Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

Thought for the Day - Christmas #1

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

- Craig D. Lounsbrough

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Six

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more.

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin your own journey of hope.

You will find “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  You can enjoy this thoughtful and inspirational book in paperback, Kindle, Nook, and audio book formats.  It is my hope that this timely, inspirational, and moving novel will become part of your Christmas tradition each and every year.

Enjoy a brief video outlining this uplifting series "Thirty Days of Hope" at https://youtu.be/DiEUIcRm7vo.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Five

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more.

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin your own journey of hope.

You will find “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  You can enjoy this thoughtful and inspirational book in paperback, Kindle, Nook, and audio book formats.  It is my hope that this timely, inspirational, and moving novel will become part of your Christmas tradition each and every year.

Enjoy a brief video outlining this uplifting series "Thirty Days of Hope" at https://youtu.be/DiEUIcRm7vo.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Four

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more.

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin your own journey of hope.

You will find “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  You can enjoy this thoughtful and inspirational book in paperback, Kindle, Nook, and audio book formats.  It is my hope that this timely, inspirational, and moving novel will become part of your Christmas tradition each and every year.

Enjoy a brief video outlining this uplifting series "Thirty Days of Hope" at https://youtu.be/DiEUIcRm7vo.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Three

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more.

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin your own journey of hope.

You will find “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  You can enjoy this thoughtful and inspirational book in paperback, Kindle, Nook, and audio book formats.  It is my hope that this timely, inspirational, and moving novel will become part of your Christmas tradition each and every year.

Enjoy a brief video outlining this uplifting series "Thirty Days of Hope" at https://youtu.be/DiEUIcRm7vo.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day Two

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more.

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin your own journey of hope.

You will find “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  You can enjoy this thoughtful and inspirational book in paperback, Kindle, Nook, and audio book formats.  It is my hope that this timely, inspirational, and moving novel will become part of your Christmas tradition each and every year.

Enjoy a brief video outlining this uplifting series "Thirty Days of Hope" at https://youtu.be/DiEUIcRm7vo.

Thirty Days of Hope - Day One

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more.

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin your own journey of hope.

You will find “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  You can enjoy this thoughtful and inspirational book in paperback, Kindle, Nook, and audio book formats.  It is my hope that this timely, inspirational, and moving novel will become part of your Christmas tradition each and every year.

Enjoy a brief video outlining this uplifting series "Thirty Days of Hope" at https://youtu.be/DiEUIcRm7vo.

Thanksgiving Thoughts - Changing Your Attitude

Welcome to LifeTalk Thanks for joining us for this Thanksgiving Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thought for the Day -Thanksgiving #3

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

- Craig D. Lounsbrough

Thought for the Day - Thanksgiving #2

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

- Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

Being Thankful - Greed or Gratitude

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

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

 

Real and Reorienting Thanksgiving

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

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

 

Thanksgiving as a Pause

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

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

 

Thanksgiving as a Reorientation

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

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

 

Thanksgiving Calls Us Out

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

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

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

 

Resources for Your Holiday Celebrations

Discover an array of holiday resources designed to enhance your celebrations on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books make lasting gifts.  Discover all of his books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

• 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

Thought for Today - Thanksgiving #1

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

- Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

Resources for Your Holiday Celebrations

Discover an array of holiday resources designed to enhance your celebrations on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books make lasting gifts.  Discover all of his books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

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

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

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

 

Resources for Your Holiday Celebrations

Discover an array of holiday resources designed to enhance your celebrations on our website at www.craiglpc.com.  Craig's thoughtful, timely, and inspirational books make lasting gifts.  Discover all of his books at Amazon. com, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  Also, take a moment to explore Craig's Public Speaking Resources for information regarding the resources available to your business, ministry, or organization.

Taking It to Our Knees - Day 10 - The Loss of Hope

Welcome to Day Ten of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.”

Today’s These is “The Loss of Hope”

The Quote for Today Is This:

“Therefore we do not lose heart.  Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.  For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.  So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

• 2 Corinthians 4:16-18

Hope.  Life drains us of it.  It almost seems that life is constantly on the hunt for what little bit of hope we might have left.  And life knows exactly what to do in order to home in on it and destroy it.  That might be a child gone rogue.  An unfaithful spouse.  A boss who’s passed you up for a promotion three different times.  Unexpected debt.  A medical issue that only gets worse the more it gets treated.  Promises broken.  A turn of events that puts a cherished dream forever out of reach…and so on.  Life targets that stuff to target our hope.

The issue is not that we lose hope.  Most often, the issue is based on what we have chosen to hope in.  We hope in many things that we have no business hoping in.  We lean on teetering promises that appeal to some selfish streak in us.  We haphazardly hitch our wagon to something that doesn’t have any horses pulling it.  We fall for brilliantly crafted sales pitches that promise something that they don’t even possess.  We get swept up in the meaningless verbiage of smooth talking people because sixty seconds of fantasy is better than an hour of reality.  We’re desperate for some shred of hope, and so we make choices without a shred of common sense.

It's not that hope doesn’t exist.  It’s that it doesn’t exist in the places that we end up looking for it.  It’s really quite easy.  Our only real hope is in God.  Everything else is a flimsy facsimile that will continue to pretend it’s real long after it’s failed us.

Let’s Pray

Dear God:

I don’t know if I can hope again.  Ever.  There’s just been too much heartbreak and too much disappointment.  The human heart can only take just so much.  There’s that final time when we take what little bit of hope that we have left, we cautiously gather it up, and we invest that hope in something that ends up failing.   I’ve had too many of those.  And so, I don’t know if I can sustain one more disappointment.

I know that You are God.  And I know that Your promises are trustworthy.  I know that there’s no risk in You.  But the trauma of hope broken, and dreams smashed, and relationships destroyed, and betrayal at every turn, and dreams upended, and the bleakness that has now become the essence of my existence…all of that sitting in me makes it hard to trust You.

And so, help me to hope in You.  Help me to take one final shot at hope.  Do not let me walk away from You because if I do, there truly is no hope.

I pray all of this in Jesus’s Name.  Amen.

Here’s a thought to carry with you today:                                                                                                    “The darkness might keep us from seeing the hope around us, but it does not have the power to remove the hope around us.”

Thanks for joining us today on this thirty-day devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” You will find “Taking It to Our Knees” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Also discover our daily inspirational quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, X, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and more.

Have a great day!

Podcast Short: We Are More - Understanding Our Capacity

We Are More - Understanding Our Capacity

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

Additional Resources

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

Podcast Short: Becoming Accountable

Becoming Accountable

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

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

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

 

Additional Resources

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

Day 9 - The Plague of Self-Esteem

Welcome to Day Nine of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.”

Today’s Theme is “The Plague of Low Self-Esteem.”

The Quote for Today Is This:

“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.  I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”

• Psalm 139:13-14

We have difficulty believing that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.”  That’s a hard one sometimes.  We look into the mirror or our decisions, and all that we see are the numerous cracks and spidery fissures in that mirror that speak to the destruction wrought by those decisions.  We glance into the mirror of our achievements, and what stares back at us are a host of failures so numerous that the mirror is packed tight with them.  We peer into the mirror of our relationships only to have no one peering back at us.  And if we wipe the mirror clean of all of that stuff and simply glance at our own reflection, we wish that mirrors were never invented.

We don’t like ourselves a whole lot.  But what we don’t like often goes much deeper than that which any mirror can reflect back to us.  What we don’t like is how people have defined us, or how we let them do that.  We don’t like how they have projected their own issues on us.  How they blamed us for their mistakes so that they didn’t have to face them.  We are left sullen and sad by expectations that we didn’t even come close to meeting because they were designed not to be met.  And in the end, this very convincing definition of ourselves is compiled from a bunch of stuff that is far more a compilation of everyone else who had something to do with us than it was about us.

It's hard to believe that we are more than what we perceive ourselves to be.  It’s difficult to embrace the reality that we are truly made in God’s image.  That stuff doesn’t resonate.  We don’t see that in the mirror, even if we squint and lean into it.  But the greatest truths about us often don’t resonate because we have difficulty believing that we could actually be something so wonderful.

Prayer

Dear God:

Please help me to like me.  Or better yet…help me to love me.  I’m not all that certain about how to do that.  There’s a lot of self-help stuff out there and catchy ideas to help build my self-esteem.  It’s all man-made stuff that never really addresses the heart stuff.

You made me, “fearfully and wonderfully.”  You uniquely designed me.  You intentionally placed me here, at this exact time in history.  There was something very intentional in the way that You did all of that.  You have a purpose and a plan for me that is bigger than anything that I could imagine.  And that purpose and that plan is uniquely gifted to me and me alone.  That’s the truth about me. 

I confess to You that I don’t feel that way…at all.  I just can’t wrap my head around that no matter how hard I try.  All of that’s beyond me.  But I want to believe it.  I want to know that there’s something of great value sitting within me just waiting to be released.  I want to see ‘me’ how You see me, not how others have caused me to see me.  Show me who I am through Your eyes.  Help me to see my reflection in Your mirror.

I pray all of this in Jesus’s Name.  Amen.

Here’s a thought to carry with you today:

“Look in the mirror.  Go ahead and look yet again.  And look not at the reflection, for while this body of yours is marvelously complex in ways that continue to elude the reach of modern science, it is but a simple shell that holds the image of God within you.  And if the shell is that grand, how much more what God has placed inside of it.”

Thanks for joining us today on this thirty-day devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” You will find “Taking It to Our Knees” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Also discover our daily inspirational quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, X, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Tik-Tok and more.

Have a great day!

Podcast Short: Dead-End Roads of Our Making

Dead-End Roads of Our Making

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

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

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

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

 

Additional Resources

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

Podcast Short: Do We Search for the Truth?

Do We Search for the Truth?

Do we search for the truth, or do we search for ways around the truth?  Do we even take the time to consider a question like that out of the long-held assumption that we are, in fact, looking for the truth because (we assume) that that’s the obvious thing to do?  What insanity would behoove us to do anything less?  But do we search for the truth, or do we search for ways around the truth?  Maybe we should consider the fact that there are a whole lot of reasons why we actually might stoop to something less.

Truth be told, the truth may not be what we want it to be.  It may not support our agendas, or our desires.  In fact, it might actually render those things as erroneous and all-together ill-fated.  The truth may not support all of the things that we passionately wish to believe, or have talked ourselves into believing.  Or truth may dare to go so far as to actually call the entirety of those beliefs into question, and call us out for believing in them in the first place.  Do we search for the truth even when it takes the foundations that we’ve laboriously built with the sweat of our brow and the best of our years, and does truth handily expose those foundations as weak, entirely misappropriated, and as nothing more than sand piled in every place except the right place?  Will we search for truth even when it looks us square in the face and tells us this kind of stuff?  Will we search for it knowing that there is a very distinct possibility that it will tell us everything that we don’t want to hear in every way that we don’t want to hear it?  Will we search for truth even then?

I don’t know that we do.  In fact, what we seem to search for the most are ways to circumvent the truth.  Our search does not seem to be ‘for’ the truth, but rather it seems to be far more vested in ways to get ‘around’ the truth.  We would not even begin to label our actions as such because such actions would immediately call the whole of our character into question.  But what we label something does not make it what we’ve labeled it.  Our search seems to be one of committed avoidance.  It is one of intentional evasion, of manufactured detours, of clever deviations that are so slick that we don’t even realize that we deviated.  It’s not that we run from the truth as much as we diligently work to create pathways around it, that in the end, never get us around anything.  I wonder if that’s really more of what we do.

And as such, these evasive endeavors are quite naturally filled with such familiar things as slippery denials, evasive rationalizations, ambiguous justifications, relentless blame-placing, rogue fear-mongering, the incessant spinning of events, the bogus editing of facts, and the mind-boggling contortions where we take reality and make it something other than reality.

But likely the most dangerous of these is the self-endowed liberty that we have granted ourselves to make truth whatever we wish to make it.  Therefore, it’s not about avoidance, because conveniently, that’s no longer necessary.  Rather, it’s about creating, which is avoidance of the most calculated, but ill-fated sort.  It’s about making truth whatever we want it to be.  It’s about making it fit whatever agenda, or belief system, or value system, or platform, or whatever it is that we want it to fit.  If truth will not grant us that which we wish, we will simply edit it until it does.  But in the end, it is no longer truth, and truth be told, we will eventually find that out, and we’ll probably find it out the hard way.

Truth.  Do we search for it, or do we do something else with it?  You might ask yourself, in a truthful kind of way, what you’re doing with it.

“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

• Jesus Christ

Day 8 - Taking It to Our Knees - The Painful Struggle of Infertility

Welcome to Day Eight of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.”

Today’s Theme is “The Painful Struggle of Infertility.”

The quote for today reads this way:

“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten— the great locust and the young locust, the other locusts and the locust swarm— my great army that I sent among you..”

• Joel 2:25

 

What many people are desperate to have are the very things that others recklessly throw away.  What is cherished, intimately longed for, and desperately sought after by so many is discarded by others without so much as a fleeting thought.

Such is the agonizing dilemma of those facing the pain of infertility.  Having squarely set decades of dreams on the immense privilege of having a child, couples find their dreams brought to a jarring and often unexpected halt.  Facing the brutal possibility of being childless, these couples expend massive amounts of time, emotional energy, and personal resources to salvage a dream that seems to slip further away with every attempt to save it.

Wildly gyrating emotions spin off sporadic thoughts of physical or personal inadequacy.  We wonder if this is punishment for some perceived offense that is only now being executed on our passion to hold a child.  Thoughts of injustice as held against the reality that life is unjust.  An uninvited jealousy of other couples who were able to bear children that runs head-long against the very real joy that we have for them.  And then, the brutal thought of those who recklessly abort the very thing that we would give the entirety our lives to hold.  The turmoil is unspeakable.  The pain unfathomable.

Life robs us in many ways.  But God enriches us in every way.  What the world takes, God will restore.  We will never lose anything that God cannot and will not give back to us many times over.  The shape and form of what He gives may not resemble what we lost, but it will provide the healing that we need.  The truth of these statements will never and can never be offset by the depth, intensity, size, or pain of any loss…ever.

 

Prayer

Dear God:

I know that life is full of loss.  It’s all around me and it’s everywhere within me.  In this world, we can’t get away from it.  I know that because I’ve done my level best to do exactly that.  And despite those efforts, it seems like some sort of loss is always lying in wait just around the corner of every dream that I’ve ever had.

But Lord, sometimes the losses are so big, so deep, so life-altering, so unjust, so seemingly impossible to live with…so everything that they should not be that I have a hard time accepting them.  The inability to conceive a child is one of those.  I’m way too human and way too fragile to take the really brutal losses and somehow find a safe or reasonable place for them despite how much I want to do that.

You know life can be brutal.  You’re no stranger to any of that.  You lived it.  You endured it.  You knew it was coming for You from the beginning of creation.  You stepped into this world knowing that it was staring You in the face. 

But knowing that kind of brutality, You said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”   Dear God, fill the hole left by the hope of a child.  I don’t want to play the victim; I want to be the victor. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life pouting; I want to live my days prevailing.  I want to rest on the fact that nothing can be taken from me that You cannot replace many times over in whatever way You decide to do that.  I desperately want to live with that reality, with that hope, and with that peace.

I pray all of this in Jesus’s Name.  Amen.

A Thought to Carry With Me Today

“If I have never had, or worse yet, I have lost the conviction that life (despite all of the blows it wields and the savagery that it spawns) is nonetheless an incalculable privilege, I will have in that single loss forfeited the whole of my life and effectively wiped out any hope that I can or will do anything other than exist.”

Thanks for joining us today on this thirty-day devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” You will find “Taking It to Our Knees” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Also discover our daily inspirational quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, X, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Tik-Tok and more.

Have a great day!

 

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

Thinking It's Over When It's Not

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

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

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

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

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

 

Additional Resources

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

Podcast Short: We Are a Mess

We Are a Mess

We are a mess.  We are a mess because we are a people on a mad rant.  Sadly, we have become blinded to the fact that we are blinded by a host of pathetically self-serving agendas.  And the pathetic nature of these agendas are evidenced by the fact that they are unable to stand up to the slightest scrutiny despite how rigorous our justifications of those agendas might be.  We create a litany of agendas whose basis is indefensible, for any self-serving agenda will always be indefensible.

Therefore, we shut down anyone who wishes to do something as simple as dialogue with us about those agendas.  The simple and potentially enriching exchange of differing ideas and perspectives is viewed as an inexcusably prejudiced and an entirely unwarranted threat.  And such a radicalized stance is based on the insecurities of an agenda that is too weak to entertain anything other than its own indefensible platform.  Therefore, we instantly shut down dialogue in order to side-step the painful reality that the agenda is simply too flimsy and too ill-conceived to be defended.  And the fact that it cannot be responsibly defended calls into question the very legitimacy of the very agenda that has come to define who we are.  For many, this then becomes horribly frightening as it also calls into question the very culture that they are desperately attempting to create that will grant them permission to live out an indefensible agenda. 

The concept of personal rights is exercised to near insanity, resulting in demands for liberties that are far more about license to be what we are not, and to do what we should not.  We have placed the desires of self over an abiding respect of the liberties that give us the ability to express those desires in the first place.  Many in our culture have utilized scare tactics simply because reason cannot support these agendas, therefore it is assumed that fear will press resistant individuals to accept those agendas.  We create paradigms that instantly and rather immediately renders anyone in opposition to these agendas as holding some sort of unacceptable bias or ignorant prejudice or ill-informed option that is immediately ruled as simply and utterly intolerable.  Once these paradigms are forced upon these individuals, they are immediately labeled as the bane of the culture and unworthy of anything but to be deported to the far fringes of the culture where all of the ignorant and uninformed are banished.  All the while, these unsustainable agendas tear at the very fabric of the culture, leaving these individuals entirely unaware that their self-declared and indefensible freedoms will be the destruction of those freedoms.

In it all, we are in desperate need of perspective; of clear, clean, fresh, and undiluted perspective free of bias and wiped clear of agendas.  We are in desperate need of balance long lost.  We are in desperate need of a recalibration that pulls us away from the insanity of a culture gone rogue, to a reality where things such as selflessness, and integrity, and truth, and morality, and sacrifice, and love for all are granted permission to run rogue and live rogue. 

And to do that, we need to be shaken awake and slapped upside the head in order to open our eyes and re-engage a sense of common sense.  We need to have something pull us out of our own heads for a moment in order to understand that ‘our own heads’ will only cause us to ‘head’ in all the wrong directions.  We need something that will blow the walls off of the confining and selfish vision that our agendas hold us hostage to in order to understand our need to be liberated from our tiny agendas in order to help a world that’s held hostage to horrific things that completely shame our tiny agendas.  We need to be broken open, shaken from slumber, rocked out of our mediocrity, shamed by our laziness, humiliated by our greed, thrust out of our complacency, and brought to both our knees and our senses regarding who we’ve become verses who we should and can become.

And to do that, all we have to do is look at the world around us.  All we have to do is to take our heads out of our ‘heads’ and look at the world around us.  At war.  At poverty.  At oppression.  At dictatorial leaders who enslave entire nations in unspeakable bondage.  All that we have to do is to look at disease and those who have no means to fight it.  At children picking through garbage heaps and people sleeping in boxes.  At nations that recklessly invade other nations for reasons that are both pathetic and the stuff of political manipulation and power-mongering.  At rampant crime that pillages the innocent in order to line the pockets of those who are not.  At the hundreds of millions of people for whom an education is an impossible dream and food on the table a fading hope.  Get out of your own head and look around.  And once we do, we must keep looking ‘around until we have chosen to get out of our comfort zones and place our tiny, selfish agendas aside in order to step out into everything that’s ‘around.’  Look around.  Get out of your head and look around.  And then do something other than live to preserve an agenda that can’t stand on its own two legs, for there are seven and a half billion people out there, many of which need help standing on their own two legs.          

 

“…if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

• 2 Chronicles 7:14

Day 7 - Taking It to Our Knees - The Plague of Addictions

Welcome to Day Seven of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.”

Today’s Theme is “The Plague of Addictions.”

 

The Quote for Today Is This:

"Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control."

• Proverbs 25:28

 

Life is filled with pain.  Or maybe more accurately, our lives are engulfed in pain.  We’ve all run into it, or have had it run into us, or have had it run over us.  That pain can be physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual.  It can be a product of the people around us, or the person within us.  It can come to us in the form of circumstances beyond our control, or circumstances that we should have controlled.  We might have had nothing to do with it, or everything to do with it.  In whatever way it comes, pain comes to all of us.

The perpetually debilitating nature of our pain gradually weakens our resolve to fight it.  Our belief that we can somehow beat it dissolves into some sort of mythical fantasy that becomes dimmer with each passing day.  Desperate to have even a moment of relief from the pain that dogs our steps, we turn to self-medication.  Self-medication can take on any number of forms, but the desire to seek relief is what drives them all.  If these methods of self-medication deliver the desired relief, our decision to use them is reinforced.  In time, we can begin to develop a gradually increasing dependency upon them that is far beyond their intended use or actual benefit. 

These means of self-medication soothe our emotional state, grant us a sense of control over our pain, and become so thoroughly integrated into our daily lifestyle that to remove them would cause a disruption in our lives that we perceive as far greater than the disruption of the dependency that we have now created.  We soon discover that the means of self-medication has created its own pain.  And in time that pain replaces the pain that we were originally self-medicating against, leaving us in the perpetually debilitating state that is certain to be our fate if we decide to swap one kind of pain for another in order to somehow remedy our pain.

The longer the dependency, the tighter its grip.  We fear the seemingly insurmountable challenge of breaking the addiction.  This fear is compounded by our concern that what we medicated ourselves against will return in force if we forsake our addiction.  In essence, we are held hostage to a something that numbs but never cures.

 

Prayer

Dear God:

There are things that enslave me.  I am bound by shackles of all kinds.  I know what many of them are and I am tired of every one of them.  But I also know that there are many that I’m not aware of.  There are things that I’ve been bound by for so long that I’ve allowed them to become part of who I am and what I do.  I am tired of the shackles.

And so Lord, whatever it is that binds me, whatever dependency I have that I’ve cultivated or given permission to, whatever the addiction is that I readily admit to or constantly deny…whatever these things are, I am asking You to free me from them.  Free me from them in ways that I thought to be impossible.  You said, “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”  Free me because I do not have the power nor the courage to be any kind of liberator by myself, for I fear that liberation from my addiction may open the door for me to be enslaved by that which I’ve spent my life running from.

The only thing that I want to serve in life is You.  I want to be give the entirety of myself to You and You alone, for in being surrendered to You I am freed from everything and to everything.  Therefore, please take away all of the lesser things that I’ve allowed to enslave me and fill me with everything that will free me.

I pray all of this in Jesus’ Name.  Amen.

 

Here’s a thought to carry with you today:

“What will I do when all of my shackles lay shattered and broken at my feet?  I will reach over and begin breaking the shackles of the person standing next to me.  And I would challenge you to envision a world where we’re all doing that every day.” 

• Craig D. Lounsbrough

 

Thanks for joining us today on this thirty-day devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” You will find “Taking It to Our Knees” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Also discover our daily inspirational quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, X, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Tik-Tok and more.

Have a great day!

Podcast Short: How Do We Look at Time?

How Do We Look at Time?

“Time is the great intimidator, steadily stealing away precious seconds with no pause in the stealing.  And such thievery leads us to believe that in time, the pilfering of these seconds will eventually exhaust all such seconds, leaving us at the ‘end’ of everything.  Yet, God states that the seconds are actually the countdown to the ‘beginning’ of everything.”

How do we look at time?  As a thief?  As something that moves way too fast?  As something that robbed our youth and is eroding our lives with every tick of the clock?  Do we see it as something that there’s never enough of?  Do we see it as something that moves faster the busier that we become, so there’s never any chance that we will ever be able to catch up?  Or, do we see it as something that drags when we’re bored, so much so that we’d gladly forfeit the time just to get out of the boredom?  If we’re tired of life, or frustrated with our circumstances, or if we just don’t care anymore, do we wish that time didn’t exist in the first place so that we’d be free of whatever it is that we want to be free of?  How do we look at time?

But is it possible that time is a resource?  And in the expending of that resource (that we call time) is it possible that we can invest in something that we never really thought of?  Something that we never really considered?  Is the trade-off expending time that we can’t get back, for something that we can?  Are we investing in something that can change a life, or alter the trajectory of a marriage gone sideways, or bring healing to someone who’s wounded, or give a bit of light to someone who’s living out their life in nothing but darkness?  Is time a resource (when used wisely) can shape a community, touch a nation, or change the world?  And more profoundly than all of that, is it something that God has given us to use now that it can have an eternal impact that is not bound by time at all?  Is time the thing that we use to bring people to a God Who’s deepest desire is to ultimately bring all of those people to a place called “eternity” where there is no time? 

If we use our time to achieve things like this, the passing of time and the loss of that time in the passing is infinitely offset by the good that came out of that time.  No, we can’t get time back.  No, it’s not a renewable resource.  When it’s gone, it’s gone.  But what if the expenditure was offset by the good that came out of that time?  What about that?  And what if that expenditure touches a life for an eternity of time?  I would think that that is time well spent, and I would think that it makes the time we have the place from which we change things for all of time.

Day 6 - Taking It to Our Knees - Discovering My Purpose

Welcome to Day Six of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.”

Today’s Theme is “Discovering My Purpose.”

 

The Quote for Today Is This:

“Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails..”

• Proverbs 19:21

 

Purpose.  Without it, life has no meaning.  Without it, life is empty.  We can liberally pour all kinds of questionable things into our lives every day of our lives, but without purpose the emptiness remains despite the pouring.  In fact, pour in the wrong stuff and the emptiness becomes more empty.

We are all created with an innate need for purpose that will not relent.  A sense that we matter.  A belief that in the chaos of life we have a purpose in the chaos.  A conviction that we are here because to ‘not’ be here is an unacceptable option.  A deep sense that we were created because not to be created was too great a mistake.

Many can argue that life is random and happenstance.  Yet, that argument itself is neither random nor happenstance, which turns that argument back on itself.  The reality is that the core needs of our shared humanity don’t resonate with such a perspective.  Such an argument makes our existence accidental.  And such randomness strips us of any value, or purpose, or calling, or whatever it is that we might choose to call it.

We need a purpose.  Not just something that we do, but something that we were created to do.  Not a reason that we create for our existence, but the reason for which we were created.  We need something that identifies who we are, the place that we are to occupy during this time in history into which we’ve been both called and inserted, and the impact that we’re supposed to have while doing all of that.

Purpose is the great “why” as to our existence.  It’s the pristine goal, our truest north, our destination in a world that is always changing its destination based on preference, current trends, and flawed ideologies.  You have a purpose that is uniquely yours.  Yours for the taking.  Yours for the living.

 

Prayer

Dear God:

I wander…way too much.  I live thinking that just living is the purpose of it all.  What I’ve missed is that living is the thing that I do while I’m pursuing my purpose.  My purpose makes living purposeful.  Dear God, I don’t know that I know what my purpose is, at least with any kind of specificity.  However, You do.

I know that You created me “for such a time as this.”  And I know that I came into all of this as a marvelously complete package.  Dear God, You are wildly ingenious.  And I know You were brilliant enough to place within me everything that I need to be in order to do everything that You created me to do.  I am complete, and I claim that right now.

I confess to You that I don’t see all of that, and most times I don’t believe it either.  But You know that I want to believe it.  Yet more than that, I want to act on it.  I don’t want to miss anything that You’ve created me to be, or anything that You created me to do.  I want to be the sum total of everything that I am, and everything that I am purposed to do.  So, help me find my purpose, help me to fall in love with it, and then help me to pursue it for the rest of my life.

I pray all of this in Jesus’ Name.  Amen.

 

Here’s a thought to carry with you today:

“Right now I am making the choice to live out this day choosing to be intentional about not being unintentional.”

• Craig D. Lounsbrough

 

Thanks for joining us today on this thirty-day devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” You will find “Taking It to Our Knees” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Also discover our daily inspirational quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, X, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and more.

Have a great day!

Podcast Short: Beating the Herd Mentality - Living With Our Eyes Open

We hear a lot of things.  A whole lot of things.  We’re incessantly bombarded with sheets and shards and streams of information.  It’s about bits and bytes and boatloads of data that we ingest and digest without even realizing that we’re doing that.  Either consciously or unconsciously we compile all of that sordid stuff into some sort of choppy mosaic about the life around us and the world within us.  And as insidiously dangerous as it is, in time this rather indistinct and somewhat dubious mosaic becomes our reality.  In essence, it becomes our existence.

It seems that we tend to be busy about a whole lot of nothing.  We can meticulously tally the tasks of the day only to be inordinately perplexed that for some reason the sum total doesn’t come anywhere close to reflecting the sum total of everything that we expended in accomplishing those things.  So consumed are we in the tasks of ‘nothing’ that we don’t have time to think about ‘something’.  Therefore, we have irreparably fallen in love with plug-and-play and pre-fab.  We like things pre-packaged, prepared, and predetermined.  We’re looking for answers that were already ingested, digested and reflexively regurgitated for our reflexive consumption by whatever source we happen to have happened upon.  In essence, we don’t think.  And in fact, there are few things as dangerous as that.    

We’re going to ingest a whole lot of something.  That’s inevitable.  And if that ‘something’ shapes us with that much force, we might be wise to ask what that ‘something’ is. 

We live in a world roiling with bias and flushed murky with politically-correct agendas.  We have splintering splinter groups proffering philosophies of every shape and sort.  We’ve got the thematic propagation of ‘diversity’ that’s more about a permission to be permissive.  Too often it’s about the ‘spin to win’.  It’s less about truth and it’s more about triumph.  It’s about the resolute and rather gritty proliferation of the agenda to the degree that truth becomes the agenda and the agenda becomes the truth.  Therefore, truth becomes negotiable and pliable in a forced and placating servitude to an onslaught of dubious agendas.  However, truth in the service of an agenda becomes opinion.  And too often opinion is bias off the leash and running wild.

So, we need to listen for a change.  We need to question…aggressively and responsibly.  We need to ruthlessly investigate and corroborate.  We need to quit being complacent consumers and become invested investigators.  We need to use truth as a steeled template, not as a fluffy convenience.  We need to bring the sturdy compass of ethics to point out the true north in every decision whether that true north is to our liking or not.  We don’t need to be worldly wise, for that’s an oxymoron of the most deceptive kind.  Rather, we need to be wise in the ways of God and life.  We need to be sufficiently stubborn to reject the pabulum of the masses, yet pliable enough to hear the beating hearts underneath the pabulum.  We need to be bold and brazen in a manner stitched tight by wisdom and lent compelling by reason.  We need to be beacons of light knowing that the crowd is apt to label us as sorely antiquated and ridiculously ill-informed.  We need to listen in the bravest form imaginable.    

It would behoove us to remember that to live passively is to live dangerously.  To live inquisitively is to live wisely.  To live boldly is to live robustly.  And to live our lives based on timeless principles is to honor God rather than worship everything else that pretends to be God.  May we choose to abandon the former and judiciously embrace all of the latter.  

“Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.”

• Ephesians 5:15-16

Podcast Short: There Is No God - Evidence

There Is No God - Evidence

There is no God.  It’s not an unfamiliar statement.  In fact, it permeates much of our modern thinking, which begs the question if our modern thinking is really either ‘modern’ or ‘thinking.’

I think that the mentality that ‘there is no God’ is centered primarily on the fact that we don’t want a God.  Therefore, out of convenience, we simply declare that there is none, for we fear that the experiences that we crave will be snatched from us, the pleasures that we wish to indulge in will be made taboo, that we will somehow be punished if things feel too good, and that this doting judge-like figure will frown on most everything that makes us happy.  So, we decide that we don’t want a God.  And subsequently, we declare that there is no God.

Subsequently, we then become our own gods, for the absence of a God does not eliminate our need of one.  So, we fill the role.  But because we demanded that we be these little gods and become the captain of our own ships, sunken ships litter the seas of our lives and they lay strewn across the endless shoals and windswept beaches as far as the eye can see.  Because we want to be our own gods, wreckage is everywhere.  Everywhere. 

And because the validity of our god-hood is thrown into question by the repeated occurrence of such disasters, we shake our fists and we declare that there must be no God because He would not have allowed tragedies of this magnitude to happen.  How could a loving God permit so much carnage?  We ask how a compassionate God could stand by and consent to devastation and destruction of this magnitude.  Clearly then, our hypothesis that ‘there is no God’ is supported by the shipwrecks, when what we’re really proving is that we are no god.

So really, the issue is ‘not’ that there is no God.  The issue is that we are trying to be god, and that we don’t do it all that well.  In fact, we are reaping the consequences in monumental ways.  And if we are enraged by the shipwrecks made up of missed opportunities, broken marriages, fractured families, financial destitution, crushed dreams, hopes gone hopeless, friendships aborted, a culture in demise, losses without number, and so much more, it is ourselves to whom we must be enraged.  For we said, there is no God, and we presumed the power, and the wisdom, and the intelligence, and the discernment to take the place of the God that we said didn’t exist.  And if we are actually going to do that, we also have to assume the consequences of that choice. 

Therefore, maybe the greatest evidence ‘for’ God is the destruction that we have caused in claiming to be god.  Maybe the thing that we should be looking at is the failure of mankind to be his own god and the captain of his own ship.  For if you look around you today, all that we have done is to sink those ships.  And we’ve sunk thousands of them.  We’ve sunk opportunities, marriages, families, finances, dreams, hopes, friendships, and a entire culture.  And does not the evidence ‘for’ God shout from every shattered hull and every broken bow.  There is no God, we say.  But doesn’t the evidence of our attempts to be god suggest the existence of the very thing that we deny?  Does not what we have done evidence the God that we say doesn’t exist?  Maybe we want to think about that before we sink any other ships.

“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”

Psalm 14:1

Podcast Short: Fear - How We Create It

Fear – How We Create It

Fear.  We all have it.  Sometimes it’s just this slight apprehension, or this bit of inner angst, or this uncomfortable twinge that we experience.  At other times it’s utterly overwhelming, leaving us helplessly paralyzed and violently shaken right down to the core of everything that we are.  At certain times and in certain situations, fear seems to stalk us.  It seems to relentlessly circle us, waiting for some opportunity to pounce on what little bit of sanity and what tiny shred of hope we have left.  Fear.  It can be brutal.  And we all have it.

In grappling with fear, we might ask ourselves how many times have our choices set the stage for the fear that we’re experiencing?  How many times have our choices, in fact, resulted in the very actions that created the very things that we fear?  How many times have our choices presented opportunities for fear to find some space in our lives, or increased our susceptibility to what we already fear, or made what we fear bigger than what it already is?  How many times has our fear been a product of our choices? 

And in contemplating these thoughts, we might ask two very profound, yet very fundamental questions.  First, where am I walking?  And second, who am I walking with?  Where am I walking in life, and who am I walking with?

First, where do we walk?  What kind of places are we walking in anyway?  In good places?  In the wisest of places?  Are we walking in the places that everyone else is walking in simple because everyone else in walking in them?  Are we walking in the kinds of places that are trendy now, but will likely fall out of favor as quickly as they fell into favor?  Are we walking in places where we can fly under the radar, because in today’s cultural climate we’re frequently too afraid to be on anyone’s radar?  Are we walking in places that have thrown ethics to the wind, so that we find our life’s a journey where we’re always walking into the wind?  Have we chosen the places where we’re walking based on some politically-correct notion, or some vogue philosophy, or some fleeting agenda that’s not grounded in much of anything other than not being grounded?  

We can walk in all kinds of places.  Some are places that are good to be in.  Others are not.  Some will strengthen us in preparation for the next place, and others will keep us from getting to the next place at all.  Some are wise and others are foolish, even though those walking in foolish places claim those places to be wise indeed.  However, the question remains, where do we walk…because our fear often arises from the very places where we’ve chosen to walk.  Therefore, have we chosen wisely?

Second, who are we walking with?  What kind of companions have we chosen?  What kind of people are walking along with us?  Are they for us?  Are they against us?  Or are they altogether apathetic about us?  Do they care are about us, or are we largely irrelevant to them?  Is the journey viewed as a joint venture, or have they declared (either silently or not so silently) that it’s “every man is for himself?”  Is it about the destination, or is it about a partnership in the journey to the destination?  Can we count on them, or can we count on not counting on them?  Who are we walking with, because our fear often arises from the people we’ve chosen to walk with.

Where am I walking, and who am I walking with?  Have we chosen the right places and the right people?  Or do we look around us and realize that we’re in all the wrong places with all the wrong people.  Or maybe we’re in all the wrong places without any people at all.  Or maybe we’re not even certain as to exactly what place we’re in or who’s in whatever place this happens to be.  In other words, we’re lost.  Really lost.  And there’s a good chance that we’ve been lost for a long, long time.  A really long time.  So long in fact that we wonder if we can ever be found, and that creates a lot of fear all by itself.

Where am I walking, and who am I walking with?  You might want to think about that, because those might be the very questions that you need to ask in light of the very fears that you are grappling with.  It’s likely that your choices generated a lot of your fears.  And so maybe you need to walk in an entirely different place, and you need to walk that ‘different place’ with the God Who is never the wrong person.

 

“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”

Psalm 23:4

Day 5 - The Agonizing Tragedy of Suicide

Welcome to Day Five of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.”

Today’s Theme is “The Agonizing Tragedy of Suicide.”

 

The Quote for Today Is This:

“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?  You are not your own; you were bought at a price.  Therefore honor God with your body.

• I Corinthians 6:19-20

 

Life is precious. Therefore, the loss of it goes deep. There are losses that are a natural part of our existence. They hurt, but at least they make sense. But then there are the losses that don’t make sense. The losses that didn’t need to happen. The losses that were premature, unnecessary, avoidable, and entirely out of step with life as we know it (or would like to know it).

Suicide is one of these. This loss was a choice. In all likelihood it involved the convergence of many things dark and weighty; hopelessness, despair, life gone wrong, self-hatred, incessant failures, the inability to find a niche, dreams smashed, relationships lost, faith gone. And the pressing compilation of such things tips the scales and renders death preferable to life. At some point of darkest desperation, a decision is made and an action is taken. And suddenly we are left with a loss that doesn’t make sense.  A loss that didn’t need to happen. A loss that was premature and unnecessary.  A loss that doesn’t fit because it shouldn’t. And despite our best effort to understand it all, resolution eludes us and people continue to die.

And all of those who live out their lives in those places are eventually left asking the question of “why?” But maybe we need to replace the question of “why” with the question of “how” because that question holds the answers to what we need to change in our lives, our families, our communities, and our nation to save the next life.

 

Prayer

Dear God:

Yes, I want to heal from those I’ve lost through suicide.  But I don’t want to heal so much that I forget the desperation that can cause a human being to forsake the privilege of living.  I want to be sensitive to how difficult life can be and how fragile all of us can become, including myself.

Help me to hate it when the gift of life is snacked away at the hands of the very one to whom this gift was given.  But more than that, help me to love the person so much, and to see the value in the life that they lived that they never become identified by the choice that they made.  Rather, might they always be identified by the person that they were.

Today, right now, there are many, many people who are weighing out the value of their lives as held against the suffering in their lives.  And in the weighing, they are finding little reason to live.  Remind them that they are made in Your image, and that such an image is something at which to marvel.

And so, I ask You to crush the dark voices within these people.  In their place, I ask You to speak into their lives an equally formidable sense of their worth, their value, and their immense potential.  I am asking You to create a compelling feeling of self-love within them, a surging passion for life that won’t be denied, an electrifying vision for their existence, and a belief that they have a place that no one can fill but them.

I pray all of this in Jesus’ Name.  Amen.

 

Here’s a thought to carry with you today:

“Although the limb fell to the weight of winter’s snow, the tree did not. And as I deal with my losses, I work to remember that I may lose a limb, but a limb is never a tree.”

• Craig D. Lounsbrough

Thanks for joining us today on this thirty-day devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” You will find “Taking It to Our Knees” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Also discover our daily inspirational quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, X, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Tik-Tok and more.

Have a great day!

Podcast Short: Repentance - Reconfigured Standards

Repentance

Reconfigured Standards

We all have standards, even if our standard is not to have one.  We all live by something, even if it’s the denial of that ‘something.’  There’s some sort of inherent code that creates a framework that provides direction to our actions.  There’s a paradigm that we all work within.  Call it genetics, call it cultural, call it greed, call it fear, call it upbringing, call it faith, call it whatever you want…but we all have standards shaped by something.  We each have them.

But the thing that shapes them the most is us.  We want standards because we’re supposed to have them, or they were inbred within us, or we just picked them up growing up, or whatever the case might be.  But we want standards of convenience.  We want standards that are fluidly permissive and that grant us ample free reign to do what we want when we want.  We want standards that won’t hold us back if we hold them up.  At times, we want standards that give us permission to do what, in fact, standards tell us not to do.  We want standards that are standards in name only.  We want standards so that we can say to others and to ourselves that we are people of standards…when, in fact, the standard is not to have one.

And to pull all of that off, we tediously and rather ingeniously reconfigure our standards to the point that they’re not quite empty, but pretty much empty.  They have a slight hint of ethics or morals or principles or values hidden away somewhere within them.   But that slight hint is left there solely as a means of granting those standards a soothing illusion of legitimacy.  But they are not left there as something to which the standard adheres.  And then we intricately weave these largely empty standards into our lives just enough to provide the illusion that we are indeed people of standards.  We make them sufficiently legitimate to look the part.  We make them tolerable.  We make them doable.  We take the ‘standard’ out of the standard, but we leave them with the name.  And in the end, we are utterly fooled into believing that we are people who live by standards.  That we are people of principle.  That we walk the hard road of integrity.  That we live right.  That we stand for all that is good and just.

But we are not.  We are people living a distortion of what we say we’re living.  And that is utterly heart-breaking.  If we honestly face that reality, it’s nothing short of catastrophic.  It’s a shock to our system.  It’s a blow to everything that we’ve built.  It’s a pill that’s far, far too big to swallow.  It’s a reality check that upends this incredibly fragile and permissive narrative that we’ve built the entirety of our lives on. 

And it is in the acceptance of this painful and often devastating truth that repentance is born.  This is where we stand before all of the good that we thought we were, and we recognize that this ‘good’ is a myth convincingly spun by this horribly comprised standard that we fashioned.  Repentance is a stark realization and a horribly jarring awakening that we’re living a life of reconfigured standards that are not standards at all.  Repentance is a hard and terribly frank look at the flimsy narrative that we created to grant us permission to live a fluidly permissive life of self-serving, dark, and personally destructive agendas.  Life is full of this stuff.  They’re everywhere in every place.  These permeate everything, including you and including me.

Repentance is acknowledging these behaviors, and then rejecting these behaviors as destructive for us and everything around us.  It’s confessing the destruction we’ve brought on ourselves and everyone around us, and it’s repenting of such an inexcusable and wholly squandered life in a manner so comprehensive that no moment, from this one forward, will ever be squandered again. 

And once we’ve cleared the house of all of that stuff, repentance is being sufficiently bold to ask what the great standard is.  The final standard.  The ultimate standard.  The real standard.  That standard that will stand no matter what.  The standard that will stand upon, against, and over every other standard.  What is it, where is it, how do I draw it into every shred of my being, and how do I live by it in a manner entirely uncompromised?  Repentance is uncompromisingly abandoning every reconfigured standard that we ever created and embracing the only standard that will outlive every other standard.  Ever.  And that is repentance. 

And so where are those kinds of standards.  Those are the standards that God, and only God, can create.  Therefore, it is God to whom we should repent, for He holds the only standards worth dying for and living out.  He holds the only standards that will still be standards when all other standards have long fallen away.  He holds the great standards, the final standards, the ultimate standards, the real standards.  That’s where they are.  In fact, that’s the only place that they are.  Repentance.  Abandon your reconfigured standards and seize God’s eternal standards.  That’s what will save you.  That’s what will bless you.  That’s what will transform you.

“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

2 Corinthians 7:14

Day Four - Wresting With the Discouragement of Failure

Welcome to Day Four of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.”

Today’s Theme is “Wrestling With the Discouragement of Failure.”

 

The Quote for Today Is This:

“…for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.’”

• Romans 3:23

Failure.  It’s having set out to do something, or not do something, and having failed to achieve the goal either way.  It’s falling short.  It’s having missed the mark, or having pulled out of the race long before we came anywhere close to the mark.  It’s the dream that we couldn’t breathe life into, or the fear that we couldn’t breathe the life out of.  It’s the relationship that we couldn’t hold because we were not worth being held.  It’s the thing that puts us in our place because we foolishly thought that we might be better than that place.  It’s falling down and finding no reason to get back up.

Failure is a stark message regarding our ability or lack thereof.  It is the undeniable evidence of what we feared might be true, that we are in fact inadequate or incompetent or whatever we feared that we might be.  It reminds us of our misdirected efforts to elevate our place in life, and it assigns us the very station that we worked so hard to avoid.  It tells us that our dreams are bigger than our ability to achieve them.  That mediocrity is our lot in life, so we’d be wise to settle there and at least do that well.

But we forget that failure is the refusal to try.  Trying and not succeeding is the very place where God has placed the richest cache of learning opportunities available to us.  It’s a chance to try again, but to try differently.  It’s an opportunity to become everything that failure says we cannot become because it is failure itself that has taught us how to outflank it.  Falling short, missing the mark, or pulling out of the race are nothing more than events packed rich with learning opportunities that set the stage for greater things…possibly great things.  It is not the fact that these things happened.  It is what we do with the fact that they happened.  And if we seize the opportunities for growth that God has graciously planted within each of these, failure will fall to a life rich with success.

“Failure is the prerequisite to success, not the elimination of it.”

• Craig D. Lounsbrough

 

Prayer

Dear God:

I know that failure is the lie told by men without vision.  For I know that You have placed growth opportunities in everything.  And I pray that I can be wise enough to seek them out until I find them, learn from them until I know their lessons well, and then apply them until I have forcefully drawn every morsel of growth out of them.

My failures are many.  Many.  And maybe the most painful ones are those that I walked away from without harvesting the bountiful lessons that You had embedded within them.  I confess that I have failed here.  But where I have probably failed the most is believing that You will never fail me.  Despite the fact that I’ve given far less than I should, that I’ve compromised my values in order to bypass the work involved in defending them, that I’ve chosen the easy road which never runs to You, and that I’ve betrayed others including You in order to advance myself…if I have failed You, it is here.

But it is not my failures that are Your focus.  It is my redemption.  It is my pursuit of You that is enlivened by Your pursuit of me.  It is your relentless commitment to salvaging what I’ve made of my life, and then constructing something wildly phenomenal out the wreckage.  Despite it all, You’ve never failed me.  Not once.  Not ever.  May I become what You are.  May I become faithful, trustworthy, ever reliable, and always obedient.  “Help me overcome my unbelief,” so that I might be empowered to do these things so that I will never fail at doing great things.

In pray all of this in Jesus’ Name.  Amen.

 

A Thought to Carry With Me Today

“Failure is opportunity.  As such, I am never surrounded by a bunch of failures.  Rather, I am engulfed by a mass of opportunity.” 

Podcast Short: Change - It Begins With Us

Change - It Begins With Us

Change.  It’s needed for sure…just look around.  But if our posture is to wait for someone else to create the change that we’re waiting for, we’re probably going to just keep right on waiting.

As a part of my own processing in trying to understand what change is, and how ‘real’ change is caused, I wrote this:

“Change. It's needed, but maybe not in the way that we think it's needed.  It seems that we need to be thoughtful about the values that we've embraced because of the ethics that we've discarded.  We need to challenge the apathy that we've fallen into because of the convictions that we've fallen out of.  Make no mistake about it, the collapse of the world around us began with the darkening of the souls within us.  Therefore, it's not about changing a nation that's in turmoil out there.  It's about changing a soul that's gone dark in here.”

Change begins with us.  With you and with me.  It begins here…right here.  The kind of change that we need…that we want, isn’t going to come from ‘out there.’  It’s going to come from everyday people like you and like me who decide to be different, to act different, to think different, and to live different.  It’s the impact of the single human being touching the lives of other single human beings in the process of living out our lives as human beings.  It’s how we celebrate with others when all is good, and how we lift them up when it’s not.  It’s determining that if we’re going to live out this life, we’re going to live it out so that when our days come to end, whatever’s left after we’re gone is better than whatever it was when we first showed up.  It’s about deciding to ‘be’ the person to other people that we want them to ‘be’ to us, and not waiting for them to ‘be’ that to us first.

It’s about asking if we’ve let our values slip.  If we’ve abandoned some ethics that we shouldn’t have abandoned.  If the principles by which we should be living have been lost because we got caught up in the flood of people, who themselves are lost.  It’s about asking if we’ve let our character be less than what it should be (or less than what we really want it to be).  If we’ve compromised standards, or become apathetic, or given the circumstances around us the power to make us jaded and negative and ultimately toxic to ourselves and to everyone around us.  It’s asking if we’ve let the deterioration of the culture define us, instead of us working to define the culture and turn back the deterioration.  Have we become what we hate and therefore we hate what we’ve become, so we’re stuck in what we’ve become (but not what we are).

And in all of that, it’s recognizing that we don’t need to be any of that, or do any of that.  We can be different.  We can set ourselves apart from a culture that’s tearing itself apart.  We can be an agent of change.  It is within us to do that.  And in choosing to be different in order to bring change, we cause those around us to be different as well, which can change everything.

Change.  It’s needed for sure.  But let’s quit waiting on someone else to do it.

Podcast Short: What Are We Focusing On?

What Are We Focusing On?

We can be very focused people.  We can decide that there is something that we want to do, or not do, or get, or not get, or complete, or not complete, or argue, or not argue, or whatever it is that we want to focus on.  Indeed, we can be very focused people.  In fact, we can be focused to the point of being quite stubborn about whatever it is that we’re focusing on.

The issue is not about being focused, as that’s simply part of our nature.  The issue is what we’re focusing on.  What has captured our attention?  What has challenged us, or captivated us, or made us angry, or riled us up and incited us to some kind of action, whatever that action might be?  What is it that we have latched onto, or what is it that has latched on to us?  What is it that’s seized the whole of our imagination and inspired us to throw off all caution, step up and run after dreams of the most magnificent sort?  Or, at the other end of that spectrum, what’s frightened us to the point that we’ve turned away from our dreams, fled in utter panic, and rushed off to hide ourselves in whatever place we feel has afforded us a safe place to hide?  What are we focusing on?

Whatever it is that we’ve given ourselves over to and focused all of our energies on, it’s typically something that we don’t have.  Whatever it is, it’s something that we’re ‘not’ in possession of.  It’s something that’s eluded us, possibly over and over and over.  Or something that’s teasing us because we can’t quite get our hands on it.  It might be something that we’ve got pieces and parts of, but we can’t quite get enough of it to have the whole of whatever it is.  It could be that critical and absolutely essential next step in a career, or something that’s just enough of whatever it is to nudge our position in our social group to that next cherished and sought after level.  It could be that one thing that will give us the financial prowess that we yearn for, or that bit of power that will allow us to leverage ourselves to some ascended position, or that one last resource that will, once and for all, liberate us from the grind of the daily grind.

But whatever it is that we’re focusing on, it’s something that we don’t have.  It’s something that we don’t possess.  It’s something that’s not in our grasp, or our control, or our bank account, or in our collection of successes and accomplishments that finally defines us in a way that we feel we are worth being defined as.  Whatever it is, it’s something that we don’t have.  And that’s something to think about.

That means that, quite frankly, we’re not focusing on what we ‘do’ have.  What we do have falls into irrelevance because it’s not what we don’t have.  It appears that part of the value of what we have (possibly the greater part) is more about achieving it and less about possessing it.  Somehow its value seems to get diminished by the sheer acquisition of it.  And so we press it aside in the famished pursuit of the next thing, when what we possess is the very thing that’s allowed us to pursue the next thing.  We lose the appreciation of all of the resources that we have as we immerse ourselves in the race for what we don’t have.  We sit amidst all of the resources that nurture us, protect us, feed us, grant us rest when we need it, give us needed refuge when the day has battered us, and solace when the world around us is too loud and overly demanding.  And we end up focusing on everything but that.  We focus on what we don’t have, and in doing so, we abuse and neglect what we do have.

And so, maybe you should take moment and ask what am I focusing on?  What has my attention?  Where are my energies being directed?  But more importantly than all of that, maybe you should think about what you’re ‘not’ focusing on?  For that is going to be far more telling. 

“Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do.  I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain.’  And I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of grain laid up for many years.  Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.’  But God said to him, ‘You fool!  This very night your life will be demanded from you.  Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’  This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”

• Luke 12:18-21

Podcast Short: We Reap What We Sow

We Reap What We Sow

We reap what we sow.  In other words, what we do is never free of an outcome that will be shaped by what we do.  The ‘cause-and-effect’ of life is such that what we do will always cause an outcome that is fashioned directly by what we do.  Despite the fact that we often think (or would prefer to think) that what we do is somehow isolated to the action or the choice itself, by doing something we have, in fact, set the stage for a future outcome that will reflect whatever the action or choice was that we made.  We reap what we sow.  And that is an immovable reality.

And if we look around us, what we see today will tell us, quite clearly, the stuff that we sowed yesterday.  The events of today grew out of the choices of yesterday.  We can complain about the world today.  We can bemoan our lot in life, or we can find ourselves becoming deeply hopeless and darkly dismayed about the state of our culture.  We can grieve deeply over tragedies that seem to befall us at every turn and that leave us drowning in an agony so consuming that we don’t have time to heal before the next one befalls us.  We can be utterly stunned at the nature of events and the course of the culture, having believed that such things were leagues beyond the scope of reality…but here they are.  The headlines are strewn with news so dark that it sometimes seems nearly apocalyptic and we sit teetering on some abyss that our choices delivered us to.  But does not our surprise reveal our ignorance, because the fact of the matter is, we reap what we sow.

Have we been so oblivious as to somehow think that this would not be the case?  And are we so adamant about wanting to preserve our so-called ‘rights’ to engage in whatever destructive behavior that we choose to engage in that we altogether deny the cause-and-effect of those choices?  Will we pretend that we are somehow above such an immovable reality.  Will we delude ourselves with the belief that we have license do whatever we want, and that we somehow have obtained the power to grant ourselves a free pass from the consequences of doing what we want?  Are we foolish enough to believe that we can indulge in the most rogue and base passions imaginable, and do so in some sort of perfect isolation? 

Or do we actually accept the fact that we will reap what we sow, but that in time what we reap will somehow magically become better, despite the fact that it was, and will continue to be sown from the same exact stuff from which we’ve reaped the bad stuff?  Or have we been sufficiently fooled by those who would declare that what we’ve reaped was actually that of others who have liberally sown our cherished and rather admirable efforts with toxic seeds designed to undermine our efforts, and it is their seeds which we have reaped?  Let’s not be fooled, for we’ve been fooled for far too long already.  We reap what we sow. 

And so maybe we should look at what we’re sowing.  Honestly.  Frankly.  With great pause and even greater thought.  And maybe we should think about what the things that we’re sowing are going to result in.  And maybe we need to refuse to live in denial of that painful and frequently disappointing reality.  Maybe we should understand that while we might like to believe that we will reap something good from compromised seeds, that that is not the case, nor will it ever be despite how much sowing we might do.  And maybe, just maybe we should start sowing something different.  Something very different.  Something radically different.  Maybe it’s time for a change of seeds, a real change, an honest change.  Maybe it’s time to sow something better because we cannot afford to continue to reap things that are this bad.

“A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”

• Galatians 6:7-9

Podcast Short: Better or Worse?

Better or Worse?

Will the choice that you’re about to make, make you better or worse?  Will it improve your life, or diminish your life?  The fact of the matter is, it’s going to do one or the other.  And because it is, it’s worth asking the question, will it make me better or worse?

But that question itself can be clouded by a whole lot of things.  First, there can be people telling us that the choice that we are about to make will, in fact, make us better.  They will look at us square in the face and say that without a doubt, this decision will improve our lives.  And these people can put forth all kinds of reasons as to why it’s absolutely certain to do that.  But do we see that kind of growth in their lives, or do we just hear that in their words?  Are we hearing real life principles and sound values and a truly refined wisdom, or are we listening to flimsy agendas and self-proclaimed platforms and substance-less statements dressed in the finery of something that they are not?  Will these choices make us better or worse?

Second, the question of whether a choice is going to make things better or worse can also be clouded by whatever is vogue or trending.  We want to be in step with the culture around us so as to not look the fool, or the ill-informed, or worse yet, the rebel.  And it is assumed that if we are in step with the culture, and if we align these choices with whatever is currently trending, these choices are certain to make us better.  They will improve our lives.  And while the likelihood is that any improvement will be superficial and fleeting at best, they will only serve us until that which is vogue is no longer vogue, and that which is trendy is now outdated and a burden to whatever has now been proclaimed as new and cutting-edge.  The question then remains…will these choices make us better or worse?

Thirdly, the question of whether a choice will make us better or worse is also clouded by our own greed and short-sightedness.  We ask ourselves questions of what a decision will get us, and not so much if the decision is right regardless of what it gets us.  We ask if our choices will position us nicely in whatever way that we want to be positioned, rather than asking how the decision positions us relative to sound principles and a set of morals to which we too often turn a blind eye.  We ask how it will make us look to those around us whom we wish to impress, rather than ask how it will make us look once time has peeled away everything that is false and less than admirable, all of which will eventually reveal the true nature of our choices.  And the question remains…will these choices make us better or worse?

Will the choices in front of us make us better or worse?  Will they improve our lives, or diminish our lives?  That depends on who and what is informing those decisions.  Is it people with questionable agendas, or is it a culture trending on a rogue wave of self-gratification, or is it our own lack of thoughtfulness and integrity?  Whatever it might be, we might ask who and/or what is informing our decisions?  And how much are they clouding that decision to the point that we will be set up to pay a potentially unimaginable price in making it…for we have all paid such prices before and we would be the fool to pay them again.  For the wrong information, and the wrong motives, and the wrong value system will leave you on the wrong side of every choice, and choices that leave you on the wrong side never make your life better.

Will the choices in front of us make us better or worse?  And if Godly principles and Biblical values are not providing the guiding function for those choices, we are doomed to live out a life of ‘worse.’

“Listen to advice and accept discipline, and at the end you will be counted among the wise.  Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.”

• Proverbs 19:20-21

Day Three - Taking Jesus to a Gender Confused Culture

Welcome to Day Three of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.”

Today’s Theme is “Being Jesus to a Gender Confused Culture”

 

The Quote for Today Is This:

“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”

• Psalm 139:14

One of the worst things is not knowing who you are.  And probably a close second to that is to hate what you do know.  And right behind that there’s the effort to create something that you think you’ll like in order to solve both of those problems.

But all of this misses the only battle that’s worth fighting, and the only effort that will insure success.  Life is not about creating ourselves.  Rather, it’s about discovering ourselves.  It’s not about assuming some presumed right to make ourselves what we’re not.  Rather, it’s about the privilege of discovering who we already are.  And that journey is one of the most profound journeys that we are each privileged to take.

Yet we live in a world bent on creating what cannot be created.  Certainly, we can mimic many things, but the mimicking will never make us those things.  We stand by and watch those committed to becoming what they are not, realizing that the greatest pain experienced by these persons is not the struggle of loving themselves.  Rather, it’s the heartbreaking failure that they will experience in the persistent effort to make themselves what they are not.  And the self-hatred that is certain to follow that failure will handily surpass that which drove them to this decision in the first place.

The rampant declaration to pursue such agendas and to force them on larger society illustrates the failed nature of the endeavor.  It would be wise to remember that if something is based in truth it will not need us to sell it simply because the priceless nature of truth always places it beyond the reach of any such market.  And one of the greatest truths that we are in desperate need of embracing is the truth of who we are, along with the equally great truth of who we are not.   

 

The Quote for Today Is This:

“You can borrow an identity if you want.  But that’s something akin to spending the whole of your life in a fitting room full of clothes that never fit because you’re embarrassed by the ones that do”.

• Craig D. Lounsbrough

 

Today’s Prayer

Dear God:

There are those who can’t find who they are, or who have found themselves and are running from what they’ve found.  These people are spending their lives trying to become something that they are not because they don’t like what they see.  I know that our greatest satisfaction and most profound life is found is discovering who You created us to be and then spending our lives cultivating that person.  I know that these are hurting people.  Confused people.  People embracing a path of failure.  People who do not believe that who they are is adequate, appealing, authentic, or worth discovering.

I ask that You help these people come face-to-face with their true, authentic selves.  And in that encounter, I ask that You help them engender a robust excitement for who they are and who that true self has the potential of becoming.  Help them see the beautiful, entirely unique, and utterly fascinating person that they already are.  Help them to understand that they are “fearfully and wonderfully made” in a way that they cannot afford to abandon, forsake, or diminish through lesser choices.

God, I pray for these people, as well as the ones who are watching them walk a road to their own demise.  Lord, cause them to fall desperately and deeply in love with who You made them to be.

 

Thanks for joining us today on this thirty-day devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” You will find “Taking It to Our Knees” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Also discover our daily inspirational quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, X, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Tik-Tok and more.

Have a great day!

Podcast Short: Who Are You Giving Yourself Away To?

Who Are You Giving Yourself Away To?

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

We would likely say that we have not given ourselves to anyone.  That none of these things are happening, and if perchance they are, we have successfully and rather astutely avoided them.  We would say that we are not so gullible nor so pathetically naïve as to fall for such trickery.  But are we?  Have we?  Really?

How often are we deceived into believing that some shining leader has been intimately touched by the cry of our hearts, and has been so moved by those cries as to lay aside everything near and dear to them in order to respond to those cries, despite the cost to them to do so?  How many times have we been fooled into believing that some cause been raised up because the collective voice of the people has been blatantly ignored by all of the other causes that purported to serve those people and heed those voices?  How many times have we been beguiled by the rhetoric of power-mongers’ who are quick to prey upon the disadvantaged in the culture in order to build small camps that are then set to war against each other, for the way to control is to divide.  Who are you giving yourself away to?

Are these ideals and causes and beliefs and values ours?  Really?  Or were they made to appear that way?  Have we been bamboozled?  Have we fallen for the old snake-oil sales pitch?  Have we drunken the Kool-Aid not by the glass, but by the gallon?  Have we been sold a bill-of-goods while believing that we have hit the mother-load?  Have we been so deceived that we are living out someone else’s convictions that having nothing to do with us?  Are we nursing someone’s else’s agenda we our life blood?  Are we erecting podiums built for some leader who will soon forget every single person who built it for them before the leader themselves falls away from that very podium?  Are we slaves who don’t recognize the fact that we have sold ourselves over to slavery?  The question remains…who have we given ourselves away to?

What are you giving yourself away to?  Into whose web have you fallen?  For you were not created for the convictions, or the agendas, or the podiums driven by someone else’s self-serving purposes or self-glorifying agendas.  You were created for greater things.  Life-altering things.  Things that make history as much as it changes it.  You were made for much greater things than the slavery of deceit.  So don’t squander your life falling for someone’s slight-of-hand, or slippery spins, or buttery smooth verbiage. 

Rather, discover what God placed you here to do and refuse to do nothing less than that.  Be who God created you to be and not what someone else wants you to be, for to be ‘you’ is to be the greatest person that you possibly can be.  Do not give yourself away to those who are certain to throw you away.  Rather, give yourself over to be the person God infused you with the life and the power and the authority and the wisdom and the privilege to be.  Be you, for your greatest life lies in doing that.

“Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”

Psalm 139:16

Podcast Short: What Is Our Narrative?

What Is Our Narrative?

What is our narrative?  What is the story-line that we’ve authored to explain our world, or allay our fears, or justify our agendas, or excuse our behaviors?  What is the narrative that we’ve created to give ourselves permission to do whatever we want permission to do?  What are the story-lines, the spins, the bits of fiction that we create so that we don’t have to face the truth, or face the world, or worse yet, face ourselves?  What is our narrative?

And have we immersed ourselves in our narratives to the point that they have become our truth?  Can we lie to ourselves long enough, hard enough, and convincingly enough that we become entirely deceived by the lies that we ourselves have created?  And in these pathetic narratives borne of rampant fear, famished greed, mis-placed motives, and ethics long cast aside in the crazed search of pleasure mongering…in these sordid narratives, have we likewise penned the lines of our own destruction?  Are we, in fact, the authors of our own demise?  For in the words of Walt Kelly, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

We would be wise to heed these words… “The greatest fool is not the person who has been fooled by the lies of others, despite how crafty and ingenious those lies might have been.  Rather, it is the fool who has lied with such amazing dexterity and subtle finesse that he himself has come to believe his own lies.  And this is the most forlorn and yet the most dangerous person that I can imagine.”

Are we the fool of the narrative?  Whether we have tediously written out the narratives to explain our world, or allay our fears, or justify our agendas, or excuse our behaviors.  Or whether we have given ourselves entirely over the narratives of others who write them for the same reasons.  Are we the fool of the narrative?

For we are better than this.  We are better than to be hauled off to destruction through the lines that we have penned, or to fall prey to the narratives of others.  We are better than this.  For God can explain our world, but He can also explain how He has overcome it.  God can ally our fears, for He is never smaller than that which we fear.  There is no need to justify God’s agenda, for it is always for the good of all.  And if we commit to live in the manner that God has outlined, there will never be anything to excuse.

Maybe, just maybe we should forsake every narrative…those of others and those of our own.  And maybe, just maybe we should embrace God’s narrative…for that will always stand as the greatest narrative ever told.

“For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.

• Proverbs 23:7

Podcast Short: 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.

Taking It to Our Knees Devotional - Day Two

Welcome to Day One of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.”

Today’s Theme is “The Aching Void of an Absent Parent

“Even if my father and mother abandon me, the LORD will hold me close.’”

• Psalm 27:10

There are many things that are meant to be forever.  There are those things whose permanence in our lives is never questioned because they are designed to be permanent.  Their role in our lives had nothing of a temporary nature built into them.  Therefore, we have no reason to doubt their permanence.  As such, we never stop to consider what life would be like without them because such a thought is entirely at odds with their permanence.  Yet, we live in a world where permanence can be traded for lesser agendas and what should never have left us does.

When a parent abandons us, the immense internal conflict of their supposed permanence as held in juxtaposition against their absence rocks our world to dark places.  In our desperate efforts to correlate the irreconcilable discrepancies of permanence as held against abandonment, we rationalize the loss of the parent or we work to suppress the pain by denying the loss altogether.  We work to believe that this might be better anyway, or that they were going to leave sooner or later, or that they needed their space to live their lives.  Yet we soon discover that no rationalization is ever big enough or convincing enough to release someone of a commitment for which there is no release.

And in the desperation of times like these we begin to realize that we’ve turned to God because He has remained permanent.  It is His permanence that becomes our sure refuge.  Our sense of stability arises from His stability.  Our ability to somehow craft a future empty of a parent that should have been part of that crafting is centered on the fact that God is a certain part of that future as much as He is a part of the present that is shaping that future.  And we have the certainty that He will never abandon us in either.

The Quote for Today Is This:

“At the point that I can look into my children’s faces and say that my life is about their lives, I have finally come to the point that I can now start becoming a parent.  And if I’ve not reached this point, I might be a parent by birth but it all ends there..”

• Craig D. Lounsbrough

Today’s Prayer

Dear God:

I am lonely.  The people that were supposed to be here…are not.  You know the reasons that they’ve left, and You know the hole within me that their departure has created.  You know how dark this hole is and how impossible it feels that it will ever be filled.  You also know the hole within them that caused them to leave.  You know that the hole within them will never be filled by their choices.  And You know that even though the hole within them and the hole within me are very different, they are both in desperate need of healing.

And so, I’m asking You to fill the hole within both of us.  You know that it’s hard for me to pray for the hole within them, but I know that for myself to heal in the way that I want to heal I must pray for their healing as well.  They ran ‘to’ something because they were running ‘from’ something.  Help them stop the running and start the healing.

Dear God, I believe that You can do more than just fill the hole.  You said that you will “supply all [my] need according to [Your] riches in glory by Christ Jesus.”  This need is big.  It’s bigger than any collection of words could ever hope to explain.  But You are bigger.  So, I’m counting on You to fill this hole, heal it, and use this experience to grow me, deepen me, better root me in you, and position me to reach others for You in ways that I could not have done so were it not for this hole.

I pray all of this in Jesus’ Name.  Amen.

Thanks for joining us today on this thirty-day devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” You will find “Taking It to Our Knees” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Also discover our daily inspirational quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, X, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Tik-Tok and more.

Have a great day!

Podcast Short: Digging Holes - Throwing Away Our Shovels

“When I’m at the bottom looking up, the main question may not be ‘how do I get out of this hole?’ In reality, the main question might be ‘how do I get rid of the shovel that I used to dig it?”

We dig holes.  Lots of them.  With all kinds of shovels.  But the interesting thing is that we dig most of these holes without even recognizing that we’re digging holes right in the middle of digging them.  We dig a lot of holes and we have all kinds of shovels to dig them with.  We dig these holes through the decisions that we make, or the people that we tend to spend our time with, or the activities that we engage in, or the lifestyle choices that we’ve made, or the way that we spend our money, or the belief systems that we adhere to, or the habits that we develop, or the choices that we make to advance our careers, or the people that we marry and the people that we don’t.  We dig all kinds of holes with all kinds of shovels.

And maybe what we should do with our lives is stop digging holes.  And maybe we should stop all the digging by being thoughtful about what we’re doing.  Maybe we should stop the digging by refusing to be reactive.  By rejecting greedy impulses and refusing to get caught up in those impulses.  By starting to ask who we’re listening to and why.  Maybe we need to stop digging holes by asking where our ethics went, or who we’re hanging around with, or what habits we need to seriously consider getting rid of, or what principles we’ve left behind us that maybe we need to put in front of us, or the incessant denial that we live in and all of the rationalizes that we create to justify that denial.  Maybe we need to stop all the digging.

So take a moment.  Put down all of your shovels.  Be brutally honest with yourself and ask yourself these questions, as well as some others that maybe you should be asking yourself.  Put down the shovels, stop the digging, and get rid of the holes.  Life is a whole lot less stressful when you’re not spending the better part of it trying to figure out how you’re going to get out of the hole that you’re currently in, and what you’re going to do to avoid falling into the next one.  Take a moment, get rid of the shovels, and stop the digging.

Podcast Short: Battle Fatigue - Fighting Life’s Battles

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

Too often we don’t care, or that’s what we tell ourselves.  We work really hard not to care because we’ve figured out that caring is just too risky, in whatever way it happens to be too risky for us.  We get the idea in our head that ‘not’ caring is just easier, because we don’t care.  Or it’s safer, because we don’t care.  We’re not in a position to get hurt, because we don’t care.  If things don’t go our way it doesn’t matter, because we don’t care.  If something or someone fails us, there’s no loss to us because we don’t care.  And this whole mindset of not caring is not about not caring at all.  It’s about protecting ourselves from the pain that we fear we’ll experience if we do care.

But, by assuming this self-protective position, we’re doing something that we may not be thinking about at all.  We’re retreating.  Basically, we’re retreating from any situations that have caused us pain before, or from situations that we feel will cause us pain if we deal with them. 

And in all that retreating, maybe there’s a stance that we should have taken, or some action that we should have engaged in, or some decision that we should have stood in opposition to or in support of.  But we don’t.  We don’t.  Instead, we retreat.  And we retreat because we’ve worked real hard to convince ourselves that we don’t care, and we’ve done that so that we won’t get hurt.  And therefore, the battle that maybe should have been ours, or the battle that we should have contributed to, or the battle that was critical for us or someone else is fought without us being in it.  Or worse yet, maybe it never got fought at all because we didn’t show up to fight it.  And the loss that we incur, however we incurred it, is likely to cause a level of pain far, far greater than the pain that we were working to avoid feeling in the first place. 

And in the end, there’s a good chance that we’ll end up caring that we didn’t care.  And because we end up caring that we didn’t care, we’ll create a battle in the last place that we ever want to fight one…and that’s within ourselves.

Taking It to Our Knees Devotional - Day One

Betrayal Is the Manifestation of Someone’s Greed, Not a Commentary of Our Worth

“After saying these things, Jesus was troubled in his spirit, and testified, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.’”

John 13:21

 

Here’s the Thought for Today:

Betrayal is intentional…ruthlessly so. It is the deliberate choice of someone to hold their interests as so superior to our well-being that the cost of crushing us in order to advance their agendas is deemed as entirely reasonable and indisputably acceptable.  In this horrifically devastating scenario, we become fodder in someone’s blind pursuit of objectives that such an action will, in fact, never achieve. 

Once the perpetrator comes to understand that both the agenda and the means chosen to achieve it accomplish neither, they will quickly fabricate a distorted narrative crafted to sustain the acceptability of what they’ve done. Such a short-sighted effort will demand repeated editing as the narratives cannot keep step with the ever-emerging realities of the betrayal. And herein the betrayal multiplies as the increasingly frustrated perpetrator fruitlessly attempts to justify choices that are ever more intensely being revealed as flawed, failed, and beyond the scope of every fresh iteration.  

Yet, we are not human fodder. Betrayal is not a reflection of who ‘we’ are. It is, in fact, a reflection of who ‘they’ are. And although the person who betrayed us will adamantly deny such a reality, we must remember that this is simply a failed means by which the betrayer will work to justify unjustifiable actions. You are not human fodder. You are not refuse to be discarded at someone else’s whim. Quite the opposite…you are a child of God. You are a manifestation of His amazing ingenuity. You are cherished royalty. You are a one-of-a-kind person with a one-of-a-kind calling. That is who you are.

 

The Quote for Today is this:

“No betrayal is so big that God’s commitment to us and presence within us is not bigger.”

 

Today’s Prayer

Dear God:

It is likely that the one who betrayed me is already experiencing the pain of an agenda not achieved and is even now working diligently to avoid that reality. I know that they will work to keep the consequences of their choices at bay, and I know that they will ultimately fail in achieving that goal. And whatever all of this does to them, it is my prayer that they may surrender to those realities and in doing so find their way to You.

As for me, heal the wounds within me, for they are deep. You say that You “heal the brokenhearted and bind up their wounds,” and I believe that You’re doing that right now because You promised to. And in the healing, may I come to understand myself better, may I grow as I press in and through this time in my life, and may I find myself turning to You with an ever-increasing intensity and ever-growing commitment. I know that my heart will be peppered with hate and I will tend toward revenge as that is part of my humanity. But as this happens, build within me an ability to see the other person as a wounded human being who has only served to increase their own woundedness. And may that soften me sufficiently to begin to forgive them, knowing that such an action will not come easily, but it will come.

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.      

Thanks for joining us today.  You will discover “In the Footsteps of the Few – The Power of a Principled Life,” as well as all of my books on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.  It’s my hope that you find these books are meaningful and restorative in your life. Also, visit us daily on all of our Social Media sites to find inspirational quotes and videos.

Podcast Short: What I Would Say to the World

What I Would Say to the World

I often think about what I would say to the world.  In the pain, confusion, fear, and rampant disorientation…what would I say?  With the deceit, the manipulation, the less than admirable agendas being floated on all fronts…what would I say?  With marriages fracturing under the weight of a culture gone rogue, with teenagers taking their lives before they ever have a chance to even understand what life is, with eyes cast to a hopeless future that seems to become dimmer by the day…what would I say?  What would I say?  And as I speak to an audience of patients that day-after-day sit crumpled and bent, as I speak to those who tolerate my penmanship and read the words that I stitch together, as I come across the innumerable people wounded and bleeding in whatever way they are wounded and bleeding, what would I say?  And maybe, just maybe I would share these thoughts with them.  This, I think, is what I would say:

This is what I would say…You’ve spent the whole of your life filling your plate with the scraps that life has thrown your way.  And even so, you feel horribly undeserving of these.  But please understand that there is a glorious table generously spread with everything that you will ever need.  And you might think about the fact that God sits at that very table staring at an empty chair that has your name on it.  So, maybe you should step up and RSVP the God who is desperate to see you in that chair.

This is what I would say…You can possess every single bit of every single thing that you see, and yet you will still be insufferably empty.  For you cannot be filled by the things created by the world.  You can only be filled by the God who created the world.  So my hope is that once you’ve gorged yourself to emptiness on the stuff of the world, you would reach out to the God who stands ready to fill you with the stuff of Himself.

This is what I would say…If you don’t believe that you are worthy of being loved, you won’t accept love.  And it’s my conviction that the most unbelievable breakthroughs come when we step past our unbelief and act on the very thing that we don’t believe in.  So my prayer for you is that you step and accept.

This is what I would say…You are worthy of every single thing that God patiently stands waiting to give you.  And if He is waiting for you to allow Him to lavish every bit of who He is upon every bit of who you are, you would be wise to throw away every bit of everything else.

This is what I would say…Don’t think for a moment that God wouldn’t step up and save you from that which is consuming the very essence of your existence, for to save you is the very essence of His existence.

This is what I would say…I am praying failure into your life.  And I am not doing that to harm you.  Rather, I am doing that to so disgust you with the failed promises of the world that you can do nothing other than turn to the God who has never failed on any promise.

This is what I would say…God says that you are enough.  You might look in the mirror with a million voices screaming something very different into the person that you see looking back at you.  But voices and mirrors lie when God never does.

This is what I would say…You are not a mistake.  Rather, you are a mass of living, breathing potential desperately begging to be unleashed.  The only mistake is that you failed to recognize that this God of ours took the time to build into you something so phenomenal that you mistook the inability to see it for its absence.

And that is what I would say.  To you.  To fracturing marriages.  To hurting teens.  To those who have lost hope.  To desperate patients.  To those who graciously read what I write.  To the wounded and the bleeding.  To a culture dazed and living daily in fear.  And even to those who have themselves created that fear.  This is what I would say.  And it is my hope that in saying these things, I have touched your life in whatever way God might chose to inject these words into your life and your situation.  This, yes, this is what I would say.

 

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

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

To Believe In Something Better - The Rise Against What Is

Our humanity is ingeniously fashioned in a manner that it can handily break the realities that would seek to break it.  Our existence need never be held hostage nor pressed into servitude to the sordid realities of all that is happening around us.  Rather, we are able to stand in spirited opposition to those realities, and in the face of them we are capable of crafting brilliant and utterly resilient solutions that crush those realities by transforming them.  We are dreamers and the authors of visions.  We have the ability to conceptualize marvelous things and actually begin the act of crafting them even at those times when the presence of them or the hope for them is entirely non-existent.  We are a powerful bunch vested with immense potential that exceeds even that which we understand. 

Yet, we bring these abilities to bear against a world that would wish to press us flat in its skepticism.  The world becomes embroiled in the selfish pursuits that it crafts as it chases things born of greed, gluttony and selfishness.  The world would bend us to its darker ways rather than be bent to a better way.  The world would prefer to kill both us and itself rather than give up what it has selfishly given itself over to.  Indeed, the world has sold its soul to something that it is convinced will liberate the soul that it sold.  Therefore, in the insanity of a world gone rogue, the world will viciously fight for the things that are certain to destroy it.

The weight of living in a world such as this, as well as the incessant press of darkness that such living spawns can at times leave us wondering if our influence might be too insufficient to wrestle the world out of a darkness that has become so terribly dark.  We stand as single entities, bringing what light we can.  Most times, that light seems swallowed in the vast darkness that seems to advance without restraint.  We are left in the squalor of a battle that seems lost, only holding the line so that we can delay the full descent of evil and grant ourselves a few precious moments before life is over.

 

To Believe In Something Better

But we forget.  We are extraordinarily quick to lose touch with a greater reality that infinitely surpasses the darkness which surrounds us.  Our perspective becomes one of gradual defeat and continual hopelessness.  Our understanding of who we are and Who we serve is lost in the grief of a battle seemingly hopeless and ground perpetually surrendered.  We fall prey to the lies of the darkness whose own darkness is completely dependent upon our fear of it.  Therefore, the darkness must appear dark beyond what it is in order to create the fear necessary to insure its own survival.  It is not an undefeatable foe.  It is, in fact, a foe that fears lest we discover the power that we possess and the vulnerability that it has.

Therefore, to remind us of who we are in times such as these and to fan the flames of our passion, I have compiled a number of quotes that I have had the privilege of authoring.  It is my desire to call us back to lofty dreams and rigorous passion.  To remind us that the darkness is the absence of light and therefore is totally dependent on the light remaining absent.  As such, the darkness is terribly vulnerable as it possesses no means by which to stop the light other than creating fear in us.  These quotes are written to set us free and send us out in the marvel of our humanity to change a world that is too ill-equipped to change itself.  To say that we stand for something better, and that we will be that ‘something better’ in the standing.  It is my hope that these quotes will move you to move your world, for I believe that you can, and I believe that you will:  

 

The Rise Against ‘What Is’

“If it didn’t go all that well today, tomorrow is the opportunity that I have to do what I did today without doing it the way that I did it today.”

 

“Pull every dream that you’ve ever had from all of the places that you’ve abandoned them, brush them off, set them in front of yourself, run the fingers of your heart over each of them, fight the lie that you’re not enough to achieve them, and realize that the dream was not too big.  Rather, the belief in yourself is too small.”

 

“Let us not fall prey to the leaching negativity and rank pessimism that runs unleashed all around us.  Rather, with the utmost determination we must bring ourselves to understand that these lies have been given legitimacy by people who thought themselves as powerless in the face of them, rather than recognizing that we have the power to rip the face off of them.”

 

“You, yes you are the impossible waiting to happen.  And the only reason that that sounds impossible to you is that you haven’t been daring enough to push the possible out to the point where it becomes what you once mistook for the impossible.”

 

“I am begging you to let nothing shackle you that God has sent you to unshackle.”

 

“I’ve sat with tens of thousands of people and I’ve stared into as many empty eyes.  And I must say that the inexplicable contradiction for me is that despite the gaping emptiness engulfing every one of these eyes, there yet lies within each one a wonderfully formidable gifting, an irrepressible energy, a depth yet undiscovered, riches unfathomed, and the resources to amply transform this ever-darkening world.  And I’ve seen enough eyes to know that if yours are also empty, like everyone else’s they are also full.”

 

“God doesn’t ask if something can be done.  Nor does He ask if we have the resources to do it.  For God is bound by neither question.  And when we stand with God, neither are we.”

 

“You are fully and magnificently equipped to stand up and change the world around you.  And to simply sit down and tolerate the world around you is to squander who you are in the process of never being who you are.”

 

“Do not be ashamed of who you are, for in doing so you are not taking into account the majesty of all that you are.  And without any shred of doubt, I know that you are a person of majesty, for in my innumerable years of working with people I have yet to find even one person who is not.”

 

“Stand up and be the light that God created you to be.  Stand with me and the millions of others like both of us who have bowed before this inexplicably marvelous God of ours and in the bowing have begged that He not let us die until the darkness in the world around us has died first.”

 

“Look in the mirror.  Go ahead and look yet again.  And look not at the reflection, for while this body of yours is marvelously complex in ways that continue to elude the reach of modern science, it is but a simple shell that holds the image of God within you.  And if the shell is that grand, how much more what God has placed inside of it.”

 

“If I let that which I hold to be true fall victim to a world that says it is not, I have in that action surrendered to the voices of those who know nothing of the truth other than to destroy it because it terrifies them.  And if there’s one thing I should be terrified of, it’s not the surrender itself, but the fact that in the surrender I have given the world permission to avoid the very thing that it should fear.”

 

“It’s not the gifts or the abilities or the talents that equip us to accomplish great things.  Rather, it’s the persistent and adamantly stubborn conviction that we will in no way leave the world the way that we found it.  And I would rather join hands with a single person of this kind than sit with a million gifted people who are not of this kind.”

 

And finally…

“I will spend my life believing in you so that you will someday commit to doing the same.”

 

To Believe

We must press ourselves into a sort of reckoning.  We must realign our minds with the truth of who we are, who God created us to be, and the fantastic mission that He gifted us with.  In a battle this pervasive and insidious, we must ground ourselves in a truth so brilliant and pristinely clean that it will handily stand against the wiles of the devil and the depth of the darkness he has spun.  We must align ourselves with a reality so brilliant, robust and muscular that we find ourselves unintimidated by the darkness that now stands quaking in front of us.

We have a God who has called us to great things.  Great things.  He has not called us to defeat or even some slightly marginal victory.  He has called us to complete and unquestioned victory.  And such a call would never have been extended had not this God of ours provided ample resources to achieve that victory.

Before moving to the next chapter, I would encourage you to reread the quotes shared in this chapter.  I would likewise encourage you to pick one that speaks to you, to write it down, and recite it daily.  Let its truth seep deep into your soul and ignite your heart.  Let it breath confidence into your spirit and energy into your convictions.  Indeed, it is time to rise against ‘what is.’  So, let’s rise.

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

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

Not Where We Were - Finding Ourselves Somewhere Else

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 rather handily 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.  For others, it’s based on the need to avoid the pain of our past or somehow prove our worth in the face of a self-image that lays battered and bloodied.  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.  Some of the more adventurous souls among us nimbly pursue that destination, spiritedly pulling in as much of everything that we can along the way to accentuate both the journey as well as the 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.  At such times we craft some other less intimidating and thoroughly unfulfilling destination.  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. 

And then in the magic of life, there are those times where we have actually pursued some authentic destination with such rigorous tenacity that the trajectory of our efforts has catapulted us past our destination to places that are everything of our furthest and fondest imagination.  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 if it hasn’t already.  When it does, it undoes everything that we thought was secure and certain, wreaking havoc on whatever our journey had been to that point.  And to whatever degree it wrecks the road underneath our feet, we’re left in a blurring trauma that renders our journey disjointed, our destination uncertain, and our lives dispirited.

 

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.  Our ingenuity falls prey to our arrogance, and the winds that we assumed to be reliable often shift and drive our genius toward some rocky shoal.  And so, life will fall upon us, or ram against us, or pull the ground out from under us, or wreck 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?  The gift is lost in the grind and we lose a sustaining sense of gratitude. 

We get caught in the shallows, forgetting that the deepest waters hold the greatest treasures.  But we would rather forage for trinkets because treasures are too stubborn to just hand themselves to us and we will not succumb to such preposterous demands.  The shallows become our calling when they are nothing more than our coffin.  Therefore, we drift without knowing that we’re drifting because we’re no longer paying attention.  We come to believe that we are living a life of great things because it is too overwhelming to embrace the truth that we have forfeited great things.  The outcome of such passive living is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.

 

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. 

There’s plenty of pablum to go around.  Therefore, we assume that if we collect sufficient quantities of it, it will add up to something bigger than pablum.  Yet, dreams are never constructed of pablum and our fears are never put at bay by any collection of it, regardless of how massive.  It is an escape, but it is never an answer.  It’s a detour, but it is never a destination.  It is an imitation of what we are attempting to avoid.  Subsequently, pablum gives us a sense that we can circumvent everything that we fear and still achieve everything that we dream.  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 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.  

Assuming that we are along for the ride releases us from any accountability for the ride and where it might end up.  We are innocent.  Or we’re victims of circumstance.  Or our families put us here because they didn’t know any other place to put us.  Or we’re simply being obedient to whatever we’ve subjected ourselves to.    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.  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. 

We live in walls that we pretend are horizons, or vast doorways that open to massive expanses and marvelous places.  In time, we come to believe that they are not walls at all as we’ve visualized them as something that they will never be.  We then live out our lives in these confining hovels, convinced that we are forging great mountains and running in wild places.  The outcome is that we end up finding ourselves somewhere else without ever seeing it coming.       

 

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 imprudently 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. 

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

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

What I Want - The Frightening Call of Great Things

I want to be happy, but I don’t think I want to be satisfied; for satisfaction lures me into believing that happiness is found in reaching some point rather than realizing happiness is born of striving for those points.  I want to experience a resilient and wonderfully endearing sense of contentment that neatly threads itself through every part of my soul, but I don’t want that contentment to morph into the baser mentality of complacency.  I want to keep a weathered eye on every horizon, but I want to do more than just watch those horizons from some sorry distance.  Rather, I want to walk their ridges.  I don’t want to contemplate the taking of a journey.  Rather, I want to be contemplating a journey as I’m taking it.

I want to robustly celebrate the achievements and vigorously revel in the milestones in a manner completely worthy of them, but I never want to fall to the bane of mediocrity that would prompt me to see them as a terminus.  I want to develop a sturdy confidence born of the advances made, and I want to have that confidence perpetually reinforced by the successes achieved.  Yet, I pray that my failures will always serve to temper that confidence so that it never turns to rot in the form of arrogance.  And in further managing this tempered confidence, I never want it to be so strong that I errantly assume any challenge as too small to be worthy of my time.  I want to be happy, but I don’t think I want to be satisfied. 

For whatever reason I might do it and in whatever way I might do it, I never want to hand myself excuses to round the next summit instead of scaling it.  I never want to slothfully presume the ability to achieve a goal without holding myself accountable to actually getting on the track and running the race.  And I suppose worst of all, I never want to scan my assorted array of trophies, whether they be numerous or few, and in the scanning embrace some languid sense born of complacency that somehow it is done and that I can hang up my hat, when in reality life is never done and no hat is really ever hung.

 

Why Do I ‘Never Want’ to Do These Things?

Laziness is humanity domesticated to its own destruction.  Mediocrity is life pent up in the very iron-clad cages that we create out of the misguided notion that an ‘adventure’ is a product of those misty-eyed idealists who expend their lives chasing dreams too elusive to catch.  Therefore, we create dreams that we can cage so that they simply can’t elude us, and in their captivity we can manage them so that, God forbid, they never manage us.  And what we forget is that a dream caged is nothing more than an anemic, pasty-white wish that is always in the process of dying in whatever cage it happens to find itself.

 

We Are Made for More

We are made for more than all of that.  Our humanity yearns for the next adventure.  We desire lofty summits and distant finish lines that tax the whole of our energies in order to get us to them.  There is inherent within us this incessant sense that where ‘we are’ is not where ‘we’re going,’ and that to park it wherever we’re at is to start dying in that very place.  There is some fixed notion in our psyche and some insistent voice in our souls that will not be silenced and cannot be appeased by lesser agendas.  These call out despite the many ways we work to silence them, and in the calling out they call us out.

Sadly, in light of the calling, we too often surrender to fear and we sell-out to apathy.  We foolishly peddle our resources and pawn off our talents to lesser things so that we can hold up some small, pithy achievement to offset the gnawing guilt we experience over bypassing the greater achievements that were our calling before we were called away.  We can’t show up empty-handed, for that would work against our efforts to squelch the already suppressed voice of passion.  Yet, unless we set our sights on higher things we will always be empty-hearted, for blind obedience to fear and the steady ingestion of apathy leaves everything it touches empty.  And I would propose that emptiness of this sort is the bedfellow of death itself.

Therefore, we achieve something because we must.  And at times we dress up those ‘somethings’ so that they don’t look half bad.  But too often our achievements are an insidious effort to sedate our sense of passion and render it appeased.  They’re the anemic manifestation of our fears, a groveling by-product of our lackluster vision, and a response to the snide voice of mediocrity that herald’s ‘passion’ as the fool’s errand. 

Passion is not fooled, even though we are fooled by the belief that we somehow fooled it.  To numb passion is not to diminish its power.  Rather, it is to diminish our sense of its power.  In doing so we stepped down instead of stepping up.  We swapped mountains for back alleys, and dramatic vistas for fading fences.  And these realities create a grinding angst within us that will not be soothed by anything but heeding the call from which we’ve run.

 

What to Do?

Decide to Do Something

As obvious as it may sound, the first thing to do is decide to do something.  Without the decision to do something, anything and everything is only an idea.  An idea, regardless of how ingenious or bold changes nothing until it is birthed as a reality.  The greatest ideas will only tickle our imagination, but they won’t fire it until they’re released.  They will nudge us, but they won’t force us to jump.  They will call, but they won’t beg.

To do something is to decide to be disciplined.  It’s a decision to take a step rather than toy with ideas.  It is a choice to move from the non-committal ease of playing out various scenarios in our head, to grabbing one of them by the throat and acting on it.  It is not based on cost in stepping out, for the greatest cost of all is in not stepping out.  And it is the sad reality that most of our ideas die without ever having been birthed as realities because we choose to do everything but step.

 

Decide If You’re Going to be Brave

An idea as only an ‘idea’ and nothing more than an idea is safe.  As ideas and ideas only, they’re manageable.  They’re domesticated.  They’re leashed.  We hold them within the safe confines of our minds and our imaginations, toying with them as time permits and returning them to those confines when it does not.  But cut the reigns and turn an idea loose and it may not be as manageable and domesticated as we might like it to be.  So, are we brave enough for the ride that is certain to ensue?

An idea that is given legs is one of the most dangerous things imaginable, but it is also one of the most exciting things possible.  An idea running at full stride is wildly frightening in a manner that unleashes something that was never supposed to be leashed.  It is not about throwing caution to the wind as some might think.  Rather, it’s about stepping into the wind and being swept up by it while wisely holding caution as we do.  It’s about understanding that wisdom is not held hostage to safety.  Rather, wisdom is based on figuring out how we navigate dangerous things in a way that no longer renders them dangerous.  And as such, are we going to choose to be brave?

 

Decide How Important Comfort and Familiarity Are

Unleash your ideas and things will never be the same; guaranteed.  Things will change when great ideas are unleashed because they can’t help but change.  What ‘is’ will become the stuff of a history that will lay beyond our ability to ever reclaim again.  Our ideas are the stuff of the future.  They are never home in the present for the present is only the thing that launches them, not the thing that cultivates them.  If our lives have been expended in the acquisition of comfort and the cultivation of familiarity, our future is our ‘now’ and no idea can sufficiently grow in that.

While the degree of success rests on the magnitude of the idea being released, the greater degree to which it will be successful is the degree to which we unleash it.  And if we prefer familiarity and the comfort that it engenders, we might never truly let an idea loose, or we may well attempt to cram it back into the confines we released it from after we’ve unleashed it.  At best, the ideas are hamstrung.  At worst, they perish.   

 

Get the Resources

If you’ve decided that you want to do something, if you’re sufficiently brave to do it, and if you’re willing to forgo familiarity and comfort in the pursuit of it, then get the resources that you need to make it happen.  Real resources.  This is not about thin and pasty resources, nor is it about material that’s been worn thin.  It’s not about sugary-sweet notions or trite sayings that are fun and fanciful but are shallow and porous. 

Rather, this is about finding bold, honest, timely, daring, frank, deep and brisk material that will thrust you out beyond the confines you saw as the terminus of your dreams.  Find resources that are unforgiving in helping you grow, reliable in content, proven in substance, and thick with wisdom.  Learn from trusted people who have been there-and-back who have likewise taken other people there-and-back.  Grab these resources, let them grab you, and then rigorously apply them without delay or excuse.  When you do, you will start the process of placing yourself in a position to begin heeding the call of great things.