Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

“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.

“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.

The Tragedy of Gutting Greatness

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

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

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

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

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

 

How We Forget

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

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

 

What Is Christmas?

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

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

 

What Sets the Story Above All Other Stories

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

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

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

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

“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.

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

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

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

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

Christmas - We Forget

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

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

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

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

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

 

Christmas is God Refusing to Forget

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

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

 

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

 

Resources for Your Holiday Celebrations

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

“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.

Welcome to LifeTalk

Christmas Rescue

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

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

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

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

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

“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.

“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.

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

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

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

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

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

- Craig D. Lounsbrough

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

Welcome to LifeTalk Thanks for joining us for this Thanksgiving Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______________________________________________________________________________________

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

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

“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

“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

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

“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.  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. 

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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!

 

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.

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

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!

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.

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!

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

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

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

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!

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.” 

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!

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

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

“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.

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!

“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.

“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.