misty immutability.  Salvia was believed to have had a curative quality; a belief entirely fictional in nature.  However, the symbolism of the act provided a needed vehicle that outweighed the myth of the act itself.  So Jesus ingeniously chose to use myth as a vehicle for a miracle; a miracle done in the simple language of the deaf mute’s isolated world to obliterate his isolation.

And then there was something for Jesus Himself.  Something the deaf man could not hear or participate in.  Jesus looked up to heaven.  There is a weighted sigh of a God whose love eliminates His ability not to feel.  It was a reflection of both His heart and the heart of His Father.  It seemed to be the private pain of a God grieving over His own creation, escaping the lethal weight of it all only by virtue of His divinity.  Jesus’s sighing was likely the plaintive moan of God once again embracing the awful reality of fallen mankind as manifest in this single, mute life.   It was likely the expression of a great angst that arose from an infinite understanding of how far this man’s life was from God’s original intent for him.

There, in that alley God would meet the need of one man.  In a few days, He would meet the need of thousands with a scant seven barley loaves and a few small fish.  A few months beyond that and He would meet the need of all mankind on a barren hill.  It would be a hill that would not be sandwiched between the walls of some abandoned alley, but between two crosses and two worlds.  However, there was the need of the moment.

“Be opened!” (Mark 8:34, NIV) said this Jesus.  Not just his ears, but his life as no miracle is excluded or in any way restrained solely to the obvious.  “Be opened!”  Be free to live fully, to hear in perfect pitch the richness of the notes and measures, the scores of life and living.  Be opened to engage everything else in life that was open.  Be opened so that being closed simply cannot be.

Jesus took a step back and watched life unfold as the miracle reverberated far beyond the miracle; something like when a stone is dropped in a mirrored pool, sending ripples far beyond the point of impact.  An alien experience transpired for which the man had no point of correlation.  Sounds began to filter through.  The orchestra gradually swelled and expanded.  The void of silence filled to capacity.

Suddenly, he heard the crunch of gravel beneath his feet, shifting his weight again and again to reproduce the sound his stunned and hungry mind had never imagined.  The barking of a dog floated in from afar, the source of the sound and everything that defined it was entirely unknown.  Birds darted overhead in tangles of wild flight, cheeps and chirps synchronizing the feathered masses journey.  He was caught in the rapture of hearing his own breath.  And then words, the first he had ever heard, annunciated clearly, perfectly and concisely.  His own voice now came back to him perfect!  The cycle was now marvelously complete.

Jesus stood silently, giving the man room and time to embrace the wonder of the moment.  Miracles become freeing and claustrophobic at the same time; opening up entirely new venues that are often bigger than our ability to embrace.  Time was needed to allow this astonished man sufficient time to reorient to the miracle of a life restored.  Maybe Jesus saw in this man, this deaf mute the liberation that the cross would extend to billions.

It may be that the individual miracles, like this one, allowed Jesus to foresee in this solitary face what the cross would do in an endless sea of faces across endless spans of time.  Not the kinds of miracles that would eventually fall to the deterioration of frail bodies and the eventuality of death, but miracles that would be eternally fresh because they open up all of eternity to all who seize it.  I wonder if maybe it might have been these moments that allowed Him to endure the long moments on a lonely cross. 

And then, the first words of another human being that he ever heard.  “Don’t tell anyone,” Jesus said.  The first words seem irrational and inexplicable.  The world of sounds brings with it responsibility to the world it unveils.  Miracles bring with them accountability to both the Restorer and what has been restored.  A relationship with God brings obedience, the responsibility to act on faith even when that action appears irrational, contrary, odd or plainly wrong.  “Don’t tell anyone”.  But containment failed.  The measure of the miracle was larger than the measure of the man to contain it.  But that is what happens when an infinite God interacts within our finite frames.  What He does is always bigger than us and bigger than our ability to contain it.  Our faith may be big enough to elicit a miracle, but our faith is seldom large enough to embrace it once it happens.  Jesus took his arm, gestured and began to move out of the alley and into life.

 

Aside in an Alley

And so, Jesus pulls me aside at times and isolates me in my isolation.  He places creation aside and draws me to a secluded place, away from the crowds that surround me and the world that has so often thrust me to its fringes.  Often I am afraid to be there because I am confused and frightened to be one on one with God.  I would much prefer to have Him heal me at a safe distance, or intersect my life in the companionship of others, or touch me as part of something larger within which I can meld.  But one on one in some alley in my life; secluded with God?  Sequestered with the Creator?  It is both terrible and wonderful.

And then, to have Him connect with me intimately in that place of isolation?  The God of the cosmos coming to me in my isolation?  Not just in proximity or in earshot, but in my language and in the raw essence of my being.  God steps into my isolation and speaks to me there.  Not standing outside of my isolation and beckoning me out of it from out there.  But coming in, gently taking my arm and gesturing me out of it.  Partnering with me and in the partnering coming squarely into my isolation to commandeer me and rescue me. Cutting through the mass of issues, pain, self-absorption, and self-hatred that surrounds me and drawing me along with Him.

And there, in those isolated alleys of my life He frees me.  He relishes watching me come to life and then fumble with a life that’s so new that I have little idea how to hold it.  He is as amazed at watching me come to life as He was when He first formed Adam from the dust and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7, NIV).  It is just as poignant for Him, never being diminished for a God whose love for His creation rages undiminished.  God is always revealing that creation can only exist if it is constantly creating.  “He has done everything well . . .” (Mark 7:37, NIV).  Harkening to yet another statement . . . “and God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:10, NIV).  In that alley God was creating all over again as He always does, doing everything well and good.

 

Dean’s Alley

It was all experimental, but the doctors said that the surgery might restore Dean’s hearing.  He was not enthused at all.  Dean walked through the process more like a laboratory rat that had no idea of what was happening or what the possible outcome might mean.  He was lethargic through it all, demure and distant.

But the day came quite by accident.  I turned and there he stood.  My first response was to say “hello” out of some prescribed tedium and routine, knowing that he wasn’t reading my lips.  Sometimes rote and ritual turns life lifeless.  It robs us of expectation and hope.  I felt that way with Dean.  But I said “hello” anyway.

He simply looked, canting his head a bit and registering something in those crystal blue eyes that I had never seen.  Sometimes we imagine something so much for so long that when it’s ours it’s both wonderful and terribly different than we had ever imagined it being.  I think that was the case for Dean.  He had heard my voice.  The surgery had worked.  For the first time, he had taken in the tone and flavor of the single word that I had uttered and had found himself awed by the utterance.  He smiled and seemed to wait for more.  I paused.  “Can you hear me?” I said tentatively, desperately hoping that he was no longer locked in and I locked out.

Instantly he grabbed my arm, turned and in the rush of wonder pulled me down the hall and into his room.  He stopped in the middle of that quaint room and pointed at the various objects around us in frantic gestures.  It was all so new for me that I had no idea of what he meant.  He continued to point in a manner insistent and adamant, walking around the room in a rigid gait and incessantly pointing.

Finally, I realize what he wanted; he wanted me to pronounce what the objects were, to speak their name, to say them so that he could hear them for the first time.  Picture, telephone, window, bed, floor, light, wall, rug, Craig; it was a young man surging alive with an urgency that flooded the room with a terrific and wonderful energy.  He was hearing it all, for the first time.

Sometimes you sense that you’ve been put in a place of privilege that you are completely and wholly undeserving of.  That’s where I was on that day.  God came aside this young man through the hands of a caring doctor and an experimental surgery.  Now I was privileged to stand beside him as well, inundated in a tsunami of wonderment and life.

It all went on for days and days.  I couldn’t wait to see Dean.  In indescribable awe, I watched a young man come alive in a way that makes coming alive worth all the pain and disappointment and deafness that we have to endure to get there.  A miracle came to me through Dean.  Deafness was abated in infinitely more ways that simply physical hearing.  Dean reminds me of deafness and what it can do to a person and a life.  Dean also reminds me of deafness abated when God comes along side of a single life and renders deafness deaf.            

 

Repeated Deafness

Unlike the deaf mute and unlike Dean, my deafness and my inability to speak to my world come often.  Frequently I need Jesus to put His fingers in my ears and touch my tongue.  Sin, selfishness and the lure of the world renders me deaf and ill-suited to speak as I should.  My condition is pitifully recurrent.  God’s presence is likewise persistently recurrent.  Daily I am in this alley with Him.  While I tire of it and find myself sweltering in embarrassment, He never tires.  He likes, it seems, these alley encounters.  He relishes taking me aside.  And I know that one day He will take me aside for that final time, that time when I will ascend to a place where deafness and speech deficits will simply not exist.  Their memory will be vanquished.  And there, in that place, I will stand eternally before God in perfection with new worlds perpetually opening up to me.  In that place the layers will constantly part to reveal something new.  His smile, the relish in His face will never be old, but always new.

 

Pondering Point

The loud voices in life, those that clamor for our attention are most often not the vital voices.  The fact that they have to clamor suggests as much.  It is the smaller voices that are weak, thin and easily drown out that are rich.  It is these that tend to be the priceless voices.  Their worth easily lost in the pompous and presumptuous voices that say much but hold little.  It is easy to become deaf.  And when we are, we miss the precious voices whose worth is immutable.

 

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.

”In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life” - Part Four

"In the Footsteps of the Few - The Power of a Principled Life"

I Was Thinking - To Think Outside the Box(s)

I was thinking.  And the more I thought, the more I realized that there is a whole lot to think about.  But in my thinking, I thought that most of our thinking (despite how much there is to think about) is really pretty standardized and chafingly rote.  We think in predetermined patterns and pre-existent templates that require no thinking, other than the commitment not to think.  We think in the way that others have chosen to think because they’ve already done the thinking, which relieves us of the need to do so.  We think we think, but the more I think about that, the less I think we think (if you know what I mean).  So, while there’s a whole lot to think about in this big, wide world of ours …we don’t. 

It seems that our thinking is constrained in a manner that there’s really not that much thinking going on at all.  Rather, more often than not our thinking is a tired process of monotonously gathering up a predictable handful of stale but safe thoughts.  And if we play with them long enough, we figure that maybe they’ll freshen up and something innovatively fragrant might actually emerge out of the rot.  If something actually does, we’re usually scared of whatever it is.  If it doesn’t (which is typically what happens) we become increasingly convinced beyond hope that life is actually as stale as we thought it was.    

 

Why?

Most of this appears to happen because we think within boxes that we randomly (and sometimes not so randomly) borrow.  We think within predetermined boxes because anything outside of those requires some innovation wherein we let the leash out a bit, let our thoughts find their legs, and let them run.  But we’ve discovered that sometimes that simply takes too much thought, far too much energy, and far, far too much courage, for it is much easier and much, much safer to just sit.  Or worse yet, we fear that once our thoughts have caught even the slightest whiff of a life running at full stride, they will forever refuse the short leash. 

What if our thinking were to open up fresh venues and pull back some hitherto hidden veil that suddenly revealed vast horizons that leaves ignorance no place to hide?  And what if the magnitude of such revelations is such that it handily crushes the complacency within which we’ve found so much comfort?  What if?  And out of the fear that such things might actually befall us, we peruse the stank back alleys of complacency, hastily borrowing boxes that we find deep in the darkened hovels of mediocrity.  And life becomes a journey lived within suffocating boxes rather than an adventure crafted of breathless horizons.

 

Our Box Collection:

The Box of Societal Norms

We think within the box of societal norms.  We grant these norms legitimacy because most of the people around us adhere to them in one form or another.  Because all these people adhere to them, we naturally grant these norms a morality, assuming that others would not dare embrace them if they weren’t sufficiently ethical or moral.  Therefore, (despite the terribly narrow nature of both the boxes and our logic), they are deemed acceptable.  To our relief, we quickly discover that if we think within these boxes we are far less likely to be met with rejection, or ridicule, or disdainful judgement, or some other rather distasteful response.  We desperately want to be in the good graces of those around us as that’s far more comfortable and far less dangerous than being in some other more adverse state of relationship with these people.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

 

The Box of the Mundane

We think within the well-worn boxes of the mundane as that path is quite well charted, rigorously predictable, and therefore void of anything dangerous because other people have figured out where all the dangerous stuff is and either removed it, or they’ve created paths around it.  We know that venturing off the path in life is ref with all sorts of calamity that’s just waiting to happen, and so in the box of the mundane there’s nothing to venture off on because there’s one and only one path.  It might be mundane, it might go nowhere, but it’s safe (if you happen to define ‘safe’ as refusing to live in order to effectively avoid being hurt).  In an increasingly busy world that’s careening in every conceivable direction, the box of the mundane allows us to perfectly function on autopilot since there’s only one path that we can walk.  Better yet, if we so choose we can simply sit along the side of this singular path, as this box generously allows us to somehow think (because we’re not) that sitting is a journey.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

 

The Box of Our Fears

We think within the box of our fears, as anything on the outside of those walls is filled with horrific danger (often of the most fabricated sort).  We’ve probably ventured out there a time or two, and when we did, we got hurt.  And so, when we were hurt, we put our pain on emotional steroids which exponentially magnified our fear.  We then took that fear and fashioned a monster that doesn’t exist, and we hunkered down in our box horrified by the fiction of it all.  And while the space out there is a whole lot bigger than the infinitesimally tiny space in here, at least it’s safe.  And safety (in our minds) is a decent trade-off, so much so that we amply decorate the box and make it homey with the scant furnishings of justification, rationalization, denial and other carefully appointed excuses.  We settle into the scantily upholstered armchair of mediocrity and wile away our days pretending that we’re not pretending.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

 

The Box of Our Families

We think within the box created by our families as we engaged them growing up.  In many unhealthy families, their boxes were shaped by their own demons and assorted hobgoblins that they handed the reins of power over to.  Over time, they dutifully passed those onto us lock, stock and barrel.  Sometimes these families demand that family members stay within those boxes because, somehow, we will vanish into the dank darkness of another life, or be whisked off to parts unknown by friends, or fall headlong into a career if we dare step outside of them.  Other times, family members may prompt us to move outside of the box because they have come to recognize the life-sucking quality of the box.  Yet, while they prompt us to step out, they did not know how to do so themselves.  Therefore, we must do the most daring thing imaginable and think through exactly how in the world we’re going to do that.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

 

The Box of Self-Esteem

We think within the box crafted by our low self-esteems.  These are often the smallest of all boxes because we dare not create any room whatsoever for anyone else to come in lest they see how pathetically awful we really are.  Sitting in our confining hovel, we know full well that there’s great adventure and untapped possibilities outside of our boxes.  There’s a good chance that we studied it, or read about it, or on those better days taken a slight peek outside before slamming the door shut again.  In fact, knowing all of that is often the most difficult thing of all.  We know outside this box of ours there’s more life than we can wrap our solitary minds around.  We constantly hear the invitations to come out.  We can imagine adventure because we’ve imagined it so many times that we can almost touch it in our minds, which makes us think that somehow we’re touching the adventure out there (which in fact, we are not).  But we doubt our ability to function in it, or find a place in it, or seize it in the cultivation of our dreams, or much less survive it.  Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

 

I Was Thinking

I was thinking that there are a whole lot of boxes.  Lots and lots of them.  But I was also thinking that they are just boxes and nothing more.  A box is not a fortified prison with towering walls and tangled barbwire, even though we have come to see it as such.  It’s just a box and nothing more.  And as a box, it doesn’t hold us.  Rather, we hold it.  I don’t ‘think’ that we have the power to move beyond our boxes.  Rather, I ‘know’ that we do.  And when we realize that power and move beyond our boxes, the parameters of our lives will explode exponentially in a manner that we will be free to think about all the many things that this big, wide world of ours has to think about.  When we do, the role of thinking will finally destroy the rules of the box.  And when that happens, we will be genuinely free.  And when we’re free we won’t be imprisoned by the dark specter of endings.  Rather, we can embrace the majesty of our purpose, and we can run with the power of our calling.

And so, I think I really, really want to think outside the boxes.  So, I think I’ll start getting rid of them.  It might take some time.  I’m going to have to be honest about them and grieve what they’ve already stolen from me.  It might be scary (in fact, I know it will be).  I may wonder what in the world I’m doing at times.  People may wonder what I’m doing as they peer out from the cracks in their own boxes.  But to not get rid of the boxes is to rot away in a box.  And I know that that is not the life for me.  And might I say, I don’t think that’s the life for you either.  So, let’s begin the process of letting the role of thinking destroy the rules of the box.  And let’s be free.

”An Intimate Collision - Encounters with Life and Jesus” - Part Two

Darren and a cheap plastic fish; it was a dollar store bin filler indelibly stamped with “made in China” that bordered on being junk.  There were numerous needs in Darren’s life, so numerous that he himself was lost in them.  They were pathetic and endless, so it seemed anyway. A plastic fish was little more than a cheap toy that momentarily anesthetized a child-like mind trapped in the deterioration of a thirty-five year old body.  It was a mere trinket, a point of focus upon which to forget the realities that had bent him and ultimately broken him.  It served as a pathetic distraction from all that had cut thick furrows across his head and heart far too early and far too prematurely.  It was a cheap, plastic fish.

The years had stooped his gait and lined his hair with ever lighter shades of premature gray, cutting deep fissures across his brow and thickening young skin.  His gait had been reduced to a shallow shuffle, dragging thick shoes across coarse pavement.  He wore the soles thin on the outsides edges, further canting his gait.  His soul was much the same, deeply worn along the outside edges as well; throwing into a precarious imbalance the cadence of an already distorted life.  Darren found himself limping through a world that placed ultimate premiums on that which is new, believing that any value is inherent only in the degree of newness any object possesses.  The world viewed his worn edges as old, used up and spent.  He was unfairly evaluated as discarded humanity and rendered invisible to the eye of a world too busy.

Baggy pants were thread thin at the knees and frayed at the pockets with stitching pulled and strained at variant seams.  An oversized shirt bespoke of his desperate efforts to fit in life.  Like his shirt, it never happened.  Stained and limp, a faded handkerchief hung from a weary pocket.  A mouthful of decay filled each smile and poured out in each conversation.  Chapped lips were edged thick by coarse stubble sprouting from a grimy bed of mottled skin.  The expanse of his squared jaw and sunken cheeks were covered with a bumper crop of inattention.  His words were primitive and slurred; rolling off his tongue in seamless bursts that made comprehension nearly impossible.  Shoulders were drawn down by the weight life had exerted on him, pulling him forward in a Neanderthal sort of cadence that was long and slothful.  And he wanted to show me his plastic fish.

“Kind of like the disciples, huh?  They caught fish.  They were fishermen!” he said.  A broad smile of decay anticipated a hearty response from me.  Darren was thirty-five, yet he was enamored with a dollar store plastic fish.  “Like the disciples, huh?”  His persistence accelerated my desire to talk to a real adult.  Church was over and there were many candidates milling about.  My momentary objective was to determine how to terminate this infantile conversation and find someone with some shred of intelligence that I could talk to.  I moved to close the conversation with Darren and did so quite deftly I thought.  He would have no idea that I had just ditched him.  As I stepped away from him, he held the plastic fish in his weathered hands as if it were a precious treasure and muttered softly to himself, “I was a sinner, now I’m a fisher of men too.”

 

God Strikes

There are unexpected moments in life when God sends simplicity as a blinding light that is far more pure and infinitely more superior than all the intellectual musings I could devise.  Darren’s words . . . “sinner” and now “fisher of men”, though soft, backlit my soul in blinding light and thundered through the very core of my ego-centric spirit.  They rocked me, simultaneously illuminating my flagrant sense of superiority as paper thin and backlighting my egotistical self against something far greater and far grander.  A light both brilliant and revealing was thrown onto something I had unknowingly lost in the dark pool of piousness and shallow Christianity that I had cultivated.  “Sinner” and “fisher of men” represented two opposite ends of life.  One was represented by sin sheathed in death on one end, and that of salvation and the humanly unexplainable privilege of salvation on the other.  He had seized something spiritually authentic that was indefinably powerful because of its innocent simplicity.

His words drew me down with my soul melting into repentant puddles on the pavement and pooling around Darren’s feet.  And in my heart a stark thought shot through my brain.  It seized my heart and surged through my soul as the light exposed the grotesqueness of my immaturity . . .  “go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:9, NIV).  I had rarely felt so abjectly ugly and so starkly far from God.  I was sickened by myself with nowhere to run in order to get away from myself.  Darren had brilliantly backlit my life with a hand full of simple words, a plastic fish and an innocent life.  I was repulsed by what I saw in the blinding light.

 

Fish and Light

The cool of the night aimlessly drifted by.  Time drifted listlessly with it.  Waves gently lapped the weathered wooden hull as if the night was completely pacified with simply existing.  Sails flapped passively, rolling in a dance with an occasional listless breeze that floated out from somewhere deep in the night.  The timbered creaking of shifting weight was soft against the darkness.  Oars dipped deep and silently, spinning tiny whirlpools of water that softly gurgled in the thin veil of satin moonlight.  The damp scent of water gathered in a thin, veneer layer of mist that tentatively skirted the water’s surface.  The night was intermittently rendered musty with the odors of nets wet with nothing but water.  A distant heron hauntingly called into the night from a far shore.  Muffled voices and the lights of other boats drifted listlessly across the water.

Nets were cast in a perfectly spinning arch, pirouetting to the rhythm of the night as they were launched by thick arms sure with experience.  Slapping the water, they were given a moment to sink into the night of the lake.  Descending, the keel of the boat became smaller in the submerged descent.  The chalky white moonlight was shattered into a million moving shards of milky light on the underside of the waves, fading as the depths were listlessly plumbed.  The water cooled, darkened, and was stirred by soft currents.  All was listless in a dreamlike descent.

And then there was a massive tug initiated by the same sure arms of experience.  The net reeled and folded in upon itself, instantly enfolding everything within it.  A series of firm tugs follow in a different kind of rhythm that was much less peaceful and much more intentional.  Lunging toward the surface the net broke the liquid plane and was hauled into the coarse belly of the boat.

Again it was the same.  There was nothing in the nets embrace but weeds, water and disappointment.  A gruff remark, and then a curse edged rough with the abrasion of frustration cut the night and oozed the pus of anger into the boat’s belly.  Frustration was manifest and coarsely expelled into the night by exasperated fishermen whose finest skills could not coerce the deep waters to offer up their bounty.  The waters stubbornly chose to withhold their living treasures.  The net was hurriedly prepared by frustrated hands and launched again, and again, and again.  Frustration layered upon frustration until nothing other than frustration defined the whole of the night.

The moon slowly descended to sleep behind the horizon.  The multitude of stars drifted across the expanse of the velvet blackness, moving in unison with the turn of the universe and the winds of heaven nudging them to the same horizon.  Night would soon drift into day.  The nets remained empty.  Soon the sun stirred with the first tentative band of pastel thin light on a yawning horizon, softly illuminating empty boats.  So went the night.

This was Simon Peter’s world, that of his father and his grandfather.  His was a lineage of weary boats, hemp nets, flapping fish glinting in flashes of silver, sails and storms.  He was isolated within the world of trolling by night as the fish rose to cooler waters and sleeping by day.  Lost in this world of his, he was so engrossed in its demands that he was defined by that world, having standardizing everything else by its shape and form.  This world of nighttime fishing and the life that goes with it dictated the shape, tenor and tone of his life.  It was so familiar and natural that becoming it, for Simon Peter, was being nothing less than who he was and where he needed to be. 

There was little thought of anything else for he knew nothing else.  No other world other than the methodical frustration of sparse nets, contrary winds, too few fish to market leaving purses thin with coinage, long nights followed by exhausted days with the only promise being more of the same . . .  nothing other had backlit his life enough to see anything any different.

 

In His World

There was an unexpected intrusion in Simon Peter’s tiny world.  A carpenter turned prophet found His way to this place of nets, nights and weary men.  Word had spread carrying rumors of miracles that had long drifted across the lake, having reached the shoreline and lapped against the wooden hulls of the docked boats.  It was likely that many of the fishermen had gotten wind of Jesus as their sails might have caught a slight breeze.

But it was of little import. Rather, it was an inconvenience.  Like too many nights, the night had been long and fruitless.  The nets had yielded nothing more than water, weeds and weariness.  There were no fish to market that day.  The lake and the night had joined forces to deny these hunters of the deep any trophy.  The coming night would be pressed with the need to make up for a night lost.  It was time for sleep, troubled sleep at best, but sleep nonetheless.  Yet, despite the need for sleep there was an intrusion . . . of all days.

The crowd grew, giving some degree of credibility or celebrity to whoever this was.  These frustrated fishermen picked up a few words here and there, discerning pieces that remained only pieces within the fatigue that enshrouded their minds.  Religion won’t catch fish and nice words won’t mend nets.  Sweeping platitudes won’t feed hungry families, and brazen prophecies won’t raise wily fish from elusive depths.

But Simon Peter had seen what the winds of rumor had only blown.  A mother-in-law had been healed by this itinerant Jesus person.  The crippled walked pensively but surely on unfamiliar legs with crutches joyously abandoned at their feet as a necessity that was instantly rendered unnecessary.  The blind stumbled in the attempt to align faces with voices for the first time, turning to drink in deep blue skies and finding themselves hopelessly enamored by mounds of brilliant wildflowers.  The pallor of death was swept from the faces of catatonic infants with tiny arms and thin legs instantly washed alive with vitality that had no explanation, except . . .  He had seen it.

Simon Peter had attempted to correlate all of that with his world of boats, frayed nets, canvas sails and fish.  The experience and the exposure had not changed him yet.  It was only an anomaly because his world had not been directly intersected.  What he had observed was wonderment, but wonderment that had taken place some distance outside the parameters of his tiny and predictable world of wooden boats and hemp nets.  It had yet to manifest itself dead center in that world and to render everything entirely less than predictable.    

However it happened, Jesus was suddenly in Simon Peter’s boat; dead center in Simon’s world . . . ground zero.  Suddenly his boat was turned into a podium and a fisherman was turned into a chauffeur.  From the bow of this tired fishing vessel the words of Jesus droned on.  It’s not that they weren’t compelling.  It’s just that they fell upon a mind dulled with fatigue and deluged with both empty nets and empty pockets.  Sometimes the greatest messages are missed because the human mind is occupied with a miniscule net of fish drawn from some tiny puddle when the Fisher of Men is standing right in their boats casting a net into the whole ocean of men.

Scripture does not indicate what Jesus said that struck Simon, it’s what He did.  And then, the command came.  The nets had already been mended, cleaned and stowed.  Weary sails had been drawn tight and tied.  Arms were weak and heads were fuzzy.  The fish had undoubtedly descended to cooler waters, far beyond the reach of their nets and all of their accumulated skills.  And yet this Jesus wanted to go fishing.  The logical argument was of no use.  A lifetime of experience was discarded and discounted by this Teacher.  He was confidently insistent.  And so, wearily Peter mumbles, “But because you say so, I will let down the nets” (Luke 5:5, NIV).  And he does.

Oars are lowered by weary fishermen who exchanged glances washed in confusion, anger and a slight flush of stupidity for agreeing to this idiotic venture.  Plunged into cool waters, awakened oars create spiraling eddies in their wake.  The morning sun was now full, having long lifted itself off the horizon of a new day, spilling a cascade of gold that broke into sparkling flecks of yellow glitter on gentle waves.  Oars were drawn in with glistening droplets falling from their weathered edges, ever so quickly catching a slight fleck of sunlight before becoming lost in the waters below.  Arms of experience grasped the nets, spread them and deftly launch them in perfect flight.  Again, they slapped the surface of the water as they had a hundred times the night before.  A thousand times maybe.  This time however, it was different.

 

Backlighting

Instantly there was a slight tug.  Then, the nets were seized and sent wildly convulsing.  The pull was overwhelming, catching the strength and experience of even the most seasoned fisherman entirely off guard.  Strained arms were etched with protruding veins.  Faces were flushed red.  The boat listed under the weight as nets were hoisted to the surface.  Drawing against the collective resistance, the surface was broken in an explosive torrent of foaming water and flailing fish.  The morning sun caught and threw the first silver glint of hundreds of thrashing fish reflected riotously in the churning waters.  The water was agitated, surging white and frothy with the multitude of the catch.

Simon Peter was astounded, his mind gaping with the inability to correlate what he saw with what he knew.  A sudden panicked call went out to other boats.  They scurried and cast off in pell-mell and chaotic fashion; experienced fisherman completely inexperienced with netting the impossible.  Oars plunged deep and hard, frantically pulling against morning’s water.  A small army of boats surged forward, creating panicked wakes.  The catch spilt as a silver torrent into other hulls.  Boats creaked, listed and then dropped to the water line, rolling fat with the bulky weight of the catch.  

Simon Peter was caught in the breech of trying to draw in nets that were fraying and snapping while correlating the event in his own mind.  For him, it was irreconcilable.  It did not match his world or his experience.  He was thrust beyond his limited sphere by an event that had occurred in his world, in the very center of it, right in the middle of who he was and what he did.

It was entirely other worldly, smacking of something supernatural even.  Every sense and sensation of the miracle was inserted into the very center of his life to blow him beyond that center.  His life was now held in sharp and poignant relief against something incomprehensibly greater and immeasurably grander than he.  He was no longer compared solely to his world; a comparison which once gave him permission to mindlessly inhabit that world without thought.  Now, instantly, he was held up against something infinitely beyond his world.  And there, in the stark and contradictory contrast of a miracle happening in his boat, on his lake, with his net and his hands, he saw himself.  Here, he was backlit.

Starkly backlit by God, his life was thrust into keen and crippling perspective.  The blinding light revealed the thin veneers of his life so much so that he was exposed beyond his ability to comprehend the exposure, much less deal with it.  The din of the activity faded as Simon was drawn down, face to face with his revealed self.  The sea, the boats, the commotion of fellow fishermen . . . they all disappeared as he devolved deep into himself.  Simon Peter was fraught with himself, finding himself grappling with the reality of his person as he had never seen it before, or been willing to see it.

He turned, stepped, and lunged to the front of the boat.  Here Jesus had watched the miracle unfold; God incarnate enjoying the provision of the fish, the message in the provision, and lives about to be changed by the provision.  Simon Peter dropped before Jesus, a proclamation of utter transparency leaping from his lips in stammering honesty.  Starkly set against the activity around him he shouted, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:9, NIV).

God had invaded the core of Peter’s being and he had been illuminated against it.  Here he saw the real self.  He acknowledged what has been exposed as far too much to comprehend, and far too big to allow him to recalibrate it all into something that made sense to him.  He could not embrace it, so vast was the exposure.  So, he had to get away from the light and get it away from him.  Yet, he would ultimately find that entirely impossible.  Soon the disciples would be named and his name would be the first called in a list of many names.  It was no wonder as being backlit is often the precursor to being called.

 

My World Defining Me

And so I am lulled into the ebb and flow of my life, into the circumstances that swirl in variant pools around me; the eddies and rippling waters that reflect back to me more of what they are than who I really am.  And I blindly accept those reflections as me, allowing myself to become impoverished in the surrender of acceptance.  It is when God steps into the middle of my world that what I took for God I find not to be God or of God.  It is when He seats himself dead center, squarely at ground zero that I am inoperably exposed.  It is here that something vastly superior is held up against who I have defined myself to be and what I have settled for.

Too often my own light is borrowed, reflected off of variant events around me much like the moon borrowing its light from the sun and reflecting back what does not belong to itself.  My life is backlit by weak imitations that reflect things that are not their own, backlighting my life by anemic events that reflect a light so washed out that the landscape of my life is hardly perceptible.  This I eventually take for light with the eyes of my soul having become so unaccustomed to real light that its absence is no longer comprehended.  I then settle and sell out to vagueness as this kind of light provides little more than that.  All the while the profound challenges and wild passions lay a silent captive to the deep shadows that such a light casts; shadows that never surrender their contents to whatever light I bring to them until my life is backlit and the shadows are forced to surrender.

 

The Hopeful Shock

The shock of being backlit by Jesus rests in the instantaneous awareness that it brings.  The sudden illumination of everything makes everything vividly stark and painfully clear.  Such is the penetrating nature of this light that the light itself brazenly outlines and defines every sordid aspect of who I am, leaving no room to ponder or stew over them myself.  Neither does it give me room to manipulate what has been revealed because the clarity is so pure that it’s cognitively impenetrable and completely indefensible.  Otherwise the moment would be robbed, becoming something less than wholly divine in the thievery.

To be backlit by Jesus is to fully see and fully comprehend all at once.  All that is left for me to do is to embrace the truth vividly set before me, or squander the moment in futile attempts at denial.  More times than I can explain I have rushed to the front of the boat, prostrated myself before Him and begged him leave because I am faced with the horror of myself.

At those times my putrid disgust with myself clearly bars my relationship with Him.  Inevitably every time, He looks beyond what I cannot.  He sees who I am verses what I have become, delineating the difference in vivid starkness so clear that I cannot stand before myself.  He reminds me of His grace which makes my grotesqueness the raw material from which He weaves His glory.  And then, bedeviled and helpless by what I see in myself He calls the authentic me to works beyond my comprehension when all I want is for Him to leave.  And it is in the angst of desperately wanting to flee and break His hold on me that I am held against myself and am drawn kicking and screaming into phenomenal growth.

 

Making a Habit of the Light

And so I go fishing with Jesus every day.  Fishing for men?  Yes.  But also that kind of fishing that repeatedly back lights my life against the majesty of God.  It is placing myself in His presence while fighting every urge not to do so; readying me for the poignant realization that I am not what I presume to be and being with Jesus will highlight that every time.  It is not His disappointments in me for His grace will always tempter that.  It is my own disappointment in myself.  I want to avoid Him because I want to avoid the pain of personal honesty.  But I find an incongruent passion that causes me to leap into the boat because I know the joy of being honest before Jesus and what He does with that.  I am constantly, repeatedly and forever changed.

 

Darren and a Plastic Fish

People continued to mill about me, but they had vanished in the midst of deep thought and emotional turmoil beset within me.  I turned to Darren who was meandering off to some unknown destination; much like his life.  I reached out and touched his shoulder.  He stopped and staggered a bit as he turned to look at me, his body long worn beyond grace and dexterity of movement.  Sparking eyes set deep in worn sockets met mine, shocking me into the realization that I did not have that sparkle.  I paused tentatively.  “Can I see your fish?” I stammered.  Although a rare treasure, he instantly placed it in my hands without hesitation or forethought.  He unabashedly shared the wealth of his life in a simple gesture, freely giving to a soul that needed what he had found; handing to me what he had grasped.  I needed the authenticity of his faith and the deep conviction in whose light my own pathetic belief system shrank and ran sour.

Such treasures often come in simple packages, like Darren.  Their simplicity is in their security, as few would look there.  Few look there because few lend their eyes to simplicity because simplicity suggests vacancy and emptiness. Those who do look there find the opposite . . .  they find treasure.  They are not out to rob or pillage the treasure, but rather seek it as a precious gift that no one can hoard or hold individually.  It is bigger than one individual and made to pass to and through all individuals, so it passes much more simply through simple people like Darren.  It is to be savored, drawn fully into oneself and then left to enrich the next passerby.  Hidden away in the Darren’s of the world God has deposited His light, set to explode into any life that is so daring and so desperate as to engage the light in simple places.

I held his plastic fish, turning it this way and that, drawing down into its plastic and paint as had Darren, trying to draw out of it what he had.  “I’m going to hang it in my house,” he blurted.  “I don’t have anything on one wall.  It’s all white. Just white, that’s all.  And I’m going to hang it right in the middle,” he said.  A barren wall; like his life.  His faith was hung right in the middle of it.  And I thought, how totally appropriate and how absolutely wonderful.

I handed the plastic fish back to him.  “I’m going to go home right now and hang it up!” he said with electric excitement.  As he turned to shuffle away, I called after him and said, “Thanks Darren.”  There was no response.  He hadn’t heard me.  He was engulfed in the symbol of his faith, a captive to his mad love affair with his God and his fish.  Other people still mingled about me, but I no longer desired what they offered.  As Darren stepped into the passenger seat of a waiting car I realized that I wanted what he had.  I wanted a plastic fish.  I wanted a vibrant faith.  I wanted to be consumed with God as was this disheveled man; to have all of that hanging in the center of my life.  And he had backlit my life in such a way to show me the terrible deficits that I had.

I can still see that fish in my mind.  It is clear and vivid reminder of my faith, of following Jesus; of that to which he calls me.  Being reminded of that by an event that backlit my life so that I could see my life.  And so, Darren, if some day you are to read this, I simply want to say what you didn’t hear that day . . . “thank you!”

 

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”An Intimate Collision - Encounters With Life and Jesus” - Part One

Filth described her very well.  While it was an apt depiction, it failed to embrace the fullest description of what she was.  Some lives seem to be nothing more than a brutal manifestation of the accumulated slag and scum that is leftover in the wake of some departed tragedy.  These people become the thing that life has done to them, being so irreparably identified with their own tragedies that they themselves are a living manifestation of all those assorted tragedies.  Sometimes we become what life has done to us.  Hers was a life that was already an abysmal collection of untold catastrophes that resulted in filth nearly indescribable.  She was only fourteen.

Susan was of little note as she stepped off the bus that first day of summer camp.  She was one of over one hundred campers swirling in an arriving mass of anticipation.  Gathering tattered bags and a tattered spirit, her eyes were set hollow with the effects of a life lived in hatred.  Filth and a pervading stench drew her apart from the rest almost instantly.  Her soul seemed to reek with a putrid odor that handily eclipsed the smell emanating from her skin and clothing.  There was about her an inner ugliness that permeated everything else about her, that had consumed her and had digested whatever shred of good there might have been.  It all seemed to have effectively left the fragrance of any human goodness now consumed in the sludge of whatever it was that seemed to define her.

Her defense mechanism was so refined that she immediately repelled all who drew near, thrusting others so far away that she guaranteed her own isolation.  Her own woundedness was so utterly complete that the poison of the pain she felt spewed in venomous rages at anyone who drew near.  Her self-hatred was effectively projected outward onto anyone who dared draw near physically or emotionally.  She seemed as something less than human, something abominable; something terribly horrifying within which any shred of humanity was consumed and utterly lost.

The following week of camp was to be marred by ugly confrontations.  She devolved into assorted rages that were wild, brutish, entirely unprovoked and profuse.  She refused to shower.  Ferocious outbursts were filled with anger distilled into lethal poison that devastated other hearts, young and old.  Physical assaults and violent rages had an insane wildness and a touch of insanity about them.  There emerged at times something animalistic about her, something very primal that raged unrestrained by either reason or rationale.  At times the line between that of a visceral animal and a human being was blurred and terribly ill-defined. 

In the end, Susan was isolated in a lone cabin.  Her parents refused to come and get her.  Her pastor was unwilling and unable to deal with her rages as her life did not fit neatly into some clean theological rubric that he could manage.  The camp staff gathering to pray for her, but found their prayers as ineffective.  Some sort of spiritual possession was questioned, and rightly so.  She was a monster; a raging pathetic monster that we waited to relieve ourselves of at the close of camp.  Such was our judgment of her.

 

Judging From Fear

Judging is, I think, a manifestation of our own fears.  We judge so that we might have some sense of control and some feeling of superiority.  If we judge that which is before us, we assume we will not become whatever it is that we are rendering judgment upon.  We set ourselves apart as distinct from that thing or that person with that distinction somehow convincing us that we are different.  Judging places us above that which we judge, meaning that we will not succumb to it from our supposedly elevated position.

We judge because we fear, and because we fear we are not prone to look deeply into the person that we’re judging.  For if we look deeply, we might see ourselves.  We might be forced to surrender to the reality that that which we are rendering judgment upon is as much a part of that person as it is a part of us.  Superficial judgment allows us to bypass our own humanity and live in the lie of superiority.  The person whom we judge is then sacrificed to our thin self-serving judgments and whatever is it that God wanted to do in our lives through that person is tragically lost.     

 

Judgment Revealed

It was to be that final night of camp.  The next morning a mass of buses and cars would invade the gravel parking lot, snatching up sun burnt campers filled with the wild tales of a week’s adventures.  But that would be tomorrow.  For now, night had fallen, drawing up a warm blanket of thick summer air across the camp and out beyond the wooded expanse, tucking the world in at each horizon.  Crickets sang in a chorus of the night from the deep woods, lulling the day to slumber with their mesmerizing notes.  Frogs bellowed thick from a stream that meandered through a wooded ravine down a slight ridge.  Their chorus hauntingly rolled up the rise and across the slight meadow.  Lightening bugs cast dancing pinpoint pigments of yellow across the shadowy landscape and deep into the tall stands of sleepy timber.  The moon had only shaken a sliver of itself awake, mingling with the starry minions.  It was the perfect night; soft and subtle.  God’s creation was melding into perfection.

With the campers bedded down for that final night, I strolled down to the chapel now bathed in the soft shadows of night.  A few moments with God at the end of a long week seemed so right.  Drawn, I descended the winding dirt and gravel path with the soft crunch of each step muffled by night’s thick softness.  Slight shadows cut from the thin pastel light of a sleepy moon seemed to whisper something about reverence and what it is to be alone with God.

Another person had thought the same.  The outdoor chapel was framed by a wall of river rock that extended muscular granite arms around an expansive gravel floor.  Across the gravel expanse there stood a rock and timber altar with a muscular, rough-hewn cross as a shadowy sentry.  Thick timbers supported a vaulted wooden roof spread with broad knotty pine boards.  The woods beyond were alive with the night.  And Susan was there.

A shadowy figure knelt at the altar.  Her aloneness was poignant, an isolated life kneeling before an altar in a desperate hope of somehow breaking that isolation.  The crying was soft and indistinct, being defy muted by her fear of vulnerability.  The moment was a manifestation of a broken heart and deeply wounded spirit which had somehow collided with God enough to strike a spark of hope.  She was kneeling there, her fingers embedded in the rock altar, hoping that this hope would not fail her as had everything else.

We had all seen her as ugly, despicable, the slimy scum of humanity that teetered on the savagery of a wild animal.  We wanted nothing more than to see the sun break on the final day of camp and watch her leave both the camp and our lives.  We could not wait to be rid of her, to relegate this vermin back to the hole from which she had crawled.  To say we hated Susan was likely excessive.  To say we despised her was likely true.  And yet, here she was, broken.  The wounded humanity she so vehemently lashed out from was pouring out across that rock and timber altar.  Her core was exposed and for the first time I saw a slight glimpse of her humanity.  I had errantly judged it not to be there for fear that I would recognize it in myself.  Now I saw her brokenness and in it, I recognized my own.

I feared her, not knowing in that moment what to do; not wanting to do anything out of the fear of behaviors I’d observed and the hatred I’d seen spew from her.  But I found myself walking toward her anyway.  Having made no conscious decision to do anything, I stepped, my footsteps dictated by something wholly other than me.  Suddenly I was beside her in the thick dark, in the thick of night; in the thick of her night.  Without a word spoken, she reached up and took my hand and drew me down to her side with a force that buckled my knees.  Putting a trembling arm around me as if the whole of her spirit was leaning its weight on me, I felt for that brief instance the intolerable hell of her life.  And in that moment I understood why she was what she was.

Her words were to silence the night that surrounded us.  Nature drew down into the moment, stood on tiptoe so it seemed as God reached out from the expanse of that starry night and changed a life.

Her next words set me back, instantly slicing through all the things that had caused me to judge her so harshly and revealing who this really was.  She said, “would you pray with me?”  Without a word from me her heart ruptured open in prayer.  I never uttered a word.  I didn’t have to as such an action would have been only an intrusion in that transforming moment.  Massive floodgates surged opened and a enormous reservoir of pain that had accumulated over the incalculable expanse of years and events deluged the darkened chapel.  I knelt . . . stunned.  I had arrogantly diminished her in my judgments, and I experienced my own cleansing in hers.  It was a marvelous and privileged moment.

In the end, we spent over an hour kneeling in the gravel, cloaked in a deep summer’s night. Her prayers, a lifetime tidal wave of events and circumstances kept coming; of abuse and neglect and drugs.  The assorted maladies such as hunger, too few clothes, empty birthdays, numerous evictions and the rejection of society that abject poverty brings to a young life.  There was a devastating abortion and a fathomless litany of other terrifying choices that shredded her soul.  A father’s alcoholism, a brother’s suicide, and a mother’s incessant marital unfaithfulness layered in it all.  Things that I could have never have comprehended.  Hers was a devastated life beyond description; a human holocaust.

And it all poured into the night, across the rock and timber altar, down the gravel floor, out into the deep woods and into the expanses of heaven itself.  When it was done, she was free and her core was cleansed.  Likewise, I was free.  In that chapel God gave me far more than I had ever expected as I had trod the dirt and gravel path earlier that night.  I saw bits of me in her, and they were likewise swept away in her own release.

The next sunrise may have actually been her very first sunrise, the day dawning over a new life.  With the sun barely warming the eastern horizon, she went to the shower.  Her clothes were deposited in the washer.  She combed her hair into long translucent waves, brushed her teeth bright and put on fresh clean clothes.  A touch of borrowed make-up and a slight sprits of perfume rounded out the transformation.  Arranging herself in the mirror, she gently primped herself to perfection.

Susan walked into the cafeteria for that final breakfast wholly new.  Silence fell over one hundred campers.  Its power was deafening.  All of our superficial judgments had defined her for all of us.  So complete were they that we all sat there trying to somehow make them fit this new person for, sadly, we knew no other way to define her.  The old judgments of a monster melted away in the light of their gross insufficiency and a fresh understanding of this remarkable young woman seized the room.  A litany of miracles walked in with her.

At that final breakfast she went from table to table to table.  Asking for forgiveness from those she’d hurt.  Weeping with those lives she’d scarred.  Holding the faces of so many in her hands, looking intently into their eyes and telling them how sorry she was.  Hugging and holding and crying with an endless array of campers and counselors.  No one ate breakfast that morning because sometimes life becomes bigger than food and larger than any agenda.  Sometimes life intersects us so powerfully that the only thing we can give attention to is that which intersects us.  And Susan intersected us all.

A revival broke in that cafeteria.  Clusters of young lives gave themselves to God over eggs, bacon and a radically changed life.  Busses and arriving cars were asked to wait until the surge of one life changed had fully raced and run through the hundreds of other hurting lives that morning.  The vast gulf between what we were and what we could be was searingly highlighted in Susan.  And in the end, God ravaged the work of Satan and the deep pain of innumerable adolescents through the life of a single young lady who chose to see her core and live differently because of it.  It was the most remarkable thing I have ever seen.  A wretched and putrid life detested by those around her changing the very lives that had hated her, thereby leaving a legacy of life with those very lives.

 

An Errant Judgment

The rocks had dropped; one by one.  Each thud stirred a slight wisp of talcum-like dust that quickly settled.  With it, a slight wisp of hope and of life spun gentle eddies in her heart.  Garbled whispering rose from the gathered cluster of angered religious leaders.  Cutting glances rendered razor sharp with hatred were slung across the courtyard toward her.  Righteous indignation wrapped itself like a robe around pious bodies.  And then, a slow dispersing of those gathered in their robes and finery with the old leaving first.  The sound of feet on departing gravel built and then gradually lessened as the courtyard was emptied. 

Soon silence drifted in, leaving the scene littered still with lifeless rocks that attest to hatred halted and judgment deferred.  All that was left was a prostitute and the Son of God.  What remained was a broken woman human groveling in the acidic guilt of promiscuity . . . and Jesus.  Wholeness and hollowness stood one on one.

Half naked, the hours had been truncated with deception, discovery, detainment and deliberation.  Deep in an illicit sexual embrace, eyes were watching it all happen, peering past slightly parted curtains.  A door stood ajar.  Shooing away curious passer-byers, they collected visual evidence as to the unfolding offense under the guise of a righteous action while hiding the feeding of their own sensate passion by vicariously engaging in the heat of passion themselves.  The trap was sprung.  She was seized, a few loose garments were thrown around her naked body, heckles of debauchery were hurled at her and she was dragged away.  Her partner somehow vanished as his purpose was fulfilled.

The religious leaders had now departed.  Jesus slowly stood.  His eyes, contemplative and soft, shifted from the marks scrawled in the dirt and were drawn across the empty courtyard.  It is painful that people condemn in others that which they cannot accept in themselves.  That somehow the act of condemning it in others supposedly frees them from that very same thing in themselves.  They had in some way proven themselves invincible to whatever they were confronting because they had identified it and confronted in it another.  In doing so, they somehow viewed themselves as insulated from that same thing.

In the oddity of facing our own filth, judging is most often not a necessary action, but an action initiated out of the fear that those judging might themselves engage in such horrific actions.  Judging is too often a self-centered act designed to free the one judging from the belief that they will ever be consumed or controlled by that which they are judging.  The sense of love that one might possess for another human being had succumbed to the fear of what oneself might actually do and the narcissism of self-preservation that arises out of that fear.  It had all resulted in their judgment of this woman.  The rocks that littered the court yard yelled it loudly long after those who had dropped them had exited.  

Jesus drew a slight breath, paused and then turned.  Before Him there now knelt a scathingly hollow human being.  Few turn to the profession of prostitution unless there is wounding emptiness.  There are few people in life who are so relentlessly hollow and hold such an unyielding self-hatred as those who ply her trade.  She had likely arrived at this moment in time hollow and empty; in desperate need of a touch, of some slight affirmation.  Receiving even a morsel of someone’s heart and life might have been just enough to pull her up and out of the life that she lived.  Empathy instead of judgment; compassion instead of condemnation; love instead of legalism; someone who might look just a bit farther beyond the putrid exterior to see the wounded and bleeding person inside. 

Men had used her, violating her for a few scant coins.  They saw her only as an object upon which to release their sexual tensions and live out their distorted fantasies.  They had been unwilling to see the person who died a little more after each illicit rendezvous.  They didn’t care to see.  They had judged her too, but they judged her differently.  They had judged how she might be used by them and how the assets she possessed could be abducted in the vandalism of another human being.

Then there was the disgust of other men that was thrown out in taunts and heckling as she made her way through tight streets.  Vendors refused to sell her goods.  Still other men wanted to stone her, to kill her; to rid the world of her without understanding why she was who she was.  All of them rendered their sordid judgments, each colored by their place of proximity and point of orientation to her life.  It was the very same thing I had done to Susan.

Yet, here was a very different kind of man, the kind of man I would like to be.  His example prompts and prods me to grapple with my inadequacies rather than judging those in the lives of others.  His example convinces me that something human resides in even the most destitute of persons and that I must be diligent in seeking it out even when I can’t see it.  I must do these things so that I might do the same as He did.

Jesus had no need to judge.  He did not need to judge her to feel insulated against her atrocities.  He had no need to elevate Himself over her to feel safe from that which had destroyed her.  He was not concerned with advancing Himself or His interests at her expense.  He simply saw her humanity, He protected it, and then He allowed it to be released rather than condemned by the rendering some sort of self-serving judgment. 

He stood in the breech and turned the condemnation away.  ”’Woman, where are they?  Has no one condemned you?’” (John 8:10), he said to her.  A life of condemnation was suddenly still and hauntingly absent; she was entirely free of the condemnation that had satiated her life and shackled her heart.  It was an odd and alien experience for her.  She was no longer suppressed by the judgments of others that were designed to elevate them.  She was not sacrificed out of the need of someone else to feel superior.  She was not used so that someone else was satisfied in the using.  She was freed to be different and to do different.

Often God intervenes in ways that are outside of our realm of experience.  Often the very thing we need, we cannot conceptualize.  But it is these very things Jesus brings to us.  And in the perfect freedom of the moment that Jesus brings we find ourselves frozen.  She was frozen and unable to look up.  Her silence makes it clear.  This man had turned away the wrath that had followed her all her life.  The stones of judgment lay still in the dust.  Their voices had been muted and she had no idea what to do in a relationship where she would not be judged.

Caught in the void, she attempted to somehow acclimate to what had happened.  She floundered in the freedom because freedom is the place where judgment is absent.  She was free to be who it is she truly was without the proclaimed judgments of others forcing her to remain who she was.  She stammered with the words forming in the midst of mental groping and said, “‘No one, sir’” (John 8:11, NIV).  It was just the two of them.  Face to face with this man; alone in the courtyard of her life.

 

Our Courtyards

“‘Then neither do I condemn you.  Go now and leave your life of sin’” (John 8:11, NIV).  It is not about judgment or punishment.  There was no recitation of sins.  No lengthy exposé on the spiritual and psychological implications of sexual sin.  There was no need.  All that stuff was clear.  It was known.  Her choices were not the point of discourse for they were only the manifestation of pain, not the pain itself.  The lacerated core of this woman that had been heartlessly bludgeoned by so many others is what defined her.  Not the outward appearances as they are only a product of those wounds.  Not the manifestation of behaviors that are a part of all of that as well.  Not her acts of sexual promiscuity.  But the terrified and bloodied inner self that intentionally repulses all others at all costs so that wounded self will not incur further damage. 

It’s about refusing to judge as judgment only sentences others to that which we’re judging them for.  Rather, we need to take a wholly different tact and attempt to see past the behavior to the person behind the behavior so that we can release them from the wounds that so bind them.

Likewise, I have stood in many of my life’s own courtyards.  There, in those places, inherent in me is the fundamental knowledge regarding my own nature and the manifest actions of that nature.  I often pretend that to not be the case, rummaging forward through the accumulated filth of my life pretending not to know the reason for its accumulation.  Playing dumb.  Feigning ignorance.  Judging others ruthlessly so that I think myself superior and insulated from being what they are, thereby escaping accountability and the possibility of their fate.  But I know.  I know full well.

But, those that condemn me have departed.  The rightful punishment that I deserve is suspended.  Justice as I perceive it has been placated and postponed.  All that should be happening to me is not.  And in the absence of judgment is freedom.  God renders all judgment void because the cross consumes it all and renders it all as all gone.  The distractions, demands and declarations of the world as it rails against my sin is rendered silent.  Any judgments are unable to shackle me to my sin because all judgment has been suspended.  Everything that would give me pause to defend defenseless actions is absent for there is no judgment against which I must defend myself.  Every voice that would legitimately and rightly describe the repercussions of my behaviors have fallen silent.  Justice is suspended in silence.  And it is only God; my sin and God and the freedom to be different.

 

A Choice Freed from Judgment

What was her choice after Jesus turned and left?   She stood there, aghast and in paralysis.  The sunrise would likewise dawn an entirely new day for her.  In the months and years ahead she would wash Jesus’ feet with her tears.  She would attend to Him; push through the crowds that hailed Him and then condemned Him; follow Him through the pressing mobs and winding streets of Jerusalem to Golgotha.  She would endure the eternity that seemed those three and a half hours on the cross.  She would watch Him die, wait through that Saturday with angst indescribable, and be the first in all of time to see Him risen.  Her life would be radically new in ways incomprehensible to her, being wrenched out of the bed of prostitution and propelled to partnership with the Messiah.  All because Someone refused to bind her with His judgments and instead, sought her freedom.

 

The End Product

The bus had rumbled up the long gravel road of the camp, dust and diesel leaving a path attesting to its journey.  The dust and diesel was now dissipating and thinning in a slight summer breeze.  Clusters of birds raised a cacophony of song in the dense foliage of the surrounding woods.  Golden sunshine rained from a generous sky of blue.  Hundreds of sunburnt campers with suitcases, duffle bags and rich memories gathered in clusters around a myriad of cars, busses and vans that inundated the parking lot.  In the departing mayhem there was a tug on my shoulder.  A transformed face greeted me.  This was not the girl that came off this same bus six days ago. Instantly I was in the grip of hug dripping with the love of a grateful heart.  Long and rich, the hug was one of life and living.  In the midst of the embrace, she whispered, “thanks so much.  I’ll never be the same again.”

Her bus rolled off down that driveway, leaving a trail of dust and diesel as it had when it had arrived.  On board was a miracle.  God had gotten to the core of her courtyard and suspended judgment.  There she seized the second chance.  And it changed her forever.

 

Pondering Point

We judge based on externals.  It’s easy that way.  There is no expenditure of energy attempting to ascertain that which we cannot see.  Seizing and evaluating the obvious is easy, convenient and simple.  It allows us to render rapid judgment and avoid encountering a life at the core of that life.  It’s cheap living that is superficial and thin.  We do the same with ourselves.  We are distant from our own cores.  That however, is where Jesus meets us.  Here, at the core of our courtyards we are afforded two things.  Genuine repentance centered in the acknowledgment of our core, and then the chance to do something radically different; a wild departure into the fullness of life and the fullness of God.

 

 

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.

Taking It to Our Knees - Not Defined By a Journey Gone Wrong

Not Defined by a Journey Gone Wrong

“To let myself be defined by my greatest mistakes is my greatest mistake.”

• Craig D. Lounsbrough

Hi, I’m Craig Lounsbrough

Welcome to LifeTalk

It seems that we have some vague sense of where we’re going in this thing called life. For the more contemplative soul, that sense might be quite refined. For the casual traveler, it might be a bit more nebulous and scattered. Vague or refined, we all have some sense of where we’re going. And too often, we find ourselves ending up someplace else.

Some of us are not necessarily in conscious pursuit of wherever this place is. We have this instinctually primal sense that it’s there and we intuitively assume that our path will take a natural course to wherever that place is. Then, there are others of us who are myopically focused on where we’re going to the degree that everything that we do is wholly defined by that singularly beguiling destination. In whatever way we do it, we all have some sense of where we’re going. And too often, we find ourselves ending up someplace else. 

 

The Detours We Create

Yet, life is not so predictable as to always wind its way to the places that we presumed it to be going. There are those times when where we were going was bafflingly mistaken as some sort of final destination when in reality it was only a step to a final destination. At other times the place where we’re going is really a destination that we had fabricated because the place to which life had originally called us appeared too big, or too far, or too steep, or simply impossible in whatever way our limited vision happened to interpret it. However it might play out, we’re all headed somewhere.

 

The Detours Life Creates

But then there are those other times when life takes a sharp turn that seems little of our actions, nothing of our destination, but everything of circumstances designed to kill our journey and crush our destination long before we get within arm’s length of it. There’s a sense that something intrinsically unjust, stealthy and evil is always about and on the prowl, and whatever it is, it’s bound to show up. When it does, it undoes everything that we thought was secure and certain, wreaking havoc on whatever our journey had been to that point.

 Yet, more often than not it’s the not the obvious shifts in our journey that are the core problem. Sure, life shows up and we get shoved down. There’s no question that the natural ebb and flow of life, whether it be titanic or miniscule, will happen to us. Despite our frequently ego-centric inclinations to the contrary, we are not so shrewd or ingenious as to be able to traverse life in a manner that deftly side-steps everything that comes at us.

 

Casual and Careless

Yet, more often than not, the explanation doesn’t rest in life having shown up. The much more poignant issue is that too often we are passive, flabby and lax in rigorously living out our lives. We’re far too casual and careless. Somehow, somewhere the exquisite sanctity of life and the priceless privilege of living it out was supplanted with some sense that it’s too much work or that it’s not going to work, so why try? And so, we drift without knowing that we’re drifting because we’re no longer paying attention.

 

Preoccupied with Pabulum

Too often we’re too preoccupied with pabulum. We’re tediously engaged with tiny things and we’re caught in the tedium of minutia because we can gather these things around us and control them when the bigger things are out of our control. Too frequently we’re goaded by the fear of big dreams and massive possibilities, so we dumb down our lives to anesthetize those fears. We’re caught in small things, and the outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.

 

Along for the Ride

Frequently we presume that we’re some docile passenger along for a ride that’s going wherever it’s going, so we just let it go to wherever that place is. We then turn to the hovel of our small agendas because it’s the only place that we now have to go. We become so entangled in the pull of our own flimsy agendas that we serve agendas that serve no other purpose than serving our agendas. Assuming we’re on a ride that we can’t direct, the outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.

 

The Walls of Denial

At other times, we live in the constructed confines erected from the raw material of denial, causing us to live out a life that is in denial of life itself. We become squatters living in a squatter’s camp constructed by the flimsy materials of justification, rationalization, blame-placing and projecting. Hemmed in by walls of this sort, the world around us is shut out and moves on without our awareness of it. The outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.       

 

Ending Up Somewhere

We will end up somewhere. The fact that we have a destination is irrefutable as life is a journey that presents us with no option other than the journey.  We may decide that the nature and course of the journey is irrelevant and we may take a backseat to passivity. If we do, we have no right to complain when we end up in some place other than what we may have thought or preferred. However it happens, we will end up somewhere.

 

Defined by a Journey Gone Wrong

To whatever degree we have done it, we have contributed to where we find ourselves at this moment. The causations may have been largely of our making. Our poor decisions and impulsive choices may have landed us in dark places. We may have believed in the wrong things and justified those beliefs in spite of the painful outcomes that they repeatedly laid at our feet. We may have thought wrong, thought selfishly, abandoned any forethought, or not thought at all. Therefore, we thought ourselves to where we never thought we would be.

We may well be the author of our destinations and the surveyor of the roads that brought us to these places. Those places might be barren. They may be empty of everything for which we had hoped and void of the slightest piece of our slightest dreams. We may see no way out of them and therefore assume that we will be forced to surrender the rest of our lives journeying further into them.

All of this may be true. But what is truer is that you are not your destination. Your lack of judgement at a crucial crossroads may have placed you here, but you are more than the place at which you have arrived. Bad choices and even worse passions may have landed you in the wasteland that you’re living in. But you are not what you see around you. You are not the place within which you have put yourself.

You are more than the choices that you made and the beliefs that you errantly embraced. You are more. And because you are, the place you are at is not the place where you will are doomed to live. You are more than what surrounds you and so is your future.  

You will find “Taking It to Our Knees – Declaring Who I Am” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Thanks for joining us on LifeTalk today. You will find LifeTalk on most podcast platforms as well as YouTube. I would also encourage you to check out our daily posts on all of our Social Media sites.

Thanks being here today. See you next time.

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Freedom is Precious

LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues.  Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes.  All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire.  Today's thought is:

“If I don’t passionately desire freedom for all of my fellowmen, it’s likely that I haven’t been sufficiently freed from my selfishness so that I might see their captivity.”

Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

To Change a Nation - It Begins With Me

How do we change a nation?  We might start by changing ourselves first.  Change begins with us.  We know that, but we also doubt that changing us changes much of anything else except us.  How far does that kind of change go?  Does it really have a broad sweep and a wide impact?  Does it really count all that much?  In the scope of history, much less the scope of this single day, will it matter?  Will it really matter?

Don't underestimate the power of the one person that you are.  Don't.  Your life is staged to touch many lives.  The example that you live out, the principles that you exude, the words that you use, and the battles that you choose to fight or not choose to fight...all of this has an impact.  All of it.  It is said that one life touches six others in profound ways.  And those six others each touch six more.  And on it goes.  Do not think for a moment that the change you make and the life you live does not have impact.  And don't think that that impact doesn't outlive you, for it does and it will.  How do we change a nation?  Let's start by changing ourselves first. 

Podcast Short: You Are Silent Now -Remembering the Sacrifices

You Are Silent Now -Remembering the Sacrifices

“You are silent now who once stood on battlefields ravaged by destruction unimaginable, holding in those desperate places the line of freedom for others you would never know, and who would never know you.  And being one of those you never knew, I would give all I have to clasp your hand one single time, look into eyes that witnessed the bloodied carnage that results when freedom refuses to bow to chains of any kind, and simply say 'thank you.'”

Men and women died in the service of this country.  They died.  They…died.  They gave up their lives.  Their futures.  Whatever roles that they would have played in their families.  They gave up their dreams.  They gave up their aspirations.  They gave up ever going home again, or walking past the school that they went to as a kid, or enjoying warm summer evenings, or decorating a Christmas tree, or hugging their kids, or planting a garden, or talking to a neighbor over the fence, or a million other things.  They gave all of that stuff up.  All of it.  Now, that all might sound a bit romanticized, particularly for those of us who don’t want to hear it.  But it’s what they gave up.  In fact, what you and I do every day is what they gave up doing…forever. 

So, we are here only because someone else is not.  We are here because someone, somewhere paid the ultimate price so that we could be here.  So we could have a future.  So we could go home at night.  So we could walk past our old school.  So we could sit outside on those summer evenings, or decorate a Christmas tree, or hug our kids, or plant a garden, or talk to our neighbors over the fence.  People died so that we can do all of that stuff.  We are here because they are not.

And I don’t know what I would do if I somehow I had to look even one, just one of those people in the face and tell them that I’ve abused what they died for.  Or, that I took it all for granted.  Or, that I was so callous that I didn’t even think about what they did for me because I’m too caught up in my own agendas to think about anything else.  Or, I’ve lived my life thinking that I was owed these freedoms instead of realizing that I’ve been gifted with them.  Or, that I’ve used these freedoms for all the things that they should have never been used for.  I cannot imagine telling a fallen solider that that is how I used what they died for.  I can’t imagine it.

So, maybe it’s a time for reflection.  A lot of reflection.  Reflection as individuals, as families, as communities, and reflection as a nation.  Maybe it’s time to realize what we have.  Maybe it’s time to reflect on the sacrifices of people who we will never know who handed us what we have.  And maybe we need to reflect on our responsibility to hold all of that with the utmost respect.  Maybe, just maybe it’s time to do that. 

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - The Power of Principles

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  Christianity stands for principles that are not stood for in our culture.  It stands for something lofty, but costly.  It stands for principles that are timeless rather than those that suit the times.  Consider this “Thought for Life:” 

“So it is that this man named Jesus handily performed feats that were astounding in their scope and utterly impossible in their nature.  And as if that were not enough, He then does something as outrageous as inviting us to a life of doing the same.  And yet it would seem that the most astounding and impossible thing of all is for us to blithely reject that invitation in favor of the aching emptiness and endless darkness that rides hard on the heels of just such a rejection.”

I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

 

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.

Defined By Our History - Taking It to Our Knees: Declaring Who I Am

Defined By Our History

“The nature of our histories are always secondary to what we choose to do with them.”

• Craig D. Lounsbrough

Our histories impact us. However, what impacts us doesn’t define us. Our histories can scar us, cripple us, leave us plagued with deficits, and reeling from loss. Our histories can leave us with overwhelming insecurities, fears that sabotage our dreams, and a deeply running pessimism that runs rogue over anything that might appear to possess some bit of desperately needed hope. They can leave us with deep-seated trauma, an addiction that won’t relent, an inability to develop meaningful relationships, and a haunting sense that the effects of our past will engulf the whole of our future. 

Our histories might define our journey to this point, but they do not possess the power to dictate that journey from this point forward. They might tell the tale of where we’ve been, but they have no power to pave the road to where we’re going.

 

A New Thing

In Isaiah 43:19 God says, “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”

The radical boldness in this verse is both rich and raw. The past ends here. Decisively. Right here. In the ‘now’ of our existence. God draws a hard line that halts ‘what was’ and unleashes ‘what will be’. He Who is timeless cuts time in two. The story of yesterday is stripped of the power to pen the script of tomorrow. All is new!

God states that He is “doing a new thing.” Not some slick revision. Not an overhaul. Not something old dressed up to look like something new. Not some clever nip-and-tuck. He is doing a “new thing.” Something revolutionary. Something that sheds the past. Something that peels away the insecurities, crushes the fear, rips away the pessimism, shakes us free of the trauma, and breaks the back of the addiction. God is the great insurrectionist, rising up against the past and crushing it in the rising.

 

Revolutionary

The tone of ‘something new’ in this verse suggests something unexpected. Something whose newness is so ‘new’ that it breaks the back of our logic and leaves our reasoning entirely out of breath. It’s ‘new’ to the point that it catches us entirely off guard. It’s not something ‘new’ that we might devise or cook up in our heads because there’s typically not a whole lot of anything new in that kind of stuff. Rather, it’s something so wildly revolutionary and so far out-of-the-box that it will defy all of the shortsighted paradigms that we use to make sense of it.

 

Not Our History

And God does this ‘something new’ because there is no need to be held hostage to our histories. That’s not God’s intent. That’s not His design. The scars, the insecurities, the fears, the pessimism, the trauma, the addictions, the inability to develop meaningful relationships, and the haunting sense that our past will engulf the whole of our future are not who we are. Rather, they are the results of what happened to us.

These things might be how people have come to define us. A spouse, or a friend, or an employer, or a family member, or some random person functioning out of some thoughtless mindset might have slapped these definitions upon us once-upon-a-time. Someone might have looked for some handy way to conveniently define us in a manner that was comfortable for them, and so they cherry-picked some assorted bits of our history and declared us to be those things.

But God is “doing a new thing.” Not a continuation of what was. Not some cheap addendum. Not some hat-trick. But something new. This newness declares that we are not held hostage to the way in which the past has attempted to defined us. We are not sentenced to walk with some impermeable definition that has already determined the nature of our future as well as our role in that future. The ability to be different will always crush that which declares that we will never be different.

 

Building Blocks

Rather, your past holds the building blocks of your greatness. Your past holds the essential raw materials for the very things that God is determined to build you into. Your past is the resource for your future, not the story of your future. It is a massive storehouse of incalculable assets capable of constructing a fresh tomorrow. Our history is not what defines us. It’s what enlarges us, enlivens us, empowers us, and thrusts us up and out of whatever yesterday was into everything that tomorrow can be. Your past is the accumulation of untapped resources standing ready to be unleashed into your today and delivered into your every tomorrow.

 

More Than Your History

You are more than your history. No history, despite how massive can define a single human being. You are far more than the accumulation of years, experiences, disappointments, betrayals, losses, frustrations, and failures. The nature of your humanity is vast beyond a hundred lifetimes and a million experiences. You cannot be defined by your past. It’s simply impossible. No one’s past could ever hope to contain enough content to define the limitlessness of their humanity. Yet despite the frequently painful nature of your past, you can be enriched by it. That is what God seeks to do in your life.  Behold, He is doing a new thing in you.

 

Thirty-One I Am Statements

The thirty-one statements made by God Himself declare that you are bound to nothing other than the magnificence of your design. History is the recounting of what has passed, not the declaration of your design.

 

Conclusion

You will find all thirty-one of these “I Am” statements outlined in my book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Declaring Who I Am.” This book is a fresh, entirely thought-provoking, and richly insightful thirty-one day devotional that will assist you in both discovering and living out your real self. You will find “Taking It to Our Knees – Declaring Who I Am” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Thanks for joining us on LifeTalk today. You will find LifeTalk on most podcast platforms as well as YouTube. I would also encourage you to check out our daily posts on all of our Social Media sites.

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - The Power of Principle

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  Christianity stands for principles that are not stood for in our culture.  It stands for something lofty, but costly.  It stands for principles that are timeless rather than those that suit the times.  Consider this “Thought for Life:” 

“So it is that this man named Jesus handily performed feats that were astounding in their scope and utterly impossible in their nature.  And as if that were not enough, He then does something as outrageous as inviting us to a life of doing the same.  And yet it would seem that the most astounding and impossible thing of all is for us to blithely reject that invitation in favor of the aching emptiness and endless darkness that rides hard on the heels of just such a rejection.”

I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

Who Are You Giving Yourself Away To?

Who are you giving yourself away to?  To what propaganda have you come to subscribe?  To what bit of media polished bias or refined political spin have you succumb?  Who has your ear, and therefore holds the heart to which your ear is attached?  What are the voices that have methodically and patiently lulled you into some sort of comatose complacency where you no longer engage this rare, but incredibly precious thing that we call common sense?  What podium have you obediently sat in front of that has led you to believe that you cannot think for yourself, or maybe that you can, but that you don’t need to?  Who has told you that facts are irrelevant, and that the truth is simply an irritating obstacle to be quickly discarded if they don’t neatly fit on the preferred end of some ever-changing political spectrum?  Who are you giving yourself away to?

Defined By Our Deficits - "Taking It to Our Knees: Declaring Who I Am"

Defined By Our Deficits

“Any deficit that you have can never stand against the asset that that deficit is waiting to become.”

• Craig D. Lounsbrough

You know, we come to define ourselves more by what we lack than by what we possess. We define ourselves by the successes that we haven’t had, the relationships that didn’t work, the careers that never happened, and the dreams that never got off the ground because they never made it to the runway.

All of these things tell us everything that we are not. The assets that we don’t have. The confidence that we lack. The intelligence that is never intelligent enough. The talents that we don’t possess, and the determination that is never sufficiently determined. We see ourselves as a sad compilation of everything that we are not.

These deficits result in shattered relationships. Shuttered opportunities. Job losses. Financial failures. Addictions. Upended careers. Friendships that went up in flames and the charred remains of families that fell to the same fate. The shame and embarrassment mocks us, telling us that we are everything that is wrong with everything that went wrong.

Surrounded by so many failures that evidence both the depth and number of our deficits, we become defined by those deficits. We feel that there is nothing else that we can define ourselves by. We are lulled (or sometimes thrust) into the belief that we are the sum total of our failures. And soon, believing becomes becoming.

 

The Power of Thought

Proverbs 23:7 says, “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he…” That’s both incredibly powerful, but wildly dangerous. We become what we think. We think ourselves into who we are. Therefore, we can think ourselves into the deficits that we think about. We can let those things define us until we ourselves are convinced of that definition.

 

The Question…

The question then becomes, “Who are we really?” Are we defined by our deficits? Is that our lot in life? Is there no escaping the things that we’ve screwed up? Do they leave an indelible mark of defeat and incompetence?

 

Our Greatest Assets in Disguise

Or, are our deficits are greatest assets in disguise? Is it possible that we are defined far more by the potential that rests in the deficit than the deficit itself? Do the roots of something great lay deep in our worst failures?

Our lives are assets in the making. We are always standing on the verge of becoming something better. Something greater. The ‘better’ in our lives is always just one step away. One decision away. One choice away. On attitude shift away. The ‘better’ is always that close and never any farther away.

The asset that any one of our deficits can become will always be far greater than the deficit from which it arose. Assets birthed of our deficits become the greatest parts of who we are. Taking what we believe to be defeat, seeing the rudimentary elements of victory embedded in that defeat, and turning that defeat into decisive victory is the stuff of true victory.

 

We’ve Got It All Backwards

God turns life on its head. He reverses the order of things. What is dead dies to death and becomes alive. Water surrenders its fluidity to feet that walk on it. Blindness becomes blinded by light. Legs that limp become legs that leap. Food for thousands from food for one. Millions from pennies. It’s all backwards. Gloriously backwards.

Sin destroys. It’s sets everything back. That’s its single mission and sole agenda. God not only shuts sin down, He throw it in reverse. He works it against itself. As Joseph said to his brothers, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good…” It’s all reversed. God walks us back from death to life. From hopelessness to hope. From fear to faith. From lives engulfed in deficits to lives empowered by assets.

 

We Don’t Think That Way

The problem is, we don’t think that way. Any belief that things might actually work this way is beaten out of us by the messages that our failures have beaten into us. We might visualize stopping something bad in our lives, or at least slowing it down. Maybe we can reign it in or temper it a bit.

But we don’t think in terms of reversals. Radical, impossible, improbable, ingenious, and wildly liberating reversals. Sin says that we can’t do that. God says that we’re supposed to do that.

 

And So…The Purpose of Deficits

Our deficits were meant to be reversed. That’s what we have them for. And in the reversal they become the assets that we never visualized them becoming. Hidden within our failures there lays all of the composite parts that set the stage for our greatest successes. The worst of us contains the lessons that teach us how to be the best of us. Therefore, our deficits do not define who we are. Rather, they tell us who we can become.

 

You Are More…

The deficits that define you are the ones that you’ve allowed to define you. God says that you are more than any deficit or combination of deficits. And that ‘more’ is boldly stated in the thirty-one “I Am” statements outlined in the Bible. That ‘more’ is laid out for you to embrace, ingest, and incorporate into your life in wildly wonderful and transformational ways. Your ‘more’ is waiting for you.

 

Conclusion

You will find all thirty-one of these “I Am” statements outlined in my book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Declaring Who I Am.” This book is a fresh, entirely thought-provoking, and richly insightful thirty-one day devotional that will assist you in both discovering and living out your real self. You will find “Taking It to Our Knees – Declaring Who I Am” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Thanks for joining us on LifeTalk today. You will find LifeTalk on most podcast platforms as well as YouTube. I would also encourage you to check out our daily posts on all of our Social Media sites.

 

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - God’s Arsenal

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  We spend our lives acquiring what we think we need to fight the battles that we think we’re fighting.  In a world fraught with fear and uncertainty, we assimilate whatever grants us this sense of invincibility and power for whatever battle we think we’re fighting.  Consider this “Thought for Life:” 

“I do not weaponize my life for God by rigorously acquiring an expansive arsenal of sophisticated munitions.  Rather, I empty out the arsenal of everything but God, for at that point the arsenal is filled to capacity.”

I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

Thoughts for Father's Day

 

Father’s Day

Some Thoughts

 

Hi, I’m Craig LounsbroughWelcome to LifeTalk

 

On Father’s Day week, I want to change the program up a bit and share something a little different on this Father’s Day week. Sometimes it’s a single thought that changes everything. Not some sweeping set of ideas or broad-based philosophy, but a handful of words. Just a handful of words that hold within them an idea that bumps the trajectory of our lives enough to make everything different. Entirely different. And so, we’re gonna take a shot at this in this podcast today.

Let’s begin our Father’s Day podcast by laying a bit of a foundation regarding fathers. You know, as each of us look back, our experiences with our father's differ. Some of us had loving fathers who sacrificed dearly for us. They were always there in exactly the way that we needed them to be there. Others had abusive and painfully disengaged fathers who were there in all the wrong ways. And for yet others, dad was entirely absent

The nature of father's varies widely for each of us. And whether our fathers were everything that we needed them to be, or nothing of what we needed them to be, the role of a father remains absolutely crucial. Likewise, the impact of father either good or bad simply cannot be understated.

Regardless of the kind of father that we might have had, may we always respect both the value and the utterly vital place of father's in a tough, challenging, and increasingly confusing world. May we restore to the role of a father the power and importance of that role. May we yet again understand what a father is whether we experienced that or not.

In order to do that I’m going to share seven Father’s Day quotes with you today. And in doing so, it’s my hope that one or more of these might “bump the trajectory of your life enough to make everything different. Entirely different.” May they remind us of what a father is. And for those of us who are fathers, may they call us to something higher and bolder. Take a moment and think about these:

“A father is the man who can change a world he will not be part of by building the tiny human that is part of him.”

“A father is the man who teaches trembling hands to reach up in search of everything impossible, for he has left his child with the unbridled sense that to do anything less is the greatest impossibility of all.”

“A father is the man who realizes that a life spent in the service of his children is the creation of a legacy so vast that it can be deeply drawn from for generations to come, but it will never be emptied by any who come to it.”

“The true test of a father’s legacy is that it rests in every life except his own, for to leave a true legacy we must divest ourselves of everything so that the investment in our families can be everything.”

“A father of the highest caliber will point the way only because he has walked it beforehand.  And in the walking he has meticulously cleared it of all the obstructions that would harm his family in the manner that they harmed him when he first cleared them.”

“A father teaches his children that the battle is not determined by the enemy that stands around them, but by the God Who stands within them.  And that lesson can only be driven home as they watch their father stand around them, while God stands within their father.”

One final quote to wrap this up. It reads this way:

“The call of fatherhood is in fact a call of sacrifice, not in some heroic sense where a father is lifted high on some glowing pedestal with all of his sacrifices held up to the awe of those around him. Rather, it is a call that will cost him all that he has, that will be absent of accolades, where rewards will be sparse, and where he will someday find himself having spent all, but in the spending have gained everything. And this is the glory of fatherhood.”

Thanks for joining us on LifeTalk today. You will find LifeTalk on most podcast platforms as well as YouTube. I would also encourage you to check out our daily posts on all of our Social Media sites.

 

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Ignoring Our Conscience

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  We ignore our conscience because we want to do what it says we shouldn’t.  But, we also ignore the consequences of ignoring it.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”

“Disabling your conscience is like disabling your smoke detector.  It doesn’t stop a fire.  It just leaves you ignorant of the fact that there is one.”

I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Running After Stuff

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  We run after a lot of stuff.  Our time, our energy, our finances, and much of our lives are spent chasing stuff.  And when we catch that stuff, we typically find that it doesn’t do for us what we thought that it would do for us.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”  

“The insanity of it all is that the search for that which will fill us incessantly drives us to pursue the very things that will empty us.  Yet, the greater insanity is to find ourselves utterly perishing in our emptiness and yet declaring to our dying day that the emptying was the filling.  And that is emptiness of the most chilling sort.”

I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

To Think Outside the Box - "In the Footsteps of the Few"

In the Footsteps of the Few

I Was Thinking

To Think Outside the Box

 

“Every child is an artist.  The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

Pablo Picasso

 

I think that most of our thinking (despite how much there is to think about) is really pretty standardized and chafingly rote. We think in predetermined patterns and pre-existent templates that require no real thinking. And while there’s a whole lot to think about in this big, wide world of ours…we don’t. Not really. 

 

Why?

Most of this appears to happen because we think within boxes that we randomly (and sometimes not so randomly) borrow. We think within predetermined boxes because they’re convenient and because they’re standardized.

But what if our thinking were to open up fresh venues?  And what if life could become a journey not lived within suffocating boxes, but rather an adventure crafted of breathless horizons where there are no boxes? What if?

So, let’s consider some boxes that we tend to get stuck in.

 

First, The Box of Societal Norms

We think within the box of societal norms. We grant these norms legitimacy because most of the people around us adhere to them in one form or another. Because all these people adhere to them, we naturally grant these norms a morality, assuming that others would not dare embrace them if they weren’t sufficiently ethical or moral. To our relief, we quickly discover that if we think within these boxes we are far less likely to be met with rejection, or ridicule, or disdainful judgement, or some other rather distasteful response. Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

 

Second, The Box of the Mundane

We think within the well-worn boxes of the mundane as that path is quite well charted, and therefore void of anything dangerous because other people have figured out where all the dangerous stuff is and either removed it, or they’ve created paths around it. We know that venturing off the path in life is ref with all sorts of calamity that’s just waiting to happen, and so in the box of the mundane there’s nothing to venture off on because there’s one and only one path. It might be mundane, it might go nowhere, but it’s safe (if you happen to define ‘safe’ as refusing to live in order to effectively avoid being hurt). Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

 

Third, The Box of Our Fears

We think within the box of our fears, as anything on the outside of those walls is filled with horrific danger (often of the most fabricated sort). We’ve probably ventured out there a time or two, and when we did, we got hurt. And so, when we were hurt, we put our pain on emotional steroids which exponentially magnified our fear. We then took that fear and fashioned a monster that doesn’t exist, and we hunkered down in our box horrified by the fiction of it all. And while the space out there is a whole lot bigger than the infinitesimally tiny space in here, at least it’s safe. Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

 

Fourth, The Box of Our Families

We think within the box created by our families as we engaged them growing up. In many unhealthy families, their boxes were shaped by their own demons and assorted hobgoblins that they handed the reins of power over to. Over time, they dutifully passed those onto us. Sometimes these families demand that family members stay within those boxes. Other times, family members may prompt us to move outside of the box because they have come to recognize the life-sucking quality of the box. Yet, while they prompt us to step out, they did not know how to do so themselves. Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

 

Fifth and Finally, The Box of Self-Esteem

We think within the box crafted by our low self-esteems. These are often the smallest of all boxes because we dare not create any room whatsoever for anyone else to come in lest they see how pathetically awful we really are. We know full well that there’s great adventure and untapped possibilities outside of our boxes. We can imagine adventure because we’ve imagined it so many times. But we doubt our ability to function in it, or find a place in it, or seize it in the cultivation of our dreams, or much less survive any adventure of any size. Therefore, the rules of the box rule out the role of thinking.

 

I Was Thinking

I was thinking that there are a whole lot of boxes. Lots and lots of them. But I was also thinking that they are just boxes and nothing more. And as a box, it doesn’t hold us.  Rather, we hold it. And when we realize that power and move beyond our boxes, the parameters of our lives will explode exponentially in a manner that we will be free to think about all the many things that this big, wide world of ours has to think about. And so, I think that I really, really want to think outside the boxes.

You will find all of these outlined in my book, “In the Footsteps of the Few – The Power of a Principled Life.” You will find “In the Footsteps of the Few” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Thanks for joining us on LifeTalk today. You will find LifeTalk on most podcast platforms as well as YouTube. I would also encourage you to check out our daily posts on all of our Social Media sites.

Asking the Right Questions Verses Responding for the Wrong Reasons

Too often we don't take the time to really ask why we support what we're supporting.  We get swept up in some energizing movement, or we're utterly captivated by some cause.  Something feels inherently good and the premise that drives it appears sound.  We find that an army of people have raced to the forefront of this cause, or it's embraced as long overdue, or it appears right for the times.

But in all of that, do we ask the larger questions?  Do we ask if there is some underlying issue that's bigger than the cause that prompted it?  Is there more here than just the excitement of the moment or the rallying cry of the population?  Do we proceed with a wisdom that will solve the larger issues, or will we just perpetuate all of those by running amuck in lesser things?  Change is needed.  But if it is not thoughtful change, nothing will change.

Not Defined By Our Appearance

  Defined By Our Appearance

“If the mirror doesn’t give me much back, it’s because it’s not designed to reflect the things within me that make the reflection truly magnificent.”

• Craig D. Lounsbrough

The world has set an airbrushed standard of what we’re supposed to look like. This photoshopped menagerie of idealized versions of a perfected humanity demands something of us that none of us can achieve. Even those whose images are altered to this definition of perfection are themselves nothing of the sort.

The culture defines beauty but it cannot demonstrate what they define as beauty unless they fabricate it. Physical perfection is the illusion that eludes anyone who claims it or pursues it. It’s the design of people who themselves cannot achieve the design that they both create and propagate. This perfection is declared as some pinnacle whose pursuit is the holy grail of our existence. It is decreed as the key that opens doors that will never open for the less desirable. It will elicit favors that the more homely among us can never elicit. In essence, it’s value is non-negotiable.

 

Misappropriated Investments

Therefore, we rigorously invest in a host of surgeries, a variety of cutting-edge procedures, and an assorted collection of creams and lotions. We sweat through an endless variety of trendy workouts that claim to put us one step closer to this pinnacle of our humanity. We dive into whatever diet that happens to have the blessing of some trending celebrity or health guru. We spend hours preening in front of the mirror. We take thousands of selfies in order to capture just the right angle that accentuates everything that we want to accentuate, and that hides everything that we don’t.

Our interactions with the world around us becomes dictated by a shrewd and entirely exhausting game of flaunting that which we believe to be beautiful and disguising that which we don’t. We are driven to present a pristine self that is pressed, clean, orderly, well-groomed, tight in the right places, and loose in the places that enhance our appearance.

 

The Priority of Our Appearance

Imagine, if you will, the amount of energy that we invest in our appearance. Imagine the amount of time, money, and personal resources that we squander on what we look like. And with such a grossly disproportionate investment in the external, the internal goes wanting. The essential essence of who we are is left languishing as the red-haired step-child to the physical part of ourselves that can never and will never define the whole of ourselves. We are ambushed by the power of the airbrush  

 

The Vulnerability of the Veneer

Your humanity is too vast to be held hostage to the veneer of your appearance. The essence that you bring to your world is housed in the powerhouse of your humanity, not the smoothness of your complexion. Your abilities will always outclass your body type. Flexing a muscle changes nothing. Flexing your mind can change everything.

The veneers are a pathetic representation of what we think will garner the affection and attention of a world from which we seek acceptance at the sacrifice of self. Veneers are a mortifying trade-off where our desperate need for acceptance drives us to betray ourselves in a deathly exchange of identity for acceptance.

 

Defining Ourselves By Our Appearance

Despite its destructive nature, this photoshopped menagerie of idealized versions of a perfected humanity reigns over a deluded culture. It is the template by which all other templates are judged, modified or mortified. It is the reflection demanded of every mirror.

Acquiescing to this weak standard, we begin to judge ourselves in relation to that standard. We lay out some sort of culturally-biased continuum in our heads and then we gauge our value based on where we place ourselves on that continuum. We live a life where the entirety of our resources are spent fighting our way up that continuum. The understanding of who we are and any value that we possess becomes based on where we’ve landed on that continuum and how aggressively we’re working our way up it (or have fallen down it).

In the book, “The Self that I Long to Believe In,” I wrote the following:

“Our existence alone is the greatest statement of our worth and the clearest evidence as to our value. What we do with that existence is up to us. But the sheer reality of that existence evidences value. The fact I am writing this and you are reading this attests to the fact that we both have immense value because we both exist to do both of those things.”

That thought is build upon by a later quote in the book which reads:

“Each of us needs to embrace the fact that our value is in who we are. And we need to widen that thought by understanding that this value that we carry within us exceeds our greatest estimation of it. It will readily eclipse anything that we do.”

None of this has anything to do with our appearance. The essence of your greatness is not based on what you look like in any mirror. It’s based on what you want to do with the person that’s in the mirror. It’s ferreting out the rich storehouse of gifts, talents, and abilities that reside within the heart. These will handily eclipse any reflection.

I would go so far as to say that cultivating who you are will lend such a power and vibrancy to your presentation that your physical appearance will be swallowed up in release of who you are. People won’t seek you out because of how you look. They will seek out because you radiate something that swallows up the superficiality of what they’ve spent their lives pursuing.

 

The Reflection of Your Soul, Not Your Face

“Taking It to Our Knees – Declaring Who I Am” outlines thirty-one “I am” statements that God has made regarding who you are. These are the reflections that have value. These are the reflections that grant our lives the power and sense of satisfaction that no other reflection will be able to deliver. Indeed, they are what’s truly beautiful. They are elegant. Their beauty deepens with age and their power multiplies with time. Your appearance is enhanced to the point that no mirror can contain it or reflect it. That is what the following “I am” statements will deliver into your life, today and every day.

You will find “Taking It to Our Knees – Declaring Who I Am” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Thanks for joining us on LifeTalk today. You will find LifeTalk on most podcast platforms as well as YouTube. I would also encourage you to check out our daily posts on all of our Social Media sites.

Thinking About the Memorials That We're Creating

Finding Ourselves Somewhere Else

In the Footsteps of the Few

Not Where We Were

It seems that we have some vague and rather ethereal sense of where we’re going in this thing called life.  For the more contemplative soul, that sense might be quite refined.  For the casual traveler, it might be a bit more nebulous and scattered.  For many, where they’re going is defined by the tasks of the day, rather than enlarged by a vision for tomorrow.

In many cases where we’re going is far more rigorously defined by all the places where we don’t want to go, rather than the places where we do want to go.  At other times its definition is shaped by the opinions of others, or it’s carved directly from the bedrock of the value systems that have been built into our lives throughout the whole of our lives. In whatever way we do it, we all have some sense of where we’re going. And too often, we find ourselves ending up someplace else. 

 

The Detours We Create

Yet, life is not so predictable as to always wind its way to the places that we presumed it to be going.  There are those times when where we were going was mistaken as some sort of final destination when in reality it was only a step to a final destination. At other times the place where we’re going is really a destination that we had fabricated because the place to which life had originally called us appeared too big, or too far, or too steep, or simply impossible in whatever way our limited vision happened to interpret it. Sometimes our destination is to set a course away from our destination so that we can dispense with whatever responsibility or obligation our original destination might have demanded of us. But then there are those other times when life takes a sharp turn that seems little of our actions, nothing of our destination, but everything of circumstances designed to kill our journey and crush our destination long before we get within arm’s length of it.

And then in the magic of life, there are those times where we have actually pursued some authentic destination with such rigor that the trajectory has catapulted us past our destination to places that are everything of our fondest imagination. However, it might play out, we’re all headed somewhere.

 

The Explanation of Detours Missed

How It Happens

Yet, more often than not it’s the not the obvious shifts in our journey that are the core problem. Sure, life shows up and we get shoved down. There’s no question that the natural ebb and flow of life, whether it be titanic or miniscule, will happen to us.  Despite our frequently ego-centric inclinations to the contrary, we are not so shrewd or ingenious as to be able to traverse life in a manner that deftly side-steps everything that comes at us.  We don’t dance as well as we think we do.

 

Casual and Careless

Yet, more often than not, the explanation doesn’t rest in life having shown up. The much more poignant issue is that too often we are passive, flabby and lax in rigorously living out our lives. We’re far too casual and careless. Somehow, somewhere the sanctity of life and the privilege of living it out was supplanted with some sense that it’s too much work or that it’s not going to work, so why try?

 

Preoccupied with Pabulum

Too often we’re too preoccupied with pabulum. We’re tediously engaged with tiny things and we’re caught in the tedium of minutia because we can gather these things around us and control them when the bigger things are out of our control. Too frequently we’re goaded by the fear of big dreams and massive possibilities, so we dumb down our lives to anesthetize those fears. 

 

Along for the Ride

Frequently we presume that we’re some docile passenger along for a ride that’s going wherever it’s going, so we just let it go to wherever that place is. We freely surrender to passivity which is an invitation to meaninglessness. And meaninglessness is the death of the soul itself. Life is a river, we say. And the best course of action is to navigate it because entertaining the far-fetched notion of swimming against it is utterly preposterous.  

 

The Walls of Denial

At other times, we live in the constructed confines erected from the raw material of denial, causing us to live out a life that is in denial of life itself. We become squatters living in a squatter’s camp constructed by the flimsy materials of justification, rationalization, blame-placing and projecting. We pull in the walls due to the reality that materials of this sort are always pulling inward because they will die if we dare to press them outward.  Hemmed in by walls of this sort, the world around us is shut out and moves on without our awareness of it. 

 

Ending Up Where We Wish to Be

We will end up somewhere. The fact that we have a destination is irrefutable as life is a journey that presents us with no option other than the journey. We may decide that the nature and course of the journey is irrelevant, and we may take a backseat to passivity.  If we do, we have no right to complain when we end up in some place other than what we may have thought or preferred.

Yet, we can recognize that we are not automatons subject to the flux of the world within which we have found ourselves. It would seem advisable to recognize that we have an obligation to the course that our life is taking, and that along with that obligation we have been granted a profound degree of power to bring to the course. If we succumb to carelessness, or become engrossed by pabulum, or if we just let the ride go wherever circumstances take it, or if we pull close the walls of denial this thing that we call life will wind itself to wherever it’s going with no one at the helm.  And that kind of destination cannot be good.

We would be wise to inventory our lives and determine if we are in some way large or small participating in any of these behaviors.  If so, we need to root them out and expunge them from our lives.  Reclaiming a sense of vision, and then seizing our lives with discipline and intentionality will set us on a path that will land us in places that we’ve dreamt to land.  If we don’t, the place we land may not be on any land that we even remotely recognize.

The Path to Losing Our Freedom

Our freedoms are not a "right."  They are, in fact, a "privilege."  They are not ours to abuse.   Rather, they are ours to cherish.  But as we abuse these rights by demanding our right to them or exercising them in ways that will destroy these very freedoms, we forget that they are fragile.  Very fragile.  They are not permanent.  They are not guaranteed.  They will not stand under the weight of our misuse of them.  And if handled inappropriately or abused in one of the many ways that we abuse them, we may someday find ourselves without them.

We are a nation that is losing it's mooring.  We are blatantly rewriting our history and thoughtlessly discarding truth in some mad dash of ultimate destruction.  We are using our freedoms to destroy ourselves.  And I would think that that is the saddest use of these cherished and long-held freedoms that I can think of. 

 

 

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - We Need to Stop

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  We need to stop.  We need to put down our calendars, set our phones aside, strip ourselves of the voices incessantly clamoring for our attention and listen.  Just listen.  For life is not what we’re chasing.  It’s what we’re leaving behind in the chasing.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”  

“Rich is the person who stops long enough to listen to a bird sing in the celebration of spring, peer into the deep blue of a drowsy summer sky, draw in the pungent aroma of fall’s leaves, and watch the listless kiss of a winter’s snow.  For in doing these you have witnessed that which money cannot purchase and man cannot create.”

I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Fear or Faith

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  We spend our lives acquiring what we think we need to fight the battles that we think we’re fighting.  In a world fraught with fear and uncertainty, we assimilate whatever grants us this sense of invincibility and power for whatever battle we think we’re fighting.  Consider this “Thought for Life:” 

“I do not weaponize my life for God by rigorously acquiring an expansive arsenal of sophisticated munitions.  Rather, I empty out the arsenal of everything but God, for at that point the arsenal is filled to capacity.”

I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Building Bridges or Barries

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  We build bridges or barriers.  If you think about it, everything that we do builds one or the other.  And the function of a bridge is quite different than the function of a barrier.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”  

“Every decision will build a bridge or a barrier.  Therefore, what stands in front of you at this moment illustrates the decisions that you made on your way to this moment.”

I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

A Mother's Day Letter

Dear Mom:

I realize that on days like Mother’s Day people tend to wax nostalgic, venerating those Mom’s among us who have passed.  It is, I suppose, a way to express both our deep respect and enduring gratitude, while somehow holding you a bit closer in heart and mind since we can no longer hold you in our arms.

Mom, you are missed more than the reach of words and the span of syntax can hope to explain.  Yet if it were our choice, if your three boys had the power and authority to choose, even then we would not wish you here for you are truly home in a truly perfect and inexplicable way.

Mom, your voice here is now muted, heard only in our hearts, our memories, and throughout the grand halls of heaven.  Even so, we still hear it.  And when it fades in the frequently stifling noise of life, we play it over in our minds so as not to forget it.  Your wisdom now arises from the many footprints you left across the landscape of our lives, examples that speak life and truth and love and ceaseless hope into both the barren places, as well as those places wonderful and lush that we walk through daily.  Your touch is lost to us, those simple hugs from a simple woman who not only knew how to love, but how to express it in a way that made each moment warm and safe.  It is one thing to be loved. It is quite another to know that you are loved.  We knew.  And now standing so many years removed from your passing, we still know.

But Mom, in the balance we have gained infinitely more.  You left a legacy in our lives; a robust legacy that embodies integrity, honesty and tenacity.  A brave legacy that boldly, even brashly believes that God always provides, always cares, always knows and is an ever-present source from which every need will always be met.  You helped us understand that life ebbs and flows, sometimes magically and sometimes cruelly.  You showed us that life at times invites us to a grand dance, and at other times it seems to slam us to the dance floor leaving us cringing and bleeding.  Life pours into us, and then it draws out of us.  The sun at times warms us and then the hail pelts us.  In whatever form it takes, you taught us that God always prevails, that there is always good, that it will always, always work out.  And it always did.

You left us an unrelenting understanding that life is more than some daily routine, or the achievement of tasks either great or small.  Life is about living well, living with respect, living in a manner that adds rather than detracts.  It is not about pretending things are well or being Pollyannaish.  You taught us that life is about understanding that things will not always be fair nor will life necessarily be just, but in the hands of God it will always present us with opportunities to learn about ourselves, to grow and to add something to those around us.

Mom, all of these lessons came packaged in simple things like iced tea on sweltering summer days and hot chocolate on frigid winter nights.  It was bedtime prayers that started “now I lay me down to sleep . . .”   It was endless lunches packed for school, dimes tucked in lunch boxes for white milk during the week and chocolate milk on Friday’s.  It was planting flowers in Spring’s sweet soils, and canning fruit when Fall generously yielded up the bounty born of those soils.  It was wrapping us thick in mounds of coats and lengthy scarves when winter drew nature to sleep, and vacuuming the pool when the glory of summer ran and skipped through our days.  It was summed up in a tiny plaque that still hangs in the kitchen which reads, “Bless this house oh Lord we pray, make it safe by night and day.”  Such was your life. 

It was being home when the street lights came on, carrying the laundry up the stairs, and not hitting our brothers.  It was your voice calmly and yet quite firmly saying, “quit teasing the dog.”  “This didn’t get broken by itself.”  “Did you call your grandmother?”  “If your friends jumped off a cliff would you follow them?”  “Would you please flush the toilet?”  “Did you get your homework done?”  “Please put your clothes in the dirty clothes hamper.”  “Don’t listen to your brother.”  “Who left the lights on?”  “Please pick up your room.”  “Were you born in a barn?”  “I didn’t raise you kids to be like this!”  “Who tipped over the Christmas tree?”  And, “it didn’t walk away by itself.”

Underlying it all, being spoken with undeniable clarity there were these messages.  “I love you.”  “You can achieve anything you want with your life.”  “You kids are God’s gift to me.”  “You’re the best kids in the world.”  “I don’t deserve you boys.”  “I’m praying for you.”  “How can I help you?”  “How are you doing?”  “Do you need anything?”  “I’m so proud of you boys.”   It was all of those things, and so much more. 

Mom, you were about the stuff of building the lives of three boys and taking care of a husband who was, at those rather impetuous times, a boy himself.  It was really never about you.  We tried to make it about you so many times, but you always politely declined.  Rather, it was a selfless investment, pouring your life, your energies and fiber of your being into three boys who really had no clue what you were doing until they themselves were adults.  Even today we are unable to fully fathom the depth of your sacrifices.  While I would wish to say otherwise, I doubt that we will ever understand them fully.

We again commit to you on this Mother’s Day that we will strive to selflessly pour into the lives of others that which you so graciously poured into our lives.  We know that any such efforts on our parts will pale indeed to the way in which you poured yourself into our lives.  Know that we are committed to drawing from the innumerable footprints that you left, the lessons taught and lived, and the insights imparted.  We will draw from the vast storehouse of memories packed tight with words, mental pictures, ceaseless emotions and warm thoughts.  And we will live that out Mom, as we have for so many years since you passed.  We will bring your life to the lives of our families, the people who populate our careers, and to those we meet in the briefest passing.  You will live on Mom, here as well as in the marbled halls of heaven.  You will touch innumerable lives through your three boys who you loved, equipped, nurtured, guided, guarded and then launched.

One final thing Mom; we want you to know that we will live each day in anticipation of seeing you again.  However, we commit that we will not let that anticipation somehow diminish the efforts and energies we invest in living life.  We will not live in some sort of distracted state, focused solely on the idea of seeing you again and awaiting that moment in such a way that the present moment is squandered.  Rather, we will invest our lives vigorously while holding fast to the promise of scripture that there awaits for us a grand reunion, a wild celebration of relationships restored in a creation likewise restored.  In the meantime Mom, know that you are loved, that you are fondly remembered, that you live on in us and that when stories of you are told, they will be told with the greatest love and deepest admiration.

Thanks Mom.  We love more than simple words could hope to convey.  God bless and see you soon.

Thanks for joining us on LifeTalk today. You will find LifeTalk on most podcast platforms as well as YouTube. I would also encourage you to check out our daily posts on all of our Social Media sites.

Podcast Short: Am I Passionate for the Right Things?

Am I Passionate for the Right Things?

“In full uniform, the color guard marched by as part of the parade.  And as they did, he forced his horribly slumped and deeply aged body out of his worn wheelchair and stood to ram-rod attention.  He held a salute until the guard had passed, and then he feebly collapsed back into his wheelchair.  As I stared in ever-warming admiration, emblazoned across his hat I saw the words “WWII Veteran.”  And while I deeply admire his stirring passion for our country, I stood there wishing that my passion for the cause of Christ might someday be strong enough to lift me out of the many wheelchairs within which I sit.”

Am I passionate for the right things?  Not just passionate.  But passionate in the right way.  Sure, there’s a lot of voices out there.  There’s a lot of causes out there.  There’s a lot of yelling, and screaming, and arguing, and hostile behaviors, and noisy propaganda, and a bunch of edgy people on more than one rant advocating for these causes.  On top of that, the causes themselves shift depending upon the temperature of the culture, or the agenda of the people pulling long strings behind closed doors.  There are causes that represent the demands of a handful of people who find the foundations of their cause so ill-defined or fragile that constructive dialogue is replaced with destructive actions.  Greed is rampant.  Power-mongering runs wild.  Principles have been discarded because they impede the progressive thinking that end up resulting in regressive outcomes.  And in this mess and in the midst of all of this noise, am I passionate for the right things?

Consider this.  There are some things that are timeless.  There are some things that are woven into this existence that you can’t remove.  There are principles and ethics that are foundational.  You can try and remove them, but there’s a huge cost to that.  Civilizations throughout history have messed with them, or attempted to adjust them to suit a particular cause, or worked to rid their culture of them altogether.  And the outcomes are never good.  History will tell us that rather plainly, if we’re willing to be honest about history. 

And so, I want to be passionate about something that’s timeless, because I want it to live on beyond my life.  Something that this culture can reliably build on both today and tomorrow and for every tomorrow after that.  Something that’s certain to sustain my kids and grandkids and great-grandkids.  And nothing that we can create on our own will do that.  What we create is too weak, and too fragile, and too shallow, and too lackluster to do that.  That kind of stuff is only something that God can create. 

And so, it’s this God and what He created and principles that He built it all around, it’s that stuff that I choose to be passionate about.  Not man-made stuff because that doesn’t last.  Rather, it’s God-created stuff.  It’s the principles that shaped this existence at its core that I will surrender my passions to and be passionate about.  Because if I’m not passionate about that stuff, passion won’t matter because very shortly nothing will.

”LifeTalks” Thought for Life - Not As Helpless As We Think

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  Sometimes we feel helpless.  In the midst of tragedy, or painful losses, or devastating moments, we often feel that we are helpless to do anything other than standby and watch.  Yet is that really all that we can do?  Consider this “Thought for Life:”  

“Prayer inserts me into the middle of any battlefield regardless of how gruesome or bloodied.  And in the carnage of whatever that battle might be, it allows me to deliver a force greater than any raging on that field.”

I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - An Existence Without God

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  It’s my sense that God doesn’t need me to speak to you.  He’s quite capable of doing that without me.  But there are times when I sense that He wants me to speak something of Him to you.  And this is one of those moments.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”  

“I don’t always preach God, for His existence is obvious.  Rather, I preach what will happen to our existence if we deny His.”

I hope that you ponder that thought today.  Discover all of my daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

The Unrecognized Potency of Prayer

Let’s start here. Think about this thought:

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

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

But I would challenge all of that by saying this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bigger on the Inside - The Self That I Long to Believe In

The Self That I Long to Believe In

Bigger on the Inside Than the Outside

Attempting to Define Success to Define Ourselves

“It would make sense that our worth should be, and in reality is based on something that cannot be proven for any other reason than its value lies forever beyond the most magnificent achievements that would serve to even remotely evidence it.”

Success has been accorded an endless array of definitions.  Some of them are crafted to make failure seem more like success so that we can limp through life and fail without remorse or guilt.  Other definitions are quite lofty, written to give us opportunity achieve in a manner that has little to do with the achievement and everything to do with restoring blunted self-esteems.  At times success is defined by whatever will accord us the accolades of others or advance us socially or professionally.  At yet other times, the definition of success is more about giving ourselves a sorely needed boost when our spirits have been lagging.

 

Lost in the Array of Definitions

Whatever and wherever their source, a dizzying array of definitions abound.  Many seem to be a target created after the trigger was pulled, making every decision a bulls-eye even if the aim was horrid.  Some are thrown out because they’re easy, or we’re not certain what success is so we just come up with something that might pass for success if people don’t pay too much attention.  And in the squalor of definitions gone awry and rogue, we seem to have lost a genuine definition of success.

 

Why Success?

It's interesting that success, in whatever manner it is defined, has come to define our worth and value.  That’s why a lack of perceived success will tank our self-esteem quicker than just about anything else.  Success appears to have become the litmus test as to the credibility of our existence and the unforgiving gauge of our worth.  Success has evolved into the exclusive commodity by which we ascribe value to ourselves and others.

 

Fear of Questioning the Definition

Success becomes so acutely defined and so irrevocably defining that we seldom entertain any other possible definition.  We find ourselves entangled in the culturally mandated definition of success, or the definitions imposed by our families or friends or occupation.  We become so absorbed in the sorting out and the achieving of those definitions that the endeavor to achieve them becomes inordinately consuming. But what does this mean in terms of how we’ve come to identify who we are and in that, how we’ve attempted to determine the value of who we are?

 

The Flaw of Success

Yet, the nature of such a mentality of success demands that we constantly achieve.  It is an effort of insanely perpetual works that requires that we continually prove our worth as the previous success eventually fades sufficiently to demand a new one.  Sure, we can define it.  But success as used to determine our worth and value is always temporal.  It’s always moving.  Therefore, we become enslaved to successes that demand nothing more than other successes.

 

We Are Too Big to Be Defined By Any Success

Our value is not based on ‘what we do.’  Rather, it is based on ‘who we are.’  If we remain stuck with the feeling that our worth is based on ‘what we do,’ the definition of success is what lends credence to those efforts.

Success is irrelevant in respect to our self-esteem as any definition of success regardless of how lofty does not possess the power to sustain our sense of worth or feed our sense of value.  When it comes to our sense of worth and value, success is the thing that’s not the thing.  It’s been marketed as the snake oil for our self-esteem by the carpetbaggers of our culture, but it’s snake oil only.

Success cannot do what it promises to do. With such an apparently irreconcilable flaw in its makeup, it would be worthwhile to postulate that our worth must be based on something significantly more consistent and profoundly more fundamental than success.

 

Value Based on Who We Are

Maybe we should dare to consider that our worth does not need to be established either by effort or definition.  Maybe we should consider the possibility that it has never ‘not’ been established.  That success was achieved by the fact that God decided to designed us and then deliver us into a far larger design to make an impact in and upon that design.  We’re here, and that itself is a success. 

Everything that we do from here forward is not about success, for success has already been achieved by the fact of our existence.  It’s about calling.  It’s about fulfillment of the purpose that we’ve been given the privilege to fulfill.  It’s about honing in on our purpose and purposefully carrying it out.  It’s about obedience to the call, not the adherence to some definition that measures our obedience to the call.  It’s doing all of that knowing that our worth and value exists by virtue of the fact that we exist.  From there on out, it’s about the doing and not about the proving.  

 

Thinking a Bit More Deeply

It would therefore be wise to consider the possibility that our worth is based on something so profound and unerringly rich that its worth singularly speaks for itself.  Something that does not need to be proven simply because it is established in a manner that the need of proof is the weakness of our vision and not the fact of reality.  It would make sense that our worth should be, and in reality is based on something that cannot be proven for any other reason than its value lies forever beyond the most magnificent achievements that would serve to even remotely evidence it.

 

Achieving for Sheer Pleasure, Not Proof of Value

We would be wise to embrace the liberating reality that we can achieve in life for the sheer pleasure of achievement, rather than as a despairing effort to establish our worth.  We can walk through life with vigor and tenacity out of a sense of worth, not out of some desperate effort to prove our worth.  We change things and we change the course of things because we have been privileged to possess both the ability and the permission to do so.  Life is engaged, energized and inspired by our worth, rather than depleted in the pursuit of it.  Our days are lived embracing the reality that our value is based on who we are, and to embrace that liberating reality is to embrace a life liberated.

 

The Viciousness of Low Self-Esteem Explained

If we cannot embrace this indispensable reality, we will be irreversibly stunted by the limitations of the achievements we pursue.  We will chain our potential to the baseness of achievements.  When we do, the infinite worth that defines us will be forever overshadowed by the shallowness of achievements, for the greatest achievements will never come close to reflecting our true value.  Your value is based on who you are, despite what you do.  And that is a critical but glorious shift that we each must make.

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - What is Truth?

LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues.  Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes.  All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire.  Today's thought is:

“Decisions based on timeless truths will never leave our tomorrow regretting the decisions of our yesterday, for such truths will always supersede any ‘then’ or ‘now.’”

Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

Taking It to Our Knees - Defined By Our Self-Esteem

Defined By Our Self-Esteem

“I can only imagine how much low self-esteem has robbed us as individuals and ransacked our culture. It is a rogue beast bent on diminishing us to some point of forlorn incapacity. Plagued by this beast, we live out marginalized lives that surrender the accomplishments and forsake the achievements that could have been ours. We grope through this existence meagerly living out each day by surviving each day, rather than realizing that we can live with an intensity that will have caused the day to finish having survived us.”

• Craig D. Lounsbrough

From “The Self That I Long to Believe In”

 

Hi, I’m Craig Lounsbrough

Welcome to LifeTalk

We are not defined by the worst-case assessment of ourselves, although we tend to render just such an assessment. We hand-pick the worst of ourselves to define the whole of ourselves. We do that because the worst of ourselves always seems to render the best of ourselves less than whatever best it might actually be.

Our attitudes trend toward the downside of whoever it is that we are. The deficits. The failures. The reversals. The relationships that never happened or shouldn’t have happened. The goals that fell to the things that got in the way. Dreams that were crushed under the heel of reality. Choices that turned sour. Careers that died at the hands of corporate wrangling. Opportunities squandered. Surrender to fear when we should have feared the idea of surrender. We trend toward our interpretation of what these things say about us.

 

The Application of Our Interpretations

Once we’ve developed these interpretations of ourselves we apply them liberally. Their repeated application creates a negative skew where everything is painted in undesirable and self-defeating tones. The best of us never escapes the interpretation of the worst of us. Some small and commonplace error becomes catastrophic. An inconsequential misstep evidences our unworthiness. The normal hit-and-miss of life is turned into a relentless barrage of not so friendly-fire where we cut ourselves to ribbons.

 

Defined by a Fraudulent Identity  

In time and over time we come to believe ourselves to be who and what we’ve told ourselves we are. We become convinced of our own self-deprecating narrative. The fictional account becomes the non-fiction of our existence. We find ourselves unable to entertain any other possible interpretation of who we are and who we can yet become. We cannot comprehend another story.

 

An Authentic Script

We become locked in a story not our own. We play a role fabricated of a false self. We continually force ourselves into alignment with this story because we have come to believe that the ‘force-fitting’ is actually some sort of self-actualizing struggle.

 

We Are More

No narrative can capture the whole of who you are. And no narrative can destroy that either. The vastness of your humanity will always escape the scope of any words that we might use to either define it, or hold it hostage. In the same vein, the narratives crafted by our deficits, our failures, the reversals, the relationships that failed, the goals that fell, the dreams that were crushed, the choices that turned sour, the careers that died, the opportunities that were squandered, our surrender to fear…none of these can craft a narrative even remotely capable of embodying the entirety of who we are.

You are vaster than everything that would seek to define you, even if the person that’s doing the defining is you. In speaking to God, the Psalmist said, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made…” That’s your narrative. That’s your story. That’s who and what you are.

You aren’t just one of many. You’re not just another person walking around on a planet populated by eight billion other people who are just walking around as well. You are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” Your design is the product of an infinite genius crafting a one-of-a-kind human being whose skill-sets and attributes were specifically fashioned to impact the point in history into which you were placed. That’s your story. That will always be your story.

I would have you think about this. Read this carefully and slowly:

“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.”

• Craig D. Lounsbrough

From “The Self That I Long to Believe In”

 

Thirty-One I Am Statements

The thirty-one statements made by God Himself declare that you are bound to nothing other than the magnificence of your design. Any low self-esteem only serves to mask the greatness within you.

You will find all thirty-one of these “I Am” statements outlined in my book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Declaring Who I Am.” This book is a fresh, entirely thought-provoking, and richly insightful thirty-one day devotional that will assist you in both discovering and living out your real self. You will find “Taking It to Our Knees – Declaring Who I Am” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Thanks for joining us on LifeTalk today. You will find LifeTalk on most podcast platforms as well as YouTube. I would also encourage you to check out our daily posts on all of our Social Media sites.

New Beginnings - Seeds in Pain

New beginnings.  The way our lives frequently go, we doubt the existence of new beginnings...at least for us.  We've had too much loss, far too much pain, and circumstances that seemed anything but kind to us.  And as we look down the road of our lives, we can only envision more of the same.  We really don't believe in new beginnings because all we've come to believe in is survival, and we frequently feel that we're doing that all that well either.

But our new beginnings lay in our painful endings.  No one likes to hear that, and few of us actually believe it.  But the seeds of our new day, our new month, our new life lay scattered about in the midst of our losses.  There are new beginnings awaiting you in the brokenness of your pain.  And it's worth looking beyond your pain for a moment to gather the seeds that lay there waiting for you.

Backwards - The Grand Reversal of Easter

Backwards - The Grand Reversal of Easter

By Craig D. Lounsbrough

 

I am backwards.  I don’t think I’m backwards, I wouldn’t necessarily see myself as backwards, nor would I tell you that I’m backwards; but I’m backwards.  And the oddity of it all is that I actually see backwards as forwards.  From where I’m sitting it doesn’t look backwards at all.  However, in terms of how I conceptualize the realities of life as held against the limitations that I perceive myself as having, I’m backwards. 

I’m backwards because I have tediously assessed the realities of the existence within which I am forced to operate, and I have concurrently determined the permanently fixed limitations that define my humanity as I live within that existence.  And based on the conclusions I have drawn in these two areas, I have done a rather splendid job of setting the parameters for my existence by configuring (to the best of my ability) what’s possible and what’s not.

In the end, this determination that I have made regarding that which is ‘possible’ verses that which is ’impossible’ is markedly canted toward the ‘impossible’, leaving me facing a life bereft of everything except a handful of the most limited ‘possibilities’.  Worse yet, this determination has come to comprehensively define all of life as I know it, leaving me nothing bigger than myself.  I have categorized the whole of life as falling within the limits that limit me, assuming these are limits for everything that exists, or ever will exist, or ever could exist.  And in that sense, I have dramatically drawn down life into some minute rubric that is but the slightest fraction of what life really is.  Indeed, I am backwards.

 

God’s Reversal

We reject God because He is not backwards.  He comes to us asking us to move forward, which we, by virtue of our shallow determinations about how life works, see as backwards.  And we stand there wondering why we would be asked to do something so utterly preposterous as moving backwards.  In fact, what God calls forward we call impossible, or improbable, or ridiculous, or naïve, or fanciful, or ignorant, or any number of other explanations that really do more to explain how backwards we really are.

 

Reversals

History is littered with God’s reversals.  Leprosy was healed when the person should have been consumed by it and died.  Bodies of water were split in two when they should have been completely impassible.  Food to feed literal thousands was secured from nothing more than a few small fish and a handful of leftover loaves of bread.  Massive armies were evaporated without so much as a shot being fired.  Dead teenagers were raised to life instead of being dropped in a hole.  Paralytic limbs were straightened and people walked away when they should have crawled away.  That stuff is all backwards.

 

The Grand Reversal of Easter

Then there is the grand reversal of Easter.  It began with an execution reversed, whereby He who was innocent was brutally executed by those who were guilty.  It was an inhumane execution turned into ingenious sacrifice, whereby an end for one man turned into a beginning for all men.  It was a devout religious leader who should have cast his vote against this man, who instead carried this man’s body into his own tomb.  Three days later it was an empty tomb when it should have not have been, leaving a dead man walking which is a reversal of the most astounding sort.  It was a group of terrified disciples keeping their heads down while crawling back to their old lives, now standing directly in front of the man they watched lose His.  It was all backwards. 

These were all uncategorically opposite of what should have been.  If we apply the realities of the existence within which each of us are forced to live, these things and so many more were and are completely backwards.  They were completely opposite of how it all should work.  They simply did not and do not fit into how we have conceptualized the realities of the existence within which we are forced to operate, and how we have concurrently determined the permanently fixed limitations that define our humanity.  They are backwards.

 

Going Forward

To fix this conundrum, might we say that to go forward we must indeed be willing to go backwards.  And I suppose the best way to do that is to switch the two of these in our minds by reversing our perception of how this existence actually operates.  And we cannot do that unless we include God, for God is the single and sole thing that reverses the limits of our humanity by quite literally obliterating those limits with His limitlessness.  Therefore, we must comprehensively trade who we are for what He is, and in the trading trade off everything of us in the exchange. 

We must understand that it is not our limits that define our existence at all, although we have foolishly surrendered to that terribly myopic idea.  Rather, it is God’s power and nature that define it.  We must understand or at least accept the immense, radical and in many cases incomprehensible difference between who we are and who God is.  And out of that understanding we must willingly trade our limitations for God’s limitlessness.  Indeed, that alone will abruptly turn things around. 

When we do that, backward becomes forward.  And when that happens we will have cut the chains that we’ve slapped on life, we will have blown out the boundaries that we thought defined us, the ‘possible’ verses that which is ’impossible’ now becomes wholly canted toward the ‘possible’, and the horizons that we had tightly fixed on our lives suddenly blow out to horizons that are horizon-less. 

Standing in the gaping space now created, we suddenly start to understand that dreams are more than hopeful fantasies that our minds toy with, rather they become realities that life is changed with.  That a vision for something better can move from ‘nice idea’ to ‘transforming ideal’.  That hope is not some thin thing that is subject to the winds of fate, but it is crafted hard by the hands of God.  That the end of ourselves is where God begins.  That the fear of failure is slain cold by success already hot on the way.  That a looming mountain is nothing more than a road in disguise, and that the impossible is not an obstacle but an invitation. 

 

Message Delivered

All of this and more happens when we refuse to continue to go backwards.  All of this and more is the true forward.  This is the incessant and unrelenting message of God throughout history.  And it is a message hand delivered by God’s Son Jesus with potent impact at Easter.  It is a message for anyone who will hear it.  It is the single and sole message that can turn us from backward to forward.  Therefore, be assured that the direction of our lives and the outcome of our existence will hinge on what we do with this single message.  Oh yes, I am backwards, but no longer.  How about you?

 

Find additional Easter resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.

Enjoy all of our daily posts on Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, X, and Instagram.

 

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Ignoring Our Conscience

LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues.  Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes.  All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire.  Today's thought is:

“Disabling your conscience is like disabling your smoke detector.  It doesn’t stop a fire.  It just leaves you ignorant of the fact that there is one.”

Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

Defined By the Culture - "Taking It to Our Knees"

Defined By the Culture

"Taking It to Our Knees - Declaring Who I Am

“When they ridicule me and tell me that my need to do the ‘right thing’ is embedded in an overweening insecurity about doing the ‘wrong thing,’ I quickly inform them of three things. First, I inform them that it is nothing of a need born of fear, but everything of a choice born of conviction. Second, that it is nothing of insecurity, but it is everything of a strength that is sturdy and amply sufficient to field the most caustic of criticisms cast against it. And third, that this strength is far more potent than the pathetic weakness out of which their criticisms arise.”

• Craig D. Lounsbrough

 

Rubrics and More Rubrics

The culture is full of rubrics. Really cheaply crafted rubrics. These rubrics are defined by what’s loosely determined to be vogue, trendy, politically correct, in lock-step with progressive thought, and anointed by whoever’s doing the anointing at any particular time. These rubrics are always shifting, ill-defined, and possess a shelf-life that’s about as short as the attention span of those who dreamt them up.

These rubrics are typically granted a sense of rightness and correctness without any evaluation as to either. They’re viewed as defining the current state of societal evolution as it supposedly trends toward a more enlightened society.

These rubrics become the template by which groups and individuals are evaluated as to whether they are cooperating with this progressive evolution or whether they are not. If it’s determined that they are not, they are assigned any number of derogatory labels. These are typically categorized into a variety of negative stereotypes that are held as defining the persons that they’re labeling.

 

The Cost of Not Fitting In

Therefore, the cost of not ‘fitting in’ becomes incrementally greater the more that we deviate from the vogue, trendy, politically correct, progressive thought that’s forced upon us. The greater our divergence the greater the cost.

This creates a dilemma of identity. Do we borrow the ever-shifting identity of the culture, or do we press the culture aside sufficiently enough to determine who we are as a unique individual existing within the larger culture? Do we allow any of the elements within our culture tell us who we are, such as our families, our communities, our jobs, the accepted cultural mantras, or the organizations to which we belong?

The demand for adherence is incessant, pressing, and coercive. The culture struggles knowing what to do with people who refuse to embrace the cultural narrative. It doesn’t mesh well, or it’s considered blatantly adversarial. It’s messy and irritating to those who are incessantly beating the drums of lesser cultural agendas. Therefore, the pressure to conform is intense. The more that we reject what our culture demands that we be, the more alienation we experience. We are subjected to punitive measures and pressed further and further outside the mainstream culture.

 

Who Will We Choose to Be?

The culture can’t define you. It doesn’t have that kind of power and it certainly doesn’t possess any such privilege. People and organizations and the larger culture can say any number of things about you. They can criticize you, make declarations about you, label you in any number of ways, or stereotype you in order to force-fit you into their agendas or force-fit you right out of the culture.

Yet, you are none of these things. Criticisms, declarations, labels, and stereotypes are far too small to express the fullness of your humanity. These are weak definitions of something far too big to define. Yet if we bend to them, they leave us living out a pasty-thin identity that is a horrific exploitation of who we actually are.

 

Who We Are

No element of our culture can define you. No culture possesses the capacity to do that. No part of the culture has the depth to define the depth within us. The culture doesn’t define us because it can’t. The fact is, it can’t even define itself.

We are defined by something far greater than the culture. Something that outlasts and outlives any culture. We are defined by the God Who created us. Nothing can define us except that which determined what our definition was to be. Nothing else understands the whole of us except that which created the whole of us. Nothing else understands the intricacies, the nuances, and the ingenuity of a design that lays leagues beyond the intellect of any man or collection of men.

 

Breaking Away

The culture has made many demands of us. Many messages have been sent to us. Many characterizations have been made. Labels have been assigned. Definitions have been plastered all over us. Traits ascribed and values determined. And all of this will continue.

Yet, none of these define you. None of them can. None of them ever had. Therefore, don’t grant them power to do what they cannot. Yet, over time we have carried these definitions. And as we have carried them we begin to act on them. When we act on some belief we are likely to get results that mirror the belief upon which we acted. Therefore, if we act on the things that the culture has defined us as being, the results are likely to confirm that we are those things.

 

Thirty-One Things God Says You Are

Yet, you are none of these. You can’t be. You won’t be. And you can’t be because you are far too vast to be fully defined by any one of them or any assorted collection of them. Only God can define who you are. He’s got the blueprint. The only thing that the culture’s got is a few errant scribbles on an illegible scrap of paper that they can’t find half the time. Only God knows you from the best of yourself to the worst of yourself. And this God is calling you to your authentic self.

 

Taking It to Our Knees

You will find thirty-one of God’s “I Am” statements outlined in my book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Declaring Who I Am.” This book is a fresh, entirely thought-provoking, and richly insightful thirty-one day devotional that will assist you in both discovering and living out your real self. You will find “Taking It to Our Knees – Declaring Who I Am” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Thanks for joining us on LifeTalk today. You will find LifeTalk on most podcast platforms as well as YouTube. I would also encourage you to check out our daily posts on all of our Social Media sites.

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - The Inadequacy of Men

LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues.  Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes.  All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire.  Today's thought is:

“I am left with no alternative than to look beyond the efforts of men, for efforts of those sort leave cities flattened, nations teetering, and lives crushed.  Instead, I must shift the whole of my gaze to the God who tenderly kneels in the midst of this unimaginable carnage and effortlessly makes the healing imaginable.”

Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

I Heard a Robin - Hope in the Dark

I Heard a Robin - Hope in the Dark

We all create expectations.  But how often are our expectations a wholesale surrendering of ‘what could be’ to ‘what is?’  How often are they borne of a discouraged soul and a frightened heart that cannot see beyond the realities of the moment so as to envision a brighter reality standing at-the-ready in the next moment?  How many times have we taken the darkness of today and handily projected it onto the landscape of a tomorrow that is in fact full of light?  How many times have we expected that failure will be our lot, disappointment our bedfellow, and that this curse is somehow our due?  We create expectations because that’s what we do, so we’d better be very careful as to how we create them.

 

What Shapes Our Expectations

There are an innumerable array of elements that mold and craft our expectations.  However, there are several that seem to directly impact most, if not all of the rest.  In and of themselves, these three are certain to kill our vision and utterly convince us that tomorrow will surely embody the darkness of today.  Left unchecked to bleed into the other areas of our lives, they can leave us destitute. 

First, we have a tendency to focus on the negative experiences that we have had for fear that the positive ones weren’t authentic, or if perchance they were, they’re unlikely to come our way again.  Second, we build a faith that’s safe, which means that it’s ‘faith’ in name only and therefore it holds no power.  Third, our vision is limited by the walls that we’ve meticulously constructed all around ourselves in order to protect us against imaginary enemies, or at least enemies that are not nearly as gigantic as we’ve given them permission to become.  And while it’s obvious that far more goes into the creation of our expectations than these three ingredients alone, these would appear to be inordinately impacting.

 

Making ‘What Is,’ ‘What Will Be’

Because these appear to be an inherent part of us, we gather up the sum total of our negative experiences, we fall victim to them because the lackluster nature of our purported faith can do no other, and we hold them hostage to these incessantly compressing walls of ours.  And in this ever-weary concoction of negativity, faithless faith and massive walls, everything coalesces to shape a distorted observation of ‘what is,’ which then goes on to shape these rather dark expectations of ‘what will be.’

Therefore, our expectations are constricted to what will ‘not’ happen verses being exuberantly expanded to embrace what actually might.  We project the misery of the present onto the landscape of the future and render it such before we even get there to better ascertain what it might actually be.  We live with this morbid expectation that nothing will get better, that the future is eternally doomed to be nothing more than the past in redress, and that any hope of something better would be yet another expectation disappointed when we feel far too fragile to bear yet another disappointment of any sort at all.

 

Hope Deferred

The morning was yet dark as if the darkness was purposefully lingering in spite of a morning that should have long been well on its way.  The cold of a winter in retreat somehow remained fiercely undiminished, casting a biting edge across what was supposed to be a warming spring.  The snow had secretly begun falling under the cover of a night now lifting, leaving a world elated by spring’s flowers laying helplessly encased in winter’s white.  It was as if the coming of spring was a promise disappointed; a hope fallen prey to a winter that spring was supposed to be advancing against.  That days tenderly warmed at the edges with hints of green breathing new life into winter’s impossible cold were a hope ripped away.

Sometimes we let circumstances of the moment create our expectations of the future.  We altogether lose the vision of being able to see beyond what besets us at the moment.  What we see is the ‘what is’ that our minds have interpreted as ‘what will be.’  And we throw the ‘what could be’ of a future yet unwritten into the straitjacket of a ‘what is’ that has all but consumed us.  The ‘now’ is projected forward and the future is subsequently cast in its unforgiving mold.   We create the shackles that bind us to the present and we fashion the blindfold that keeps us from seeing the future as anything but the present.  Our expectations of ‘what will be’ are crafted entirely by ‘what is,’ and yet it is highly likely that neither are correct.

 

I Heard a Robin

Suddenly and without warning, out of snow and darkness I heard a robin.  I heard the harbinger of spring call out into the dead of winter.  I heard a single song that raised itself up against the dark and the cold and the anger of a winter being forced into retreat.  It sat entirely at odds with everything that made that morning that morning, this bold song of this single bird off in the distant distance.  As held against the power of the frigid morning, it seemed to be voice mocked by the morning itself.  It seemed a lone prophet of spring that was ridiculed for bringing a such a song into such a morning.  But it sang anyway.  It sang until the sun rose.  It sang the promise of something better that I could not see because I had errantly projected the ‘what is’ of a dark moment onto the ‘what could be’ of a spring already surging in my direction.  This single robin was not deterred by the darkness and foreboding cold of my expectations.  It sang.  And that evening, it bid the cold day farewell by singing into the night of spring well on the way.

 

Expectations

It took a robin, this single harbinger of spring to remind me that the moment is just that…the moment.  On the heels of any day or any event there is a robin singing in the distance.  There is the hope of something coming, of the end of the darkness and the cold, of all things always moving on to new things.  I cannot allow my expectations of ‘what is’ to create some sort of construed view of a future that in and of itself will not bow to my ‘what is’. 

It might be dark.  It might be cold.  I might not see the horizon.  But out on the horizon’s edge there stands a robin.  There is something that is raising its song into the darkness and the cold, heralding the truth that something new has long been running in our direction.  Such is the story of spring, and better yet, such is the promise of God’s redemptive plan.  Something new is coming and the darkness of our expectations cannot stop it.  It’s existence is undeniable and its arrival is inevitable.  So you might take a moment, step into a darkness that is cowering before the light of a new day, pull your coat tight against a cold that is bowing in sure retreat, raise an ear and listen for a robin.

I Am Only One - "The Self That I Long to Believe In"

LifeTalk Script

I Am Only ‘One’

Understanding Our Impact

 

“I am only one but still I am one.  I cannot do everything, but still I can do something.”

• Edward Everett

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. 

 

Living as Being Only One

And so, because I am only one, I relegate myself to being only one. I surrender to this weak singularity.  I am obscure, so much so that I can hardly define myself or my purpose as held against the billions of others within which my existence becomes swallowed up and lost.  As held against history, time and creation, I will enter with barely a sound and I will exit in the same manner.

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 become convinced of what I think being one means and subsequently what it does not mean.

 

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.  It’s a bunch of ‘ones.’  By and large, those individuals experience life pretty much the same way that we do.  It’s all just 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 still 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, there’s plenty of them and 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, biased, mistaken at some fundamental level, or being something of a faith-based moron? What if we take a stand? What if we refuse to compromise? What if what we’re saying isn’t popular or trendy or it’s absent in the talking points of a screaming media?  What if?  I think that we need to understand that there are ‘ones’ out there who share our convictions and who understand the oppressive burdens that birthed those convictions. Indeed, we are ‘one’ but we are not alone in being ‘one.’ 

 

            The Fear of Failure

What if I step out as one in the midst of the chaos and the darkness and the malaise, and what if I fail? What if nothing is different? What if I am shamed into submission as my failures bring me face-to-face with the limitations of being only ‘one’ that I hoped were not true?  What if I try and nothing changes? What if I step up and get knocked down?  Then through some misplaced hope and fanciful zeal I have done nothing other than convince myself that being only ‘one’ is truly limited to being only ‘one.’ And I hardly think that I could live with that.

 

            The Fear of Responsibility

But what if this one that I am is not a one in isolation?  What if I can change things?  What if I can impact the world?  What if?  Maybe we don’t want to be responsible for that much power.  Maybe we don’t want to shoulder some sort of bold mantel, draw our resources around us, and press out against so much of what is destroying so many. Maybe under the right circumstances we’d be willing to following someone who would be willing to do that, but we don’t want to be the one doing that. We prefer to leave such exploits to others and follow them at a comfortable distance, or track them from an even greater distance. But, what if we actually pull it off and are left with the responsibility of having done that? The responsibility might be a bit too much for us.    

 

The Opportunity of Being “One”

I am only one in a mammoth sea of 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. I am only one and despite the rather lackluster view of myself, 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 can 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.

I am in union with the Infinite ‘One’ Who renders me capable of being everything that I am not. I have yet to understand that my oneness is never held solely to itself. That my oneness is the seed of a greater greatness that when joined with God, with those others He brings alongside of me, with the dreams He has implanted within me, with the purpose He has bestowed upon me; this ‘one’ will remain one, but it will be a one that has moved leagues beyond its own oneness. Yes, I am only one, but I am one in league with a God Who makes my oneness infinite. 

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. Be the one that you were designed to be and change the world by being that one, for despite your poor assessment of yourself you will always remain this beautiful one. 

 

Closing

Today’s podcast is drawn from the book, “The Self That I Long to Believe In – The Challenge of Building Self-Esteem.” Get your copy today at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Thanks for joining us on LifeTalk today. You will find LifeTalk on most podcast platforms as well as YouTube. I would also encourage you to check out our daily posts on all of our Social Media sites.  

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LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues.  Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes.  All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire.  Today's thought is:

“Love is the essence of our humanity expressing itself in actions of sacrifice so profound that we risk not surviving those expressions.”

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LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues.  Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes.  All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire.  Today's thought is:

“Who are you sending into the future and how are you sending them?  For this is the stuff of legacy that we tend to forget until long after we’ve sent them.”

Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

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LifeTalk's "Thought for Life" is a weekly one-minute thought that touches on one of today's pressing issues.  Each of these brief presentations is centered on one of Craig's personal quotes.  All of his quotes are specifically written to challenge, inform, and inspire.  Today's thought is:

“It comes down to 'fear' and 'faith'. 'Fear' of what stands in front of me. 'Faith' in believing that the resources I possess can handle what stands in front of me. If I stop at the former, I will change nothing. If I embrace the latter, I can change everything.”

Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

”Flecks of Gold On a Path of Stone - Simple Truth’s for Profound Living” - Part Three

Slavery as an institution is pretty far removed from the minds of most of us residing here in 21^st century America.  Slavery sits back plenty far enough in the faded, yellowed and brittle pages of history to create a more than comfortable chasm between us and itself.  We view that chasm of time and social development and modernism as broad enough to keep slavery from leaping from the past across the chasm of time into the present.  The idea of slavery seems to evoke dusty black and white tin-type images of the Civil War, the expansive plantations of the Deep South, bloodied chains, inhuman whippings, lynching’s, and wild-eyed slaves fleeing through swamps, thick underbrush and the wilderness of their own fear.

Those kinds of pictures have become our definition of slavery; the visual that creates a picture of what slavery is.  Slavery is seen as a physical captivity that coerces a forced service to an enslaving master.  That’s how we view it.  That definition is nearly exclusive, making our definition of slavery so incredibly tight that we can’t see any other kind of slavery at all.  And if we don’t see slavery of this type, we assume freedom.  That assumption in and of itself can be enslaving.

 

Slavery to Ignorance

Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”  Ignorance is being oblivious, to one degree or another, to the obvious.  Confucius said that “ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon and star.”  Ignorance is walking around in the dark without realizing what ‘dark’ is, and having no understanding of light.

It’s not seeing what actually ‘is,’ to the point that whatever it ‘is’ that ‘is,’ isn’t . . . at all.  It’s having no recognition of something that exists despite how very real and very powerful that thing might be.  Ignorance is naiveté multiplied to blindness.  It seems that living in blindness can be freeing in some cases, and horrifically dangerous in others.

The old adage that “ignorance is bliss” is blissfully ignorant of how much damage we can experience walking in that kind dark darkness.  Despite all of that, the worst kind of ignorance is when we’re ignorant that we’re ignorant.  It’s one thing to intentionally ignore something and turn a blind eye.  It’s quite another thing to be so ignorant that we don’t even know that anything’s there to turn a blind eye to.  Ignorance at its fullest is fully convincing.  It sells us wholesale on the hypnotically appealing belief that there’s nothing to be ignorant about because there’s nothing out there to be ignorant about.  We buy the whole sales job lock, stock and barrel because it’s what we want to believe regardless of whether it’s really believable or not.  At that point slavery leaps out of tin-types and right into our worlds.

Ignorance can open the doors to a lot of things and give a whole lot of space for a whole lot of things to exist in our lives.  Yet I think that ignorance of our enslavement is one of the worst types of all of the kinds of slavery that we can be shackled to.  To be ignorant and to be enslaved at the same time seems to be the absolute worst kind of slavery since we don’t even know that we’re enslaved.  We become ignorant to slavery and slaves to ignorance.

 

What Enslaves Us?

How many things enslave us?  We tend to see that things demands things of us, that we struggle with certain behaviors or attitudes, that we have our holes to dig ourselves out of, and our mountains to climb over.  We look at our lives and see what we need to change, what should be altered, where we need the proverbial “nip n’ tuck,” a bit of “cut and paste,” or maybe a little bit of Botox for the personality.  We likewise see the pieces of ourselves that need to be entirely eliminated in some sort of wholesale, demolition-like fashion.

We see our foibles, the fallacies of false fronts, our warts and things that warrant our attention.  We know that we’re not where we should be and that where we should be isn’t anywhere along the road of where we’ve been going.  We know at times that our values have been compromised, our integrity has been marred, and that far too often our morality has had the air completely sucked out of it.  We realize that we’ve crafted career strategies that have outright killed our marriages, and that we’ve sacrificed families to seize six figure incomes.  We know that we haven’t been accountable when we should have been, we haven’t apologized when we should have, and that we’ve never restored even half of what we’ve stolen along the road of our lives.  We know.

 

Ignorance in Action

Yet, we tuck these things in the deep file of ignorance and then we file it away in the filing cabinet of forgetfulness.  Once we do that, we make every effort never to pull the file ever again.  Yet, nothing is filed and no filing cabinet exists despite the ingeniously creative wealth of our imaginations to believe it to be so.  In reality we walk with all of this stuff hanging on with claws embedded in our hearts, and roots thickly entwining our souls.  Yet we ignore this.  We skip and cavort through life to some sort of fabricated tune whose velvety verses sooth us with lyrics that all is good and our lives are squeaky clean and polished to a mirrored surface.

Or we manipulate ourselves into believing that whatever good that we have is good enough.  That life is more about the business of survival which doesn’t afford us the larger luxury of introspection, personal evaluation and the sweaty rigor of change.  We don’t see anyone else focusing on all that negative stuff and so we assume that it must not be all that bad or everyone else would be focusing on it . . . wouldn’t they?  We find some comfort in the belief that overall we’re good people and at least we try to do the good thing even if we don’t end up doing the good thing.

We create expansive and ornate rationalizations to justify ignorance, and we do a bang up job of creating them.  Once we create them we nail them to the walls of our conscience so that we have them for ready reference during the times when guilt handily rankles our souls.  We lull ourselves into belief that in the end, all of that stuff really doesn’t matter all that much anyway and that it will sort of eventually fall off behind us and kind of blow off the road of our lives,  somehow getting lost somewhere in the wilderness of our journey . . . so we think.  Therefore, we settle in ignorance and let ignorance give all of these things space to enslave us.

 

Our Enslavement

We are a peculiar people indeed.  We tend to focus on the tasks that will either achieve our goals or keep our heads above water, whatever our situation might be.  We’re notorious for feeding, watering and carefully attending to all the superficial stuff, but we put the real stuff out of sight behind the impermeable veil of ignorance.  And we live as slaves to that stuff. 

We work to tactfully or not so tactfully counter the real stuff and we futilely attempt to offset it by managing and manipulating the superficial things and focusing on the things that don’t hit us too hard or upset us all too much.  Yet all of our efforts to offset all of the things stored deep in catacombs of ignorance are wholly insufficient.  We live trying to change things by ignoring them.  We attempt to resolve them by countering them with something else that isn’t as difficult or problematic to deal with.  Or we justify them with conveniently trite sayings or offbeat philosophies that act like cooling waters on the searing hot coals of our conscience.  In all of this maneuvering, we try to cheat ourselves to health and wholeness.

The end result is slavery to those things we’re chosen to ignore.  They drive us to futility attempting to compensate for them by ignoring them.  They pound and thunder and bend us from behind the veil of ignorance.  They dog our steps and flog our minds.  They draw us down and drag us out.  They impale us as they impact us.  In short, we become subject to them whether we wish to acknowledge its happening or not.  We become so enslaved by our own foolish and short-sighted vision that we become ignorant to that which enslaves us.  When that happens, we become slaves in the most awful manner possible.

 

Refute and Refuse Ignorance          

We refute and refuse ignorance by being honest about our weaknesses and failures.  We need to cast off justification and we to torch rationalization.  We need to frankly acknowledge and bring to the forefront all of those things in our lives that we’ve chosen to ignore.  Once we do that, we work to work through them with diligence and beat them by resolving them.  In that way our enslavement can truly end because that which enslaved us is that which we’ve enslaved through its elimination.

”Flecks of Gold On a Path of Stone - Simple Truth’s for Profound Living” - Part Two

Flecks of Gold On a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's For Profound Living

An unknown author wrote, “Real treasure lies not in what that can be seen, but what cannot be seen.”  Oddly, we possess this strangely cockeyed perception that we must be able to see something in order to treasure it.  What we see as treasure is really only the thing that’s revealing the treasure itself.  The treasure in a daisy is not the daisy, but the massively creative genius behind the daisy.  The flower itself is simply a tender, fragrant and quite intricate manifestation of the real treasure.  Reflected in the wonder of this simple flower we are privileged to see a whisper thin slice of something truly marvelous.  Real treasure then lies nestled in hidden places with generous clues to its magnificence scattered all about us like a generous field of daisies that rolls off to blue horizons.  Sadly, we call those clues “treasure.”

The real treasure is often too airy and intangible for us.  But, we feel that we have to see treasure, which in reality keeps us from seeing treasure.  Not only do we have to see treasure, we think that we have to be able to somehow hold it in our hands.  And then, in far too many cases we think we have to be able to own in order to really treasure it.  What we haven’t figured out is that if we can possess something it’s simply not a treasure, for real treasure is far too elusive to be held in the hands of any man.

Sadly, we rarely consider the reality that real treasure is the stuff that can’t be seen.  Therefore, we don’t look for it because we presume that there’s nothing to look for.  Because we don’t look for it, we miss real treasure and we accept the bogus, phony and plastic stuff of life for the stuff of treasure.  We plod through life with our pockets crammed with a squalid array of worthless trinkets that we think to be treasure.  We live anemically impoverished lives and we don’t even know it.      

In fact, it may well be that to treasure something in a truly treasured manner it must be entirely ethereal; it must be something that we can’t see, that we can’t hold and that we can’t own.  When we possess something, the fact that we have the ability to possess it suggests that whatever it is, it’s terribly limited; so limited in fact that we can control it.  Possessing something suggests that whatever we possess is subject to our whims and the flux of our own whimsy.  Anything we can control must have some sort of inferior status that automatically excludes it as being treasure of the most treasured sort. 

Being unable to possess something suggests that it has a sweeping scope, an unfathomable significance, and a fathomless depth that is far beyond us or beyond anyone else for that matter.  Real treasures are elusive because if they’re not, they don’t rise sufficiently above our sordid and stained humanity to be genuinely categorized as treasures.  Real treasure will not be owned, or bound, or appraised, or hemmed in, or leashed, or locked in a vault, or confined to a trust, or be made subject to either our ridicule or praise.  Real treasure is priceless because it supersedes and completely eclipses any rogue monetary standards that we’d foolishly attempt to place on it.  Real treasure will not bow in servitude or obediently follow at our heels because it is superior to us.  Yet the real wonder of real treasure is that it is withheld from no one. 

 

Sparrows and a Clapboard Garage

Every spring the sparrows came back to the old garage; something like coming back to a comfy, old friend.  Darting and bouncing in feathered frenzy, they would burst from the muscular maples and the tangled brush of the Mock Oranges, flirting and flitting in front of the garage in some sort of grand hello after a winter’s separation.  Upon their return their boundless energy and contagious enthusiasm seemed wildly intoxicating; vibrant, vibrating and filled with all the fresh energy of spring.  I often wondered if they had spent the cold, gray months of winter in a nearly uncontrollable anticipation of greeting their old friend once winter had rolled off the horizon of spring.

Sometimes in life there seems to be a subtle yet wonderfully warm camaraderie of sorts that develops between things you’d never think would or could be connected like that.  Those things are a kind of treasure in themselves.  That seemed to explain the quiet, entirely unspoken kind of relationship that existed between the old garage and the sparrows.  They seemed like long seasoned friends that didn’t need to say much because the bond that they shared spoke more than words ever could.  The old clapboard garage and the house sparrows were each warmed, gently magnified, and beautifully enhanced by the other.  Each was a treasure embraced as a treasure. 

The sparrows would glide up between the heavy wooden doors and slip by the sturdy steel tracks that they ran on; seeming to nestle into the garages soft, clapboard embrace.  Every spring the sparrows would settle in and nest right above the heavy wooden doors, tucked just inside the thin edge of the garage attic.  There was far too much love and warmth in the old garage, so there were usually two or three nests enfolded above the wooden doors.

It was easy to see the sparrows incessantly coming and going as they bobbed and darted about.  Yet, as with any real treasure you couldn’t see what they were doing.  Treasure enveloped in secrecy always lends a bit of tantalizing mystery to it all.  The sparrows were phenomenally tireless; transporting endless bits of straw and brown grasses into the garage; building a place to birth the treasures of the next generation.  Within moments of entering the garage they would poke out elated heads, and then burst into flight with empty beaks.  In no time they would return with more strands of lacey grass, or bits of tattered weed, or cottony fibers, or limply discarded pieces of string . . .  over and over.

Within weeks the sound of new life could be heard tentatively reaching out from above the old, wooden doors.  Scattered chirps and peeps liberally tossed out as brilliant shards of spring would be shushed when anyone approached.  Patient mothers were teaching their little ones that life is an incomparable treasure, but treasure does not eliminate danger.  These little, hidden treasures would become ever louder as they grew.  They would grow strong and eventually seek the independence of flight.  Before the close of spring they would launch themselves in a gangly and awkward kind of flight.  Curiosity would beckon them out to explore the places close to the garage, bursting into uncoordinated flight but never wandering too far way.  Life would eventually call them out ever further from the clapboard garage until they were gone into summer’s embrace.      

 

Characteristics of Treasures

Unobtrusive

Treasures are hidden away in quiet places.  They speak in soft tones and often become silenced as we approach.  They don’t beg to be found, but embrace us if we do happen to find them.  They are the product of completely ordinary circumstances unfolding in wonderfully extraordinary ways.  They are found hidden in the nooks and crannies of our existence; all around us if we quit allowing our attention to be captivated by that which is noisy and listen for that which is quiet and still. 

 

The Product of Unexpected and Loving Camaraderie

Treasures are a product of treasures.  Real treasure is the product of lives shared, experiences intermingled, roads merged into single lanes, sacrifices jointly experienced, the soulful laughter of two hearts in beat with each other, and lives bountifully expended in unity.  Treasures are the step-child of lives lived out in shared experiences that dramatically multiply both the experience and persons in a manner geometrically beyond anything the persons could hope to experience alone.  Treasures rise out of the relationship of people who are intimately woven together by the threads of time and the needle of experience.

 

Always Creating and Never Preserving

Treasures are not stagnant.  They’re not to be preserved as in the preserving they will most certainly wither and they will perish.  Real treasures begat other treasures.  Real treasures are designed to perpetuate other treasures.  Sometimes the perpetuation involves the replication of the original treasure, and sometimes the replication is something entirely different but just as wonderful.  Treasures are ingenuously and deliberately crafted to enrich the world.  If one thing is for certain, they are not designed to be encased in the lifeless museums of our making, or the vaults we create to keep them to ourselves.  It’s in their multiplication that the cold of life’s winters are forced off the edge of the calendar to make way for spring.

 

Sown to the World

It’s our natural inclination to preserve treasures; to corral them and box them and seal them tight.  We assume that unless they’re preserved they’ll be lost, which is entirely contradictory.  In fact, they are designed to be launched and thrown out to the horizons of each of our lives regardless of whatever the season is that we might be in.  Authentic treasures permeate our world; they gain wings of their own and they disburse so that they might reproduce in other places and in other lives.  The stuff of treasure is irrepressibly infectious and prudently wild; intent on providing enrichment whenever and wherever it can.  We must work against our own inclinations and toss treasures out to the world around us.

It would be tremendously wise to rethink the concept of treasure in your own life.  What you may be holding onto may not be treasure at all.  In fact, if you’re “holding” onto it, it’s not.

”Flecks of Gold On a Path of Stone - Simple Truth’s for Profound Living” - Part One

Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone – Simple Truth’s for Profound Living”

Someone once uttered the timeless saying that “timing is everything.”  There’s something about things happening in a certain order in a certain time that makes it all fit in a certain way.  We sense a natural and correct progression that, if followed, leads to success or happiness or fulfillment or whatever it is that we’re chasing.  The whole element of timing seems critical.  The more important something is, the greater the issue of timing seems to be.  Timing can be so critical that at times we set out to minutely orchestrate the tiniest pieces and parts of whatever we’re doing so that everything is perfectly cinched, tightly in synch and precisely on time.

 

Falling Apart Just to Fall Apart

Yet sometimes it all falls apart anyway.  I mean it disintegrates; something like Murphy’s Law times three or four.  Sometimes it’s not just a matter of something being a bit out of step, or not lining up quite right.  It’s not about tweaking something or gently nudging it back into whatever place it was supposed to be.  Sometimes the wheels fall off the thing, which then causes everything else to fall off as well.  We end up with the classic train wreck where we met a downhill train on an uphill grade.  More than that however, there’s absolutely no rhyme or reason for the train wreck.  It simply didn’t need to be, but it was.  It was all way beyond any odds or all statistics.  Whatever happened, it was a cruelly extenuated string of stupid, dumb luck.

Sometimes it just all falls apart . . . all of it.  We’re left standing dumbfounded, mired in the confusion of it all and running our minds down a thousand roads of the classic “what could have gone wrong?” question.  Sure, we’ll likely find some things that weren’t too well thought out or strategies that were a bit ill-conceived.  We might unearth some rationales that now, in hindsight, weren’t quite as rational or shrewd as we originally thought them to be.  We even might stumble over some misdirected motivations or less than ethical agendas that were part of the whole thing.  The way we pasted it all together may have not been entirely seamless, and the stuff that we pasted together in the first place might have been less of a fit than we have originally thought.  We may have even chosen to force fit some stuff that in the end really didn’t mesh all too well.  Yeah, there are probably some quirks and a few flaws.

Yet, there are times when these quirks and flaws and other dynamics really represent only a small portion of the whole train wreck.  We dig and scratch and scrape only to uncover a sparse handful of these dynamics.  There are times when the sum total of them is far too small and far too innocuous to really explain why the wheels fell off and the whole thing fell apart.  They don’t add up sufficiently to explain the mess that lays scattered, derelict, smoking and broken at our feet.

 

When Lack of Timing Makes Us Look Bad

George McGovern once said, “You know, sometimes, when they say you're ahead of your time, it's just a polite way of saying you have a real bad sense of timing.”  Sometimes we just try to play it all off, or make light of it in order to make it lighter.  We missed a step somewhere, or we lost our place in the script, or we missed our cue.  We can make it all cute and cut up about it.  We can poke fun at ourselves to lighten everything up a bit.  We can make polite statements to take the edge off of our stupidity.  But when we lose our timing and things go horribly wrong, there may be nothing remotely right that can be said.  

 

No Answers

In the end we’re left with bushels of questions that rot for lack of answers.  Things just didn’t line up.  There’s no sustaining or compelling rationale other than it didn’t happen when and how it should have happened.  If the timing had been good, it all would have all been good.  But the timing was not and now everything lays wrecked and ravaged.

Sometimes the losses are marginal.  At other times they’re catastrophic.  Sometimes we can just pick up our toys, brush them off, head on home and play another day.  Sometimes there’s nothing left to pick up other than the charred ash of incinerated dreams and the unidentifiable pieces of years’ worth of hope and sacrificial toil.  Sometimes it’s no big deal, and at other times the whole thing is deal-breaker.  Sometimes we can pick up and move on, and at other times there’s nothing to pick up and no place to move on to.

 

Better Questions to Ask      

Maybe we should expand our thinking a bit.  Maybe we should ask the question “is loss sometimes the best thing that can happen?”  That’s a bitter and biting pill to swallow, on top of the fact that it’s a completely unsavory to even entertain in the first place.  It suggests however that things in life don’t line up because maybe they’re not supposed to.  Maybe what we were doing was in reality a whole lot more wrong than it was right.  Maybe it would have been a whole lot more damaging than it would have been constructive.  Maybe it would have been the thing that would have robbed us totally blind rather than enriching us beyond measure.  Maybe it would have become the monster rather than the malevolent benefactor.  Maybe the fact that wheels fell off of it and it derailed was one of the biggest blessings we’ve experienced in a very long time.

Is there room in our thinking to entertain the possibility that failure is sometimes preferred to success?  Success does not always deliver a blessing and failure does not always deliver a curse.  Life is far too vast to place success and failure into scrupulously neat and tidy categories that we aptly apply in each and every situation.  Sometimes the best thing for us is the very thing that we feel is the worst thing.  Sometimes in God’s grand scheme, pain and loss are the pavers to something grand and glorious.  Sometimes a misstep is a nothing more and nothing less than a change of cadence to right a path right to God.      

 

The Taxing Nature of Our Preconceived Outcomes

At the beginning, when we’ve started to head off into most of our endeavors we don’t have the perspective of what this will look like on the other end.  All we see is what we have in front of us, how it all goes together, and then based on that how we guess it will all come out in the wash.  We can take a shot at speculating outcomes and be pretty convinced that our conceptualization will indeed be what it will look like on the other side.  We can do the math and project the numbers and point to what it should all add up to.  We can play with our mental bell-curves and crunch the emotional numbers to calculate an outcome.  But sometimes things don’t add up according to our calculations, despite how tedious they might be.  Sometimes our best projections because our most haunting nightmares.

We’re typically not open to this kind of thinking because we’re angry about the loss and we’re licking our wounds because we feel gipped.  We didn’t land where we projected we would land and we scour the minute fractions and infractions in order to get us to those ill-fated coordinates.  We’re not in the mindset to think about the fact that maybe it blew up so that we wouldn’t.  There’s no room in our heads to realize that we might have just been saved from ourselves.  We’re too recklessly obstinate to realize that if we keep insistently goading the situation in order to achieve our preconceived outcomes there might come a point when we won’t be saved from ourselves anymore.  All we tend to focus on is the feeling that we’ve been victimized, ripped off, audaciously cheated, short-changed and short-sheeted.  The reality is that sometimes we are.  But quite often this is life’s way of putting on the brakes.

 

Is It Untimely?

Are our circumstances untimely, or very timely?  Do our situations appear untimely only because we’re seeing what didn’t happen, but we refuse to see the things that are happening right in the middle of what didn’t happen?  Are we so myopic that we can’t see beyond the train wreck to the fact that the wreck stopped the train and that that might have been the very thing that compassionately saved us, or maybe graciously redirected us?  To our chagrin, the exact time and place when we think something shouldn’t have happened may very well be the exact time and place when it absolutely should have happened.

Rose Kennedy said that “Life isn't a matter of milestones but of moments.”  It’s not about what we achieve, but what we learn on the way to the achievement.  We glue our eyes to the goal and we ignore the journey on the way there.  And that journey will often involve our world’s falling apart despite heroic efforts to keep them together.  Yet, our world’s falling apart have within those events great lessons that we would be well advised to embrace.  Moments are not always nice, but they can be rich.  So, when your world falls apart in the untimeliness of living, look at the wreckage.  You just may have been saved and didn’t even know it.  You just may have been mercifully redirected and missed it.  Your world falling apart may in actuality be your world being put together.    

”Flecks of Gold On a Path of Stone - Simple Truth’s for Profound Living” - Part Four

Common sense is a ‘common’ phrase that is in reality far from common.  To add insult to injury, common sense also seems to weigh in a trite bit light on ‘sense’ as well.  It might be proper to say that common sense is neither common nor does it make much sense anymore.  Today, common sense commonly lacks sense and we are the poorer for it.

It seems rather apparent that some things in life should simply ‘be’ without any thought about whether they should ‘be.’  We would define those as the common things.  If we tinker with the idea of “common” for a moment, it would imply something that just ‘is’ because it has a place in life that’s uncontested, blatantly obvious, globally useful, intrinsically beneficial and it’s as cleanly natural as sunshine and rose petals.  ‘Common’ defines those things whose existence we simply presume without questioning what they are or what role they play.  They just ‘are’ because they’re supposed to be and we accept them as such. 

 

Common Sense

It seems that common sense should be common as well, or at least we would like it to be common.  After all, when we apply common sense things usually come out pretty good.  Even if we can’t rightly define it, the phrase “common sense” has a nice ring to it.  There’s something soothing about the idea of “common sense” as it seems to have some reliable guiding quality to it that’s much more likely to insure a good outcome.  Common sense seems to bring a sure and steady compass to situations that are short on compasses.  It seems to be the thing that will not fail us when all the craftiness, shrewdness, cunning and presumed brilliance of men who presume themselves as brilliant fails.  Common sense is the spotless and orderly notion that we smile at with a kind of soothing and pleasantly simplistic agreement.

Common sense implies a cup of wisdom, a dash of discernment and a dollop of intellectual acumen that’s blended clean and translucent.  It’s clarity in chaos and focus when all else is frantic.  It suggests the direct application of life experience, gently hemmed in by intuition and held fast by reason.  Common sense is the best of our senses refusing to react to the worst of our fears.  It appears to be a culmination and consolidation of the best of our experiences that in combination are sufficiently adequate to overcome the worst of who we are.  

 

The Absence of Common Sense

The absence of common sense seems in large part to be related to the fact that we tack so much stuff on to it, or cut so much stuff out of it, or painfully contort it to the point that we’re not certain what we’re left with other than it’s probably nothing even remotely close to common sense.  We’re prone to nip, tuck, tinker and toy with it until it’s a whole lot less to common sense and a whole lot more something else.  Common sense then gets unrecognizably blurred or worse yet it gets entirely lost in our tinkering.

What’s problematic is that once we’ve done all of that stuff to common sense, we think that what’s left over is still common sense.  If fact, we often think that we’ve refined it to the point that it’s tight, clean and logically invincible.  In reality, common sense is lost to the point that we don’t even recognize that whatever we’ve got left over after messing with common sense, it’s probably anything but common sense.  We’ve got our own derivative of something that maybe started out as common sense but is only common in the fact that it no longer makes any sense.

But we go ahead and treat it like common sense anyway.  The obvious and natural progression is that we act on it thinking all the while that its common sense that we’re acting on.  The repercussions are that we end up acting on something that’s likely distorted by our agendas or shaped by whatever the cultural bias is.  The result is that we do incredibly stupid things while applauding ourselves for how smart we think we are.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said it well when he wrote, “Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.” George Bernard Shaw put it another way when he said, “Common sense is instinct.  Enough of it is genius.”  Common sense is the stuff of simple man’s uncluttered instinct simply applied to whatever we’re facing.  Instinct is all of our life experiences pooled together that gives us a sense that something’s right or wrong, good or bad, constructive or destructive, wise or not.  Common sense then is simply using that instinct; refusing to convolute it by engaging in tangled complexities, and doing nothing more than directly applying it to our situation as our instinct tells us to apply it.

If that’s the case, then why is common sense so incredibly uncommon?  Common sense would suggest that common sense itself is contaminated and distorted by things that dramatically diminish or altogether destroy common sense.  We bias it and distort it through a number of means that undercut it and render it largely anemic.  In doing that we rob it of its simplicity, we sully its purity and then we strip it of its effectiveness.  We make decisions based on whatever we’re left with and the end product is typically something reeking with the rancid stench of stupidity.

 

Authentic Common Sense is Free of Prejudice and Bias

Common sense is a frankness that’s not convoluted by prejudice, bias, special interests, personal demands, self-centered motivations, self-seeking agendas or any of a thousand things that twist it to something rank and spoiled.  Those things cloud common sense to the point that it’s so mucked up that we can’t see in it, or through it, or even around it.  In reality, common sense is a blend of truth and fact untainted by any agenda that would dilute or skew it.  It’s clean and transparent, entirely uncluttered by all of the muck and mire that we rigorously pump into it.

What makes common sense so uncommon is that we contaminate it with all that stuff.  We have a difficult time setting our agendas cleanly apart and maintaining some disciplined degree of objectivity.  We don’t get that common sense has a voice of its own and that voice is not our voice.  What we adamantly listen for is our voice, our opinions, our sense of what should be.  What do we think about this, that or the next thing?  What are the pro’s and con’s that we can weigh out to weigh in our favor?  We tend to like to hear ourselves talk anyway, so when we hear our own voices we typically like what we hear.  Because we like what we hear, we assume it to be common sense and we act on it as such. 

Common sense is not our voice.  It’s the voice of life experience.  It’s the voice of uncompromised truth and hard fact.  It’s the voice of a guiding conscious that whispers or sometimes screams in the back of all of our heads.  It’s the voice of something that’s far greater than who and what we are that speaks simple truths that are so clean that we can’t even apprehend them in the sludge of our own minds.  Whatever commons sense is, it’s not our voice.  So, if we’re listening to hear what we’re saying, we’re not listening for common sense.

 

Authentic Common Sense Uses Knowledge as Wisdom

Despite the fact that it’s pretty clean and simple, we somehow have the need to analyze, decipher, scrutinize, probe, inspect, dissect and then review it all in retrospect.  If we don’t go through this gargantuan process, we feel that we’re not being entirely responsible and thorough.  In this cumbersome process the intellectual acumen takes it all in a thousand different directions which are then further skewed by our own biases.  In the end common sense is altogether killed and swapped out with something that’s certainly intellectually shiny and pretty impressive, but probably entirely irrelevant and likely utterly off-base.  Once we get to this place it’s all so messed up that we typically can’t even backtrack sufficiently well enough to find the place where we left common sense buried and dead.

Robert Green Ingersoll said that “it is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.”  Common sense is not something that’s learned in academia.  Rather, it’s something gained by raw, hands-on, day-in and day-out experience where we get slapped and slugged.  Common sense is gained in the rough and tumble of life, where we get beat, bruised, belittled, betrayed and battered.  It’s standing up after we’ve been pummeled, shaking ourselves back to some level of consciousness and asking “what did I learn from whatever it was that just happened?”  Whatever we learned, we add it to our base of preexisting knowledge.  It’s the pooling of all those experiences and bringing them to bear on our situation that’s the raw fiber of common sense.

 

The Value of Common Sense  

Common sense is a whole lot more valuable than we might think.  There is something inherently grounded in common sense, something that resonates with the facts and the realities of whatever we’re facing.  It keeps things on track, focused and balanced.  It directs correctly and in a manner that brings relevant solutions that are effective even in seemingly implausible and impossible situations.  Common sense takes the confusion that we tend to create and develops a clarity that sometimes seems too simplistic to be worth anything of real value.  Yet, common sense can have tremendous value.  Re-evaluate your thought processes.  Reconsider the impact of both your own mind and all the sordid messages impressed upon you by the culture.  Get back to the basics and you’ll find that life often has a stunning clarity that was stunningly missed.