Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth’s for Life’s Complex Journey” - Part Two

Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Two

Forgiveness often seems to be one of those things that’s a genuinely nice idea, but not really a life liberating reality.  Life is full of nice ideas; those trite sayings, gentle stories and brave concepts that would make life a whole lot better if they were really real.  Nice ideas often seem to be spun of the threads of idealism and the fabric of fanciful thinking.  The reality is that they don’t really seem to work in the real world.  Sometimes the very things that we wish were true simply dissolve and disintegrate when the reality of life hits them.  Forgiveness seems to be one of those things.

Sometimes the greatest, most profound truths seem to be the very things that are completely removed from the reality of the lives that we live.  In reality, it’s not that they don’t fit or are idealistic or naïve or far-fetched.  Most often it’s simply the fact that we don’t know how to incorporate them.  Sometimes the greatest truths are so big and so encompassing that we can’t figure out how to figure them in.  And because we can’t somehow make them fit, we assume them to be irrelevant, weak, inadequate or just plain stupid.  Such often seems the fate of forgiveness.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines forgiveness as “to grant free pardon and to give up all claim on account of an offence or debt.”  The American Psychological Association expands the definition of forgiveness “as the process of concluding resentment, indignation or anger as a result of a perceived offense, difference or mistake, and/or ceasing to demand punishment or restitution.”  Whatever your definition might be, forgiveness is about letting go in a manner so total that the offense and the restitution are released.

 

Obstacles to Forgiving

Forgiveness is a releasing which makes it difficult on at least three basic fronts.  First, we typically demand restitution be obtained or that justice be meted out for whatever offense we have incurred.  There is a deep sense of justice that demands correction of an offense through some sort of action that both compensates us for whatever loss we’re sustained while teaching the offending party that such actions are inappropriate and intolerable.  The act of forgiveness works against this feeling, making forgiveness difficult and contrary.

Second, forgiveness creates a perceived sense of vulnerability.  If we “grant free pardon,” do we then open ourselves up to have the same offense perpetrated upon us again?  Are we giving space and opportunity for the offending party to do to us what they did before?  In forgiving, have we relinquished power that we can no longer hold over the person who offended us in order to keep ourselves safe or make them pay?

Third, we see forgiveness as letting someone ‘off the hook.’  It’s a free pass, a mulligan, a turning away where we permit ignorance to erase that which should not be erased.  We feel we do an injustice by not handing out justice and instead waving off an offense in a manner that seems both irresponsible and ignorant.  Forgiveness is often seen as an easy way to resolve or bypass something that should be dealt with.

 

What Forgiveness is Not

Forgiveness is not saying that the offense was ‘okay’ or somehow less than what it really was.  It’s not watering down the offense or somehow sweeping the whole thing under the proverbial carpet in some sort of passive gesture.  Forgiveness has nothing at all to do with avoidance or passivity.  There’s nothing placating or escapist about it.  It’s not an act of weakness nor is it a means to maneuver around that which we find unsavory or downright scary.  It is in reality an act of the utmost strength, the highest form of sacrifice and the deepest manifestation of our humanity. 

The truth is, it’s simply saying that to hold the offense against the person is simply too toxic for the one holding it.  We will be offended and we will take hits that are deep, searing and violently cutting.  When that happens, we must have an alternative to holding them.  There must be a release of some sort.  Holding the offense stymies the one holding it, therefore not allowing the offended party to move on.  Forgiveness makes nothing ‘okay.’  It’s not about that.  It’s about creating freedom and release in manner that nothing else affords us.

Neither is forgiveness a means of giving the offending individual permission to reoffend.  Forgiveness comes with the understanding of the nature of the offense, as well as the establishment of boundaries to keep the offense from happening again.  Forgiveness is not permissive or passive.  It’s not about being an inflatable punching clown that pops up for the sole purpose of taking another hit in an endless series of hits.  It is an intentional act of release, not an act of permission.

 

What Forgiveness Is

The old saying is quite true . . . forgiveness is more for the one who forgives than for him who is being forgiven.  In forgiveness, we choose to let go of the emotional toxicity that harboring anger over an offense breeds.  We are not granting permission to the offense or minimizing it.  Forgiveness is an act of personal liberation where we are setting ourselves free from whatever was done to us.  It is not an action that invalidates the offense.  Rather, it is an action that leaves the consequences of the action between a just God and the offending party while freeing us up to move on with our lives.  Forgiveness is a choice to leave the past with those who created it so that we can move on to a future yet to be created.  It has nothing to do with weakness and it has everything to do with strength.

 

The Hardest Person to Forgive    

In all of this forgiveness stuff, the absolutely hardest person to forgive is most often ourselves.  There’s some sort of blockage when we are the one in need of our own forgiveness.  There’s something doubly binding when we are both the offending party and the one extending forgiveness all wrapped in one.  The duality of all of that puts us in two roles at the same time, making forgiveness doubly difficult.

Despite the inherent difficulty, it’s right here that the greatest grace (unmerited favor) needs to be extended in that we embrace both authentic remorse for offenses we’ve incurred while extending ourselves the full release of forgiveness.  Something about this dichotomy is terribly difficult, holding many hostage to mistakes far in the past that dim or even rob the hope of the future.  Forgiveness is inherently powerful enough to extend itself wholly and completely to us even when we are the ones in need of forgiving ourselves.

 

Freeing Ourselves

What are you holding onto and why are you doing it?  If you look closely enough you’re likely to see that the rationale for withholding forgiveness is far outweighed by the liberating release inherent in forgiving.  Take stock of what you’re holding onto and consider the worth of holding it verses the freedom found in releasing it.     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Falling Apart Just to Fall Apart

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

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

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

 

When Lack of Timing Makes Us Look Bad

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

 

No Answers

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

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

 

Better Questions to Ask      

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

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

 

The Taxing Nature of Our Preconceived Outcomes

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

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

 

Is It Untimely?

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

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

I Heard a Robin - Hope in the Dark

I Heard a Robin - Hope in the Dark

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

 

What Shapes Our Expectations

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

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

 

Making ‘What Is,’ ‘What Will Be’

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

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

 

Hope Deferred

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

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

 

I Heard a Robin

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

 

Expectations

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

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

LifeTalk’s ”Thought for Life” - Leaving a Legacy

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

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

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

Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth’s for Life’s Complex Journey” - Part Three

Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Three

The concept of sacrifice seems more suited to novels or epic movies.  It appears more an ideal; a concept that when observed from a safe distance seems wonderfully heroic, deeply inspiring and chivalrous in a way that stirs up something powerful in us that seems to be forever held hostage despite the fact that it gets stirred.  Sacrifice, as we watch it displayed from afar, awakens some internal passion that chafes against our souls in its quest to be unleashed within us.

Somehow sacrifice seems to be something that is entirely right, that is likewise entirely lost.  There are those things that we believe exist yet are lost to mankind; the things we are ever in search of not because we are caught up in some sort of shallow fascination with them.  Rather, there are those things that we know to be authentically real whose absence must be remedied by their discovery.  There are those things that we are made for, yet which are entirely absent.

Sacrifice is one of those things.  It’s something that we know we are all called to.  It’s one of those things that we know is the right thing to do; that it’s part of our humanity and represents something undeniably central.  Sacrifice is the totality of our humanity called upward and outward in a grand display of selfless behavior.  It declares that we are not made solely for ourselves, but that we are made for others.  It captivates our minds and catapults our actions to do things we never dreamt possible.  Indeed, it defines the core of our humanity; representing the ultimate action that one human being can take on behalf of another human being.  That’s sacrifice.

 

The Balance of Sacrifice

All of this doesn’t mean that our lives are always about other people.  It’s simply about priority and the arrangement of things in our lives.  Our culture, and in many cases our world seems bent on maximizing our personal gains in any situation.  There appears to be an inherent mentality that the self can be sacrificed, but only to the degree that the self is not actually threatened, or threatened beyond likely recovery.  Sacrifice is calculated and made clean.  Certainly, we must exercise wisdom when we take actions on the behalf of others, but a clear set of priorities would seem to dictate the manner in which we act with others in mind.

 

Priorities

It seems that our actions are dictated by our priorities.  There appears to be this inherent grid that we run decisions through.  That grid seems primarily to hold the welfare of self above everything else.  Clearly, that seems to be in keeping with the natural tendencies and behaviors of base human nature.

Yet, there is a sense of some deep sort that runs entirely contrary to human nature; that in putting ourselves first, we must by necessity put others first.  There’s some sort of sense of community, of relationship and connection that deems us only a part of a much large whole.  And as a part of that larger whole, we are obligated to preserve the whole above the preservation of self.  That dichotomy all seems rather strange because it appears to run against our natural inclinations to make certain that we’re okay and that our personal interests are protected.

 

What’s the End-Game?

We all ask where we want everything to end up.  At the end of it all, when our days are over and the fullness of our time, talents and energies are spent what will be left?  That’s a terribly big, and in some cases, a terribly frightening question.

If our focus is upon ourselves, then the end results of our lives will be likewise focused on us.  The benefits and resources that we will have garnered and spent will serve us and us alone.  That might make for a life that we perceived as satisfying and a good ride, but it ends at our end.  The service of self terminates at our own death.  Therefore we will have left nothing that outlives us, nothing that serves the greater good, nothing for those who remain.  It would seem that the end-game is indeed the end-game in a manner tragic and unfortunate.

 

What about Legacy?

What kind of footprint will each of us leave?  Will it be big enough and broad enough that others are enriched by it and find both comfort and inspiration in it?  Will it have changed lives, redirected people who were on crash courses to their own destruction, or given someone somewhere some degree of hope in a place where they saw none for themselves?  Will our legacy live on, not just for the purpose of living on but for the purpose of giving others purpose?  Are we committed to leaving something of value behind that will cost us, but will in turn be of inestimable value to someone else, someplace else?  Or are our lives spent in the service of self which means it all begins, and more tragically ends there?

In leaving a legacy, we can’t be so shallow as to leave a legacy of who we were as some sort of monument to self.  Monuments are not legacies, they are simply reminders.  A legacy is leaving something to others for the sole purpose that it gives them something valuable and needed in their own journey whether we are given the credit for that or not.  It’s a selfless detachment where we hand another human being something that may very well be life-saving without them knowing its origin or being able to credit the one who gave it to them.  It’s a gift that is given for no other purpose than the nature of the gift and the recipient who will receive it; the giver being entirely lost in the transaction.  That is sacrifice.

 

How Will I Live?

Sacrifice . . . it runs contrary to who we are, but it is in reality everything that we are.  The pinnacle of our humanity is ascended when we descend in the service of others.  We are raised up when we lay ourselves down.  It builds us, it builds others, and it builds families, communities and nations.  Sacrifice is the best of our humanity manifest in shining moments when everything that would diminish us is overcome and set aside.  It is all of us at our very best.  So how then will you live?

Personal Testimony - It’s Just Too Much

How many times have you felt that there’s just no use?  There’s just no sense in going on.  You know, we’ve made way too many mistakes.  Or the hole that we’ve dug, or the hole that misfortune dug is just too deep.  And it really doesn’t matter who dug it anyway because, either way, we’re not getting out it.  We failed out of college, or we didn’t go to begin with.  Or our marriage went away.  Or our addiction won’t go away.  Or our career goals always stall no matter how much we’ve invested in what we’re doing.  The medical issues just keep happening.  We can’t hold onto a friend to save our lives, or our family just can’t get along long enough to actually look like a family.  The bills never stop.  It’s always bad news.  Our self-esteem is shot, our dreams are dead, the kids won’t call us, and we’re dreading tomorrow because it’s going to be the exact same thing all over again.  How many times have you felt that there’s just no use?

And when we’re at that point, life doesn’t really matter all that much anymore.  It’s just something that we tolerate until we’re tired of tolerating.  It’s not about living.  It’s about surviving.  And at some point, after we’ve done it long enough, surviving ‘becomes’ our life.  It ‘becomes’ who we are.  It ‘becomes’ all that we do.  And then, over time, it ‘becomes’ all that we think we can do, or should do.  How many times have you felt that there’s just no use?

And you know, we try all kinds of stuff to fix this.  We immerse ourselves in some self-help philosophy, or we’re on a mad hunt for the right podcast, or we’ve ordered the latest breakthrough book, or we’re hanging on the words of some person of prominence.  We try change our diet, or change our attitude, or change our social circle, only to realize that all of that really never changes anything.

So, we’re in a hole.  We blew college, our marriage is long gone, the addiction keeps showing up, our career is stalled, the doctors can’t figure out our issues, friends come and go, the family bickering doesn’t stop and neither do the bills, our self-esteem is shot, our dreams are dead, and the kids won’t call.  Yeah.  How many times have we felt that there’s just no use.  I have.  And I’m guessing you have too.

For me, when I’ve been at those places, the only thing bigger than everything that’s laid me flat is God.  Some would say that God has failed them just as much as everything else has.  And in my own life I’ve discovered that when I feel that way, it’s really a whole lot more about the fact that I failed God.  Because God doesn’t fail us.  He might not show up in the way that we want Him to.  He might not engage all of this stuff in the way that we think is best.  We might think Him to be too slow in the way that He works.  Or we might not believe in Him at all.  But what I can tell you is that with God, you never have to feel that there’s ‘no use’ because He’s got a ladder for every hole that you’re in, and a solution for every problem that you have.

So get your Bible out and read it.  If you don’t have one, buy one or download a Bible app.  Go to church.  Call a pastor.  Pray.  Listen to Christian music.  See what happens.  Believe me, God’s got a lot of ladders, and He’s got an endless supply of solutions.

Personal Testimony - Hope

People ask me, “Is there any hope?”  And there have been times (more than one), where I’ve found myself asking the same question.  “Is there any hope?”

And I often ask myself, “What kind of world do we live in?  How dark has it all become?  How bad must it be that we somehow find ourselves driven to some point, or some place in our lives that’s so desperate that we actually find ourselves asking that kind of question?”  And I’ll tell you what, if you’re asking that question it’s because you’re in a really dark place.  And I know how dark they are because I’ve been there…and so have you.

Think about it for a minute.  Without hope, what have we got?  What have we got?  If we can’t apply some feeling of hope to our future, or a marriage that’s hanging by a thread, or a disease that could go really wrong really fast, or a child who’s gone rogue, or a career that teetering on the edge of some abyss, or an addiction that’s eaten up someone’s life or someone’s family…if there’s no hope that you can apply to any of that stuff…what have you got?

You know exactly what it’s like when life collapses.  We both know what that’s like.  When your dream just dies, and they can die for a lot of reasons that are just brutal.  When your marriage vanishes, and you didn’t even see it coming.  When you’ve run into so many walls just trying to get to ‘some next place’ in life, (any next place) that all you end up spending your life doing is waiting for the next wall to show up because you’re certain that it’s going to.  When you begin to realize that the damage is just too much, and as you realize that it begins to dawn on you that it’s humanly impossible to ever climb out from under all of it.  If there’s no hope that you can apply to any of that…what have you got?

If there’s no hope, what’s the sense in all of this?  Why go on?  Why try?  Why invest?  Why keep moving forward?  If there’s no hope, nothing matters.  If there’s no hope then this existence, living out whatever this is that we’re living out, all of this is meaningless.  It just doesn’t matter.  You’ve felt that.  I’ve felt it.  The world feels it. 

Hope is indispensable.  And I mean…indispensable.  And if we’ve lost it, as we all have at some time, or some place, we’ve gotta find it because going on without it is simply impossible.  It just doesn’t work.  I know that, and if you’ve lived long enough, and if you’ve faced the darkness long enough, you know that too.  Hope is indispensable.

But where do you find hope anyway?  I mean real hope.  I’m not talking about someone persons promises (because those break), or some passing fad (because those have no depth), or some vogue philosophy (because those are typically failed ideas that have been dressed up in new clothes), or political platforms (because those typically serve the platform rather than the people), I’m not talking about any of that because life is littered with that stuff.  We’re drowning in it.  I’m not talking about the latest book, or some trending podcast, or some ‘woke’ idea.  And as far as I can tell, all of that stuff promises hope, but delivers nothing.  If it did, we wouldn’t be here.

This is my experience.  I’ve had times where everything seemed hopeless.  Everything was dark…I mean really dark.  Bleak.  When all of the resources and all of the promises that this world made me, failed me…miserably. 

And when the world fails you, where do you go?  Well, you go where I went.  I went to God.  Now, that statement won’t sit well with some people, but if hope is indispensable and the world can’t give it to you, where else do you go?  What other option do you have?  But more than that, what other option would you really want anyway?  I want an option that works, that’s sustainable regardless of what life throws at me.  An option that delivers hope for my future, hope for my marriage, hope for a disease, hope for a child who’s gone rogue, or a career that teetering on the edge of some abyss, or an addiction that’s eaten up my life.  And there’s only one place where you find that kind of hope.  And that’s in a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Get a Bible and check it out.  Go to church.  Call a pastor.  Give it a shot.  If you do, you’ll find exactly what you need in the exact way that you need it, because that’s how the God of hope operates.

Personal Testimony - Dreams that Die

You know, I grew up with a lot of dreams.  A lot of things that I wanted to do.  We all have dreams.  Maybe your dream was to have a great marriage.  Maybe it was to start a company that changed a community, or a nation, or maybe the world.  Maybe it was to raise solid kids, or travel, or write a book, or invent something revolutionary that made life better for other people, or live in some particular place, or achieve some level of financial comfort, or whatever it might have been. 

And as you grow older, you actually find yourself kind of refining those dreams.  You tweak them.  You roll them over in your head.  You begin to adjust them ‘here and there’ to fit the world as your understanding of the world matures and sharpens and grows and expands.  And as that refining thing happens, you begin to figure out how these dreams might actually work.  How you might actually be able to pull all of that stuff off.  It’s a really neat kind of thing. 

And in thinking out loud, I would guess that, at some level, you’ve had those kinds of dreams as well.  That you’ve played with some really cool ideas.  That there was something that you were excited about, that gave you some sort of energy or sense of excitement.  That you had some sort of vision for your life that added something to your life that you needed. 

But then life happens.  In whatever way it happens, it happens.  It happens to all of us.  And many times, whatever happens ends up killing those dreams.  They die.  They just die.  Sometimes they die before they were ever born, or sometimes the dream is actually beginning to unfold and then it dies.  However or whenever it happens, they die. 

And sometimes we try to bring them back, or resurrect them in whatever way that we try to do that.  We try to figure out how to do them differently, or modify them, or come at them from a different angle.  Or we decide to fight the thing that’s killed our dreams.  We figure that if we can eliminate whatever killed our dreams, (or at least beat it up pretty thoroughly), that maybe, just maybe, we can get our dream back.

At other times we just let our dreams die.  We either don’t know what to do, or we’re overwhelmed, or we can’t get past a sense of injustice or unfairness, or whatever it is.  And because we let it die (because we feel that we have no other option but to let it die) we refuse to ever dream again because the death of a dream is just too painful.  It’s just too much.

The world will kill our dreams.  Life has no qualms about showing up and killing the very things that we spent a large part of our lives living for.  Dreams die every day.  They die at the hands of whole bunch of stuff.  And for every dream that dies, something on the inside of the person dies as well.  The death of a dream is just too painful because a part of us dies right along with it.

I’ve had many dreams die.  So have you.  And every time one died, something inside of us died too.  But when my dreams died, here’s I’ve found.  I learned that God has a dream for each of us that will never die.  Never.  It’s just too big to die, it’s place in God’s plan is just too important to let it die, and it’s backed up by a God who never dies. 

There are many who would not agree with me.  And that’s okay.  However, I believe that God has a dream for your life that’s bigger than any dream that you could conjure up.  God’s dream for you exceeds anything that you could dream for you.  So, ask Him what it is.  Talk to a pastor.  Get into your Bible and start reading.  If you don’t have one, buy one, or download a Bible app.  Listen to Christian music.  Find a church.  God can and will use any or all of these to help you discover the dream that you were fashioned to live out.  And that dream won’t die.

A Personal Testimony - Life

The odds that are we’ve never met, and if we have, I hope that I was able to leave something with you in the meeting as that is my passion and my calling.

My life has been devoted to helping people.  You know, you start out with a vision to help people, and that vision is often pretty romanticized.  In your mind you envision changing people lives, and because you are, you envision changing the world.  It all becomes kind of heroic, and valiant, and courageous, and all of that.

But you soon discover that helping people (truly helping them), will ask everything of you.  It’ll drain you.  At times it will drive you to despair.  You will look pain, and loss, and abuse, and hopelessness, and shattered lives, and addictions…you will look all of that stuff in the face, and you will find yourself questioning your ability to do anything about it at all.  Sooner or later, helping people will leave you with some level of trauma, and there will come a time (more than one time) that helping people make you ask if the world and the people in it are simply beyond hope.  Helping people will ask everything of you, and at times it will take everything from you.

As I sit with people day-in and day-out, I sit there with my own pain as well.  My own life has been marked by pain, by personal devastation, by losses that I thought impossible to survive, by abandonment that left me devastated, and by disappointments that crushed me to the point that I thought that recovery (of any kind) was simply a fantasy that was too painful to fantasize about. 

And so, I live the two sides of pain.  Those of the people that I’ve served for over forty years, and that of my own pain.  And there’s nothing heroic in that, as there are untold millions of people who set out each day to make the world a better place despite the wounds that they carry as they seek to heal the wounds that others carry.  And to all of you who are the walking wounded who have given their lives over to help those others who are wounded, whoever or wherever you may be, you have my deepest admiration.

But here’s the point in all of this.  Many people mock God as either someone who only exists in the feeble-minded or those who has to find security is some fabricated myth. Or if He does exist, he’s someone who’s incapable, or incompetent, or irrelevant, or out of touch, or outmoded, or inherently judgmental, or someone who’s failed us in entirely unacceptable ways…or however we’ve labeled Him.

But without hesitation, and without any sense of contrived religiosity, or syrupy idealism, or preachy verbiage, I can tell you that God is real.  I can also tell you that I would not be sitting here without Him.  And that’s not some cute or inspiring statement that’s supposed to trigger some emotion in you.  It’s my reality.  Life would have destroyed me without Him.  God is my rock in every sense of the word.  He is sturdy in the storm, both my own and those that I work with each and every day.  He is in the turmoil, but He is above it.  He is not the cause of our pain, but He is the solution to it.  He is not some idealized myth created by weak people who can’t face the realities of the world.  He is the greatest reality in all of the world.  He is what you need.  He is the everything in the middle of your nothing.

And I know this because I’ve lived it.  More than once.  In the pain.  In the darkness.  In the loss.  In the confusion.  In those moments of deep desperation.  When hope is something that I just can’t believe in any longer because life has left no place for it.  At those times in life when I can’t take the next step because I can’t get myself off of the ground so that I can try and take it.  I know that God is all of those things because I’ve watched Him do the impossible in my life, and I’ve sat next to tens of thousands of people, and I’ve watched Him do the impossible in lives whose situations were nothing but impossible.

Our culture would deny this.  In fact, it would ridicule it and do its level best to declare that all of this is the stuff of weakness, and foolishness, and stupidity, and ignorance.  And all I know is that I’ve watched it work too many times, in my own life, and in the lives of others to know that it’s far more real than the culture that would say that it is not.

If you’re lost today.  If your pain is deep beyond imagination.  If you’re standing alone in the darkness that is always a part of being alone.  If your dreams have died.  If your spouse has left, or your child has rejected you, or your finances have collapsed, or hope has eluded you, or if you’ve come to the point that you look in the mirror and you despise everything that you see looking back at you…whatever your situation might be, there is a God that’s big enough to heal you, lift you up, restore you, grant you hope, lay a new future in front of you and grant you the energy to achieve that future.  It is not impossible, for God is truly the God who pulls off the impossible. 

And how do that I know that?  How am I convinced of that?  Because He’s done that for me.  Because I’ve watched him do it for tens of thousands of people in over forty years of walking with wounded people.  It’s real, and regardless of who you are and what you’ve done, or where you’re at, or how deep you’ve fallen, or how dark your circumstances might be, it’s available to you.  Right here, right now.  Today, tomorrow, and forever.

Grab a Bible.  Find a church.  Call a pastor.  Get on your knees and pray.  It will work.  The road back might be long, but there’s a road.  And God will walk with you every step down that road.  Every step.  May God find you in your despair, in your confusion, in your desperation, in your darkness, in your hopelessness.  And may He create in you the life that you thought to be impossible, because that’s what He does.  That is my hope, and this is my prayer for you.

Being a Lamp That’s Lit

Jesus calls us to be the "light of the world."  The fact is, we are all lamps.  We all have the capability to cast light into a darkened world.  And furthermore, we can actually cast a compelling and far-reaching light if we choose to.

But even though we are a lamp with great potential, is that lamp ever lit?  Are our lives ever really bright and casting something hopeful into the darkness around us.  Yes, we are all lamps.  But few of us are lit.  And the question is, "Are you a lamp that's lit?"  The answer to that question will have immense bearing on your life and the lives of those around you.

Discover additional podcasts as well other resources on our website at www.craiglpc.com.

Uniqueness - Not as License

Sometimes fully being oneself in plain sight can be viewed as rather weird or downright odd.  Sometimes our uniqueness is labeled as strange, bizarre, quirky or slightly peculiar. ‘Different’ in a culture of uniformity is too frequently labeled as eccentric, curious, “out there,” slightly unconventional, eerie, a tad bit unorthodox, or being something akin to being a dork.  Our uniqueness can have dramatic social implications, causing us to be the outsider, the alien, the cultural misfit or just so plain weird that we’re a social phenomenon entirely unto ourselves with no place within which to fit at all; being relegated to the outcast. 

These kinds of conclusions are quickly drawn and judgments are carelessly rendered rather than seeing uniqueness as potentially fresh, distinctive, or entirely singular. Far too often uniqueness is directly correlated with weirdness, dumping it into an entirely negative and typically unredeemable social sideshow.  Uniqueness is pathetically reduced to oddity.It is then seen as entertaining because face it, “odd” is entertaining.  The throngs of society curiously mill about these sideshows seeking some form of entertainment or amusement at the ignorant expense of the miracle of uniqueness.  If you happen to have had the misfortune of having been dumped in some sort of sideshow because of your uniqueness, you’re seen as a permanent resident unless you reinvent yourself and sacrifice your uniqueness as part of that reinvention.  The cost to do that is astronomical and deadening.  

The Loss of Rendering Conclusions and Judgments

These various labels that we apply to others or have applied to us create a sharp and tainting distinctiveness that separates and excludes, rather than incorporates and includes. The profound asset of our uniqueness becomes a crippling liability.  We have these various labels dogmatically slapped on our foreheads in exceedingly bold type with the whole of our person then being identified based on whatever’s been scrawled on the label and slapped on our foreheads.  Following the brutality and ignorance of uniqueness branded as oddity, or worse yet as a deficit, we are forever relegated to the sideshow of life. The richness of our uniqueness is then lost to us, and lost to a world wallowing in stereotypes.  In such a“lose-lose” situation, we are all diminished in ways that we may never make up.

Rightly Exercising Our Uniqueness

In a culture that embraces tolerance and diversity, let’s make one point very clear. Being unique is not about taking license by being oneself and using it as a stage to elicit attention, or make some sort of controversial cultural statement, or use it as a pedestal to flaunt immoral behavior, or generate some sort of shock factor in those who are watching us be “us.”  Simply put, possession of uniqueness does not include permission to use that uniqueness with impunity to create something that we’re not in order to fulfill a personal agenda or fuel a social mission of some sort.  Our uniqueness is not a lifeless stool to be snatched up and errantly or thoughtlessly used in the service of whatever cause we choose to use it in.  Being authentically oneself is much more responsible and careful than that. 

Being oneself is about embracing a deep respect for the stunning and entirely vibrant uniqueness of all of creation; a uniqueness that has been carefully crafted, unapologetically exercised and fully manifest in each and every one of us. It’s respecting that uniqueness within us not as license to be itself at the cost of everyone else around it, but something that builds upon everything else around it.  It is not a pedestal to demand tolerance of the aberrant behaviors that we take license to construct from of our uniqueness.  Rather it’s a place where we bow in some soulful combination of deep appreciation and mind-boggling awe as we look to carefully unearth who and what we are without twisting or tainting who we are in the process.  It’s has nothing to do with revisionist mentalities or self-decreed permission where we seize our uniqueness, plop it as some lump of clay on a potter’s wheel and methodically shape it to our designs or our likening without regard for what it really is.  Uniqueness used in these ways will cease to be unique.

Uniqueness Gone Bad

The uniqueness of our individuality under the total control of the individual is likely to be driven by selfish and self-centered agendas that will make us unique, but uniquely troubled, dysfunctional, disoriented and distorted.  The power of uniqueness in the hands of limited people with unlimited parameters is dangerous indeed.  In a culture of self-determination, personal rights and the territorial thumping of our chests to declare that we’re the masters of our own fates we take license with our uniqueness that is not necessarily ours to take.  The cultural mindset of brazen independence creates a misguided sense that we are indeed of our own making, and that if we don’t shape who we are in whatever image we’ve determined that to be, we will have completely squandered our lives.

Uniqueness Well Handled

It seems that our uniqueness is not something to be shaped by us, but understood by us.  It’s not to be engineered by us, but explored by us.  It’s not to be created by us, but cultivated by us.  We do not set its agenda; rather we discern it so that we know enough of it to know the agenda it has set for us.  Our uniqueness is a precious gift that’s designed to be understood so that we can participate in making it the most that it can be, not shaping it into what we want it to be. 

Our uniqueness holds within it the clues and the resources that tell us who we are, why we’re here and what we’re supposed to do with this gift called life.Our uniqueness is most effectively nurtured and cultivated within moral and ethical parameters that don’t inhibit that individuality as the culture assumes, but rather creates a place for us to maximize that individuality.  Moral and ethical parameters keep our uniqueness pure, supple and free from all the things that would tarnish it and ultimately destroy it.  Uniqueness is a priceless gift that is as fragile as fine china, as tough as fired steel, and as broadly expansive as the creative genius of God.  It is a gift beyond our ability to handle, but not beyond our ability to surrender to something greater than us so that it will eventually become something greater than us.  Uniqueness surrendered and lived out in the enabling power and protective place of moral principles and ethical standards paves the way for that uniqueness to rise to unparalleled heights, to be more than we can think or imagine, and to grow far beyond the horizons of any vision we could craft for it. 

You are unique . . . that’s already an established reality.  Amazingly, you are one of a kind. You’ve got one and only one shot at life.  So, what are you going to do with the immense gift of your uniqueness?  You will kill it or cultivate it.  What will you do?  Consider it.

 

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.

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Darren and a Plastic Fish - The Size of Smallness

We seem small.  We look around at the mounting difficulties and challenges in our world today and we simply seem too small to make any sort of meaningful impact.  We witness the flood of irrational agendas, the rampant greed, the destruction of morality, the corruption in leadership, and the insanity of organizations that propagate questionable platforms, and we feel far too small to speak into any of those things.

Yet, small is big when understood correctly.  After all, everything big started as something small.  Everything big is a compilation of small things.  Everything big requires the work of small things to sustain them.  In essence, small is big.

Craig's recent message outlines the fact that size does not suggest power.  That we are capable of making a significant impact despite how small we might feel.  Take a moment and enjoy this thought-provoking and timely message.

Being a Lamp That’s Lit - Part Two

Being a Lamp That's Lit

So let’s begin at the beginning and ask the first question that needs to be asked . . . are you a lamp that's lit?  Matthew chapter 5 talks about being a light, but we might want to first ask the fundamental question, am I a lamp that's lit in the first place?

How many of us are lit and ablaze?  We’re all lamps . . .  every one of us.  But how many of us are lit and burning and casting light, because it’s one thing to be a lamp, and it’s quite another thing to be lit.  If you walk through life being a lamp that’s not lit, you will live a diminished life and you will add to the diminishment of those around you.  And that is tragic.

The Irish play-write, George Bernard Shaw was interviewed by a reporter who asked him, “Mr. Shaw, if you could live your life over and be anybody you’ve known, any person from history, who would you be?”  Listen carefully to what he said.  George Bernard Shaw said this.  He replied, “I would choose to be the man George Bernard Shaw could have been, but never was.”  Will that be your commentary on your life?  When the end comes and the years are dwindling, will you say, I would choose to be the man I could have been, but never was?

George Bernard Shaw was a lamp that, by his own admission, was never lit.

“Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.”  You . . . all of you . . .  all of us are lamps.  And the question that I have for you is “are you lit?

 

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.

Dealing With Grief and Loss - An Autumn’s Journey

Grief and loss are something with which we are all well acquainted.  Some of the losses that we've experienced are small, while others are utterly overwhelming.

Our natural response in our loss is to press past the pain in an effort to resume our normal lives as quickly as possible.  But in the rush to heal and free ourselves from the pain, we miss the immense growth that is awaiting us in the pain itself. 

Craig's recent message outlines the fact that "There is great purpose in great pain."  However, if we live in denial of our pain or place all of our efforts on simply stopping the pain we will forfeited the priceless growth that await us in the pain.

Take a moment and enjoy this thought-provoking and timely message.

Being a Lamp That’s Lit - Part One

Being a Lamp That's Lit

So let’s begin at the beginning and ask the first question that needs to be asked . . . are you a lamp that's lit?  Matthew chapter 5 talks about being a light, but we might want to first ask the fundamental question, am I a lamp that's lit in the first place?

How many of us are lit and ablaze?  We’re all lamps . . .  every one of us.  But how many of us are lit and burning and casting light, because it’s one thing to be a lamp, and it’s quite another thing to be lit.  If you walk through life being a lamp that’s not lit, you will live a diminished life and you will add to the diminishment of those around you.  And that is tragic.

The Irish play-write, George Bernard Shaw was interviewed by a reporter who asked him, “Mr. Shaw, if you could live your life over and be anybody you’ve known, any person from history, who would you be?”  Listen carefully to what he said.  George Bernard Shaw said this.  He replied, “I would choose to be the man George Bernard Shaw could have been, but never was.”  Will that be your commentary on your life?  When the end comes and the years are dwindling, will you say, I would choose to be the man I could have been, but never was?

George Bernard Shaw was a lamp that, by his own admission, was never lit.

“Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.”  You . . . all of you . . .  all of us are lamps.  And the question that I have for you is “are you lit?

 

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.

Grief and Loss - Part Two

Grief and Loss

Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life's Seasons

There's an old Chinese proverb that states:

"Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still."

I'm going to talk about grief and loss in this podcast.  And if there's ever times in our lives when we end up "standing still," it's during times of grief and loss.  My intent in this podcast is to help us understand how grief and loss, even devastating grief and loss, rather than causing us to "stand still," can actually facilitate great growth.  

Grief and Loss

One of my books, “An Autumn’s Journey – Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life’s Seasons” deals with the issue of grief and loss, so I'll be drawing from that book a bit this morning.  I ended up writing this particular book for a number of reasons.  Unfortunately, I don't have time to go into those reasons this morning.  Suffice it to say, I have had my own grief and loss, and for over forty years I've walked with thousands of people through their grief and loss.  Obviously, all of that created some of the motivation to write.

In reality however, the thing that really created the impetus for me to take on the task of writing about grief and loss was the unexpected death of my own mother on October 14th of 2007.  In those final hours of her life, on her deathbed, I promised her that I would write.  I made that promise to her because for years she had encouraged me to write.  And so, the journey from her deathbed, to her funeral, to closing out her personal affects and affairs, to visiting her graveside on a cold Christmas Day some two years later is the journey outlined in this book. 

Now, time this podcast only affords me the opportunity to say a few, very brief things of the many things I would like to say to you on the subject of grief and loss. The premise that undergirds everything that I am going to say in this podcast is simply this . . . "There is Great Purpose in Great Pain."

So, in order to build a foundation to support this premise, I'm going to pull several different thoughts together.  First, I want to talk about pain as tremendous opportunity.  Then I want to briefly talk about how and why we miss those opportunities.  Once I have those two thoughts in place, I want to share with you two basic ideas, two principles that you can begin to incorporate into your own times of grief and loss to turn your pain into great gain.

 

Additional Resources

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

Podcast Short: The Problem Is Not the Problem

The Problem Is Not the Problem

We all have…problems.  And there’s a real good chance that we have a lot of…problems.  Life comes with problems.  It’s part of the deal.  It’s a natural part of this thing that we’re all doing called life.  Life comes with problems.  But the real problem is not that life comes with problems.  The real problem is what we do with them.

In the majority of cases, the problem is ‘not’ the problem…despite the fact that we think it’s the problem.  The problem is how we’re choosing to deal with the problem.  That’s the problem.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that in most cases the problem actually creates less problems than the way that we’ve chosen to deal with the problem.  The ‘real’ problem is that we don’t want to deal with the ‘real’ problem.  And all we have to do is look around at our culture today to realize that we have cultivated, and refined, and ingeniously perfected a whole bunch of ways to do that.

We want to immediately minimize the problem out of our frantic efforts to wave off the gravity of it at any cost in order to salvage our self-image.  Or we want to blame others for it so that we are magically free of any culpability from the problem that we (through our geed or stupidity or arrogance) created.  We want to devise clever narratives to excuse whatever we did that created the problem so as to hand ourselves a free pass and by-pass accountability for the carnage we caused.  We want to see the problem as arising from circumstances beyond our control, leaving us utterly innocent, squeaky clean, and nothing more than the wounded victim of the choices that we refuse to own. 

Or, we have come to determine that the problem is marvelously self-serving, and that it grants us some sort of cherished leverage that we would lose should we actually solve the problem.  Therefore, we perpetuate the problem, turning a blind-eye toward those who are suffering because of the problem.  Or, most deviously of all, we spin the problem to be the brain-child of some ill-defined, but dark and foreboding force intent on our destruction.  And these people, or these organizations, or these clandestine groups clustered in some darkened room, or whatever they might be become enemy that they never were, and we become the victim that it is, in fact, the victimizer.  The real problem is rarely the real problem.

But when we fall prey to our lesser selves and enslave ourselves to the fear of accountability, or risk tarnishing our cherished reputations by being exposed as the culprits, or have to expend cherished resources to clean up the mess we made when we would much prefer to hoard those resources for ourselves, or when we seize the opportunity to turn our failures on others in order to elevate ourselves above them in some sickening power grab, or when we choose whatever gain the problem might grant us over the destruction it will wield in the lives of others…when we do any of these, we are creating a problem far bigger than whatever the real problem was.  Far bigger.  And we would be utterly foolish to think that these choices will not come back to haunt us with an unparalleled vengeance that we cannot begin to imagine.  Yes…the real problem is rarely the real problem.

It takes courage to step up and own what we have done.  It is the brave individual who will refuse to elevate themselves at the expense of others.  It is the person of integrity who will unflinchingly stare into the mirror of their decisions and own what they see staring back at them.  It is the man or woman of wisdom who will recognize that to embrace the consequences of our choices, and to own the outcome of our behaviors is the single path to freedom, and that any other path will always, always, lead to enslavement.  And it is the person of faith will understands that God can only forgive that which we repent of, and that there is nothing so large that He cannot, and will not, forgive.  God is in the business of wiping slates clean and handing out new starts.  Yes…the real problem is rarely the real problem.  And if we are to begin the process of wiping out the problems in our world, we must wipe out the way that we have chosen to deal with them.  We must…

“Do not deceive yourselves.  If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become “fools” so that you may become wise.  For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.  As it is written: “He catches the wise in their craftiness…”.

• 1 Corinthians 3:18-19

ECA Ordination Message - The Magnitude Of the Message in the Need of the Moment

The message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is everything that the world needs in a time when the world is madly pursuing everything that it doesn't need.  Our world is desperate for that message.  However, our less than thoughtful handling of the message of the Gospel has diluted it to the point that its appeal is nearly gone.  We have subjugated it to our particular interpretations, shaped it to our personal agendas, inserted our own biases, preached it for our own gain, presented it more as entertainment than transformation, and assumed that we have the power to deliver it by our own means.  A message manipulated and diminished in such ways will have no appeal to a dying world.

Craig's recent message to a group of ordination candidates thoughtfully and yet unashamedly challenges us to preach the richness of the Gospel free of the encumbrances that have left it weak and pathetic.  This message is a call to restore the purity and power of the message in a world that is desperate for us to do so.  

Discover additional resources at www.craiglpc.com.  You will also find daily resources on all of our Social Media platforms.

Grief and Loss - Part One

Grief and Loss

Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life's Seasons

There's an old Chinese proverb that states:

"Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still."

I'm going to talk about grief and loss in this podcast.  And if there's ever times in our lives when we end up "standing still," it's during times of grief and loss.  My intent in this podcast is to help us understand how grief and loss, even devastating grief and loss, rather than causing us to "stand still," can actually facilitate great growth.  

Grief and Loss

One of my books, “An Autumn’s Journey – Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life’s Seasons” deals with the issue of grief and loss, so I'll be drawing from that book a bit this morning.  I ended up writing this particular book for a number of reasons.  Unfortunately, I don't have time to go into those reasons this morning.  Suffice it to say, I have had my own grief and loss, and for over forty years I've walked with thousands of people through their grief and loss.  Obviously, all of that created some of the motivation to write.

In reality however, the thing that really created the impetus for me to take on the task of writing about grief and loss was the unexpected death of my own mother on October 14th of 2007.  In those final hours of her life, on her deathbed, I promised her that I would write.  I made that promise to her because for years she had encouraged me to write.  And so, the journey from her deathbed, to her funeral, to closing out her personal affects and affairs, to visiting her graveside on a cold Christmas Day some two years later is the journey outlined in this book. 

Now, time this podcast only affords me the opportunity to say a few, very brief things of the many things I would like to say to you on the subject of grief and loss. The premise that undergirds everything that I am going to say in this podcast is simply this . . . "There is Great Purpose in Great Pain."

So, in order to build a foundation to support this premise, I'm going to pull several different thoughts together.  First, I want to talk about pain as tremendous opportunity.  Then I want to briefly talk about how and why we miss those opportunities.  Once I have those two thoughts in place, I want to share with you two basic ideas, two principles that you can begin to incorporate into your own times of grief and loss to turn your pain into great gain.

Podcast Short: What I Don’t Want to Hear

Might I Say - What I Don't Want to Hear

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

 

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.

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Talk is Cheap

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.   “Talk is cheap,” as the old saying goes.  We say a lot of things, more due to the fact that we believe that we’re supposed to say those things, or we say so them because, in the end, they’ll get us what we want.  Consider this “Thought for Life:” 

“The degree of my commitment to a cause will not be in direct proportion to the degree that ‘I am willing’ to sacrifice for it.  Rather, it will be in direct proportion to the degree that ‘I am sacrificing’ for it.”

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

New Beginnings - Seeds in Pain

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

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

Podcast Short: Is Anyone Listening?

Is Anyone Listening?

Is anyone listening?  In the world within which you live, is anyone listening?  Does your voice matter?  The pain that you carry, the confusion that dogs your steps, the fear that drains your soul, the dreams that lay buried in a distant past, and a future that you sense is already being buried by the same things that buried your past…is anyone listening?  In those moments when loneliness is all that you know.  At those times when the loneliness has gone on for so long that you have little alternative than to believe that loneliness is the single story that life has penned for you, and that there is no other story…at those times is anyone listening?

Is there anyone who cares that you cry?  Is there anyone who is willing to place themselves aside in order to make sufficient space for you to place yourself in their arms?  Is there anyone who is willing to pick you up, to wipe clean the wounds that you have, to light a candle in your darkness, and help you press out into the light?  Is there anyone who’s willing to get their hands dirty so that you might begin the process of getting yours clean? Is there anyone listening…at all?

And if perchance someone does listen, are they listening?  Really?  Or do we sense that they are listening out of obligation?  Are we their project, or their charity case, and that in some way they are simply using us in some misguided way to fulfill some guilt-induced obligation to give back to society?  Are we the box that they check in the ‘good deeds’ column of their lives because they haven’t checked a whole lot of boxes in that column?  Or are they listening because focusing on our pain grants them an escape from their own?  Or are they listening because to play the hero in our life is to make them feel that they have a life, or at least some sort of purpose in life so they don’t stumble through life feeling purposeless?  Is anyone listening?  Anyone?

In the Bible God says, "Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.”  God will listen.  Not out of obligation.  Not because you are a project.  Not because you are a charity case.  Not because God is checking a box.  Not because He’s escaping from anything, or needs to play the hero, or to grant Himself some sort of purpose.  There is none of that.

God is listening.  And He’s listening because to hear you warms His heart.  To hear you thrills His soul.  To hear you is the culmination of everything that He created, including you.  He created the entirety of this world, and then He placed you in the middle of it so that you might know this God, and that He might love you.  Intimate relationship.  Unbroken relationship.  A forever relationship.  And when we broke that relationship through our sin, He refused to let that brokenness stand.  That brokenness stood against everything for which God created ‘everything.’  So deep was His desire to listen to us, to connect with us, to hold us, and heal us that He sent His Son to die to heal what we broke.  Yes, He listens.  He created us to be heard, and when we messed it up He did nothing less than sacrifice His Son to heal what we broke.  Yes, God listens.  He refuses to do anything less.  He listens.  And because He does, He’s waiting for you to speak.  And so, do the thing that you were created to do…talk to God, for He’s listening.

 "Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart."

• Jeremiah 29:12 and 13

There Is No God - Evidence to the Contrary

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.’

We Don’t Want a God

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.

Podcast Short: Good as the Enemy of the Best

Good as the Enemy of the Best

“That’s good enough.”  How many times have those words come out of our mouths?  The idea of this lackluster commitment to the living out of our lives has become so prevalent that we’ve learned to articulate it in a whole bunch of different ways.  The rather robust vernacular that we’ve created to wave off responsibility and say “that’s good enough” includes such catchy phrases as “that’ll get us by until Monday,” or “that’s good enough for government work,” or “that’s doable,” or “that’s in the ballpark,” or however we say “that’s good enough.”

The whole phenomena of “sliding by” or “skating by” has always been a byword of history.  Subsequently, any vague concept of a ‘work ethic’ seems to have become much less an ethic and much more of a remotely fuzzy idea.  We’re constantly working out ways of how not to work.  And in doing that, we forfeit doing all the incredible things that we could be doing.

Many of us seem to have developed this fairy-dust type of magical thinking where things will just be there for us.  Because we can’t see the efforts and the work of those who fill the shelves of our stores, or keep the wheels of commerce greased, or who relentlessly ply the seas of a forty-plus hour work week, they tend to become invisible.  And so, things are just there because they’re there.

Ultimately, our gifts, talents and abilities are sacrificed on the altar of laziness and entitlement.  We lose who we are, we lose what we could do, and in essence we lose our lives.  At best, whatever our best could have been is lost.  Tragically, in time we gradually lose a sense that we could actually do great things, and we forfeit the transformational reality that our best is both achievable and far beyond anything we could have imagined with the best of our imaginations.  We forget that to be our best is the best thing that we can be.

Being our best is asking how can we take ourselves to our own limits in any given situation?  It’s asking, how do I intentionally leave every situation and every person with more than what they had when I first encountered them?  Being our best involves walking away from every situation with less than what we had when we encountered it because we left something behind in the exchange.  Being our best asks did we press it as far as was humanly possible, and did we walk away with nothing else we could have given?

And so, commit to being your best.  Shun anything that is anything less than that.  Realize that you were created to ‘best’ your own ideas of what your best is.  Be your best, and in doing so transform yourself and transform those around you in the best way possible.

“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”

• Galatians 6:9

A Noble Calling - A Noble Response

Life calls us to many things.  We will have to step-up in more ways and in more situations that we'd likely prefer at times.  And when we have to step-up, the manner in which we do so becomes extremely important.  We can do so in ways that are less than admirable or less than honest.  We can attempt to side-step something, manipulate it to our convenience, shape it to our likes or dislikes, engage it in a way that invites the praise of the people that we admire, or we can ignore it altogether.  At some time and in some place, we will have to step-up.

As we watch the world today, many people are stepping-up in less than admirable ways.  It has become less about integrity and a whole lot less about honesty.  Stepping up has been hijacked by agendas of all sorts.  It has been compromised by lesser things that have created a nation of lesser people.  But we have the ability to step-up in ways that are noble...truly noble.  We can address situations thoughtfully, ethically and with the guiding hand of timeless wisdom.  We can change our families, our communities and our world by stepping-up to the challenges of life in ways both noble and brave.  We can all step-up in ways that makes stepping-up something beautiful and life-changing.

Podcast Short: What Is Better...Really?

What Is Better...Really?

What is “better?”  I mean, the definition of “better.”  When we change something, we tend to label the change as “better,” whether it’s better or not.  If we adjust something, or alter something, or eliminate it altogether, we define the changes that we make as “better.”  We initiate new programs, or we reconstruct old ones, and in doing so we say that we are making things “better.”  We craft new policies, or we tear down old businesses, or we adopt new beliefs, or we upgrade this, or we downgrade that, and we label all those actions as “better.”

But “better” based on what?  What’s the criteria that determines if something is, in fact, “better?”  Is it based on the current cultural climate?  Or, is it based on the trends that tend to be trending?  Or, is it based on the desire to make a name for ourselves, or get ahead, or beat the opposition, or bring down a boss, or lift up a cause, or promote a philosophy, or demote anything that irritates us?  Is it based on our desire to make a win-fall, or get ourselves out of a freefall, or just create a free-for-all?  What do we base the idea of “better” on?

Labeling something as “better” is often a justification for something that’s anything but “better”.  It’s that label that we attach to our actions, hoping that people will pay a whole lot more attention to the label, and a whole lot less attention to the actions that we’ve pasted the label on.  Sadly, most things are not better.  They’re certainly ‘something,’ but they’re not “better”.

But what should “better” be based on?  “Better” is when others benefit, even if we don’t.  “Better” is driven by the need of the common man, as the common man is the common cause.  It’s something in the service of a hurting world, and not something that serves to hurt the world.  “Better” is something that we do that leaves the world “better” than what we found it, even if we end up not being “better” in the service of that world.  It’s sacrificial.  It’s recognizing our responsibility to the lives around us, not the agendas within us.  “Better” is when we end the day having gained nothing, but having given everything.  “Better” is where love is given legs to run and greed can’t find its shoes.  The world needs to be “better” in a “better” way.  And that starts with you, and it starts with me, and it starts with rejecting anything that is not truly “better.”  

To Think With Thought - Words of Wisdom in Difficult Times

Few of us think with thought.  What I mean is that too few of us really examine the times that we're in verses getting caught up in the times that we're in.  If we're not caught up in a particular cause or some compelling agenda of some sort, then there's a good chance that what we're caught up in is the fear and insecurity of these various causes and agendas.  We're typically rather reactive rather than thoughtful.  We reflexively respond, rather than digging deeper and asking the difficult questions.  We move to 'fight-verses-flight' rather than something more calming and productive.

This podcast is a selection of Craig's quotes designed to give us comfort, perspective, insight and confidence as we face the uncertain times that we are living in.  These quotes assist us in being thoughtful in a manner that allows us to not only effectively navigate these times, but bring something of stability and healing to them as well.  They are written to help each of us become more thoughtful about the times so that our response to them can be more productive for us as well as those around us.  

Conscience or Convenience

We each have a conscience.  Whether we listen to it or abide by it is another story.  But we each have a conscience.  The issue with our conscience is what will we do with it?  The immediate answer might be that we will listen to it.  But do we really do that?  What if our conscience says "no" to the things that we want to say "yes" to?  What if it takes us in an entirely different direction than the direction that we would like to go?  What if is says that our dreams will be our downfall despite the fact that we are deeply passionate about those dreams?  What if it calls us to something that we feel is either horribly frightening or terribly inconvenient?  What if?

Too often we follow our conscience if the following is easy or if it's in keeping with our agendas.  It's easy to follow our conscience when it lines up with everything that we want.  But when it doesn't we often edit it, tweak it, put a hefty spin on it, or ignore it altogether.  And it is in making decisions like these that we end up in places that we never wanted to be.  It is the ignoring of our conscience that leads to the destruction of our lives.  Our conscience is not this shrill and nagging voice.  Rather, it is one of our most reliable compasses that keeps us out of the most terrible of places.

”LifeTalk’s Thought for Life - The Notion of God

Welcome to LifeTalk’s Thought for Life.  The notion of God does not set well with some people.  Sadly, that notion was often shaped by people or situations or less than admirable agendas that did not reflect the true nature of this God.  And if we’re going to reject something, maybe we should reject it on its true merits, not those that have been imposed upon it.  Consider this “Thought for Life:”  

“I can staunchly reject the notion that I was created to live in relationship with God.  But should I do that, I will be unable to reject all of the consequences for which I was not created.”

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

 

Additional Resources

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

Podcast Short: All Is Lost - Or So We Think

All Is Lost

Everybody seems lost these days.  People don’t like to admit that, or they refuse to admit that…but everybody seems lost these days.  I suppose that the greatest kind of ‘lost’ is to be ‘lost,’ but to deny that you’re ‘lost,’ even though you are.  That’s about the worst kind of lost that I can think of, and we certainly see a whole lot of that kind of ‘lost’ today.  Everybody seems lost these days.

Let’s face it, we live in a world that’s lost.  In one way or another (or to one degree or another), the world’s always been lost.  There’s a pattern to our humanity that should cause us to wise up a bit, and that pattern is that (as a species) we’re pretty consistently lost.  It just seems that we’re a bit more lost these days.

And in our world today, the more that we work to become un-lost, the more ‘lost’ that we seem to become.  As a culture, we walk around pretending that we have reliable maps and accurate compasses to get us un-lost.  But we have neither.  We attempt to create them, or make them, or say that we have them when we don’t.  We claim that we have the policy, or the formula, or the philosophy, or some recent enlightenment, or some supposedly brilliant or revolutionary idea from which we can now draw the maps and fashion the compasses that we’ve been looking for, for so very long.  And we grab hold of these new maps and compasses, and we use them to recalibrate wherever we are (and wherever it is that we think we want to go), and we end up deeper in woods than we’ve ever been before.  The woods of our lives and our culture are littered with discarded maps and broken compasses.  Everybody seems lost these days.

Of course we’re lost.  We’re lost because the woods that we’re in are bigger than the resources that we have to get out them.  And those woods become increasingly bigger the more that we convince ourselves that we can get out of them by ourselves.  Where we are is too big for any map or any compass that we can create.  And while we tend to bristle at the idea, God holds the map and has the compass.  A sure map and a steady compass.  And while we’re likely to continue to refute that reality, or work to ignore it in light of our incessant stubbornness, He’s got the map and the compass.  And all we have to do (all we have to do) is ask Him for it.  And I wonder (I wonder) exactly how lost we’re going to have to become before we finally ask Him.

 

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.

”LifeTalk’s” Thought for Life - Talk is Cheap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Sparrows and a Clapboard Garage

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

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

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

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

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

 

Characteristics of Treasures

Unobtrusive

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

 

The Product of Unexpected and Loving Camaraderie

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

 

Always Creating and Never Preserving

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

 

Sown to the World

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

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

The Problem is Not the Problem

We all have…problems.  And there’s a real good chance that we have a lot of…problems.  Life comes with problems.  It’s part of the deal.  It’s a natural part of this thing that we’re all doing called life.  Life comes with problems.  But the real problem is not that life comes with problems.  The real problem is what we do with them.

The Problem is Not the Problem

In the majority of cases, the problem is ‘not’ the problem…despite the fact that we think it’s the problem.  The problem is how we’re choosing to deal with the problem.  That’s the problem.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that in most cases the problem actually creates less problems than the way that we’ve chosen to deal with the problem.  The ‘real’ problem is that we don’t want to deal with the ‘real’ problem.  And all we have to do is look around at our culture today to realize that we have cultivated, and refined, and ingeniously perfected a whole bunch of ways to do that.

Do We Search for the Truth - Or For Ways Around It?

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.

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?

Better or Worse - The Clouding of Our Choices

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

The Battle - I'd Rather Be David

Battles.  We all fight them.  Sometimes they're just the minor things that are a natural part of the day-in and day-out living of our lives.  Sometimes they're unspeakably brutal and unexplainably savage, making no sense as to why they're happening.  Battles can sometimes be something more of a minor irritant, or they can be something that leaves our lives in flames, cinders and ash.  At times we battle people, we battle circumstances, we battle society, we battle injustices, or we battle within ourselves.  Either way, we all fight battles.

But how do we fight them?  Do we fight them just to survive them?  Do we choose not to fight and opt to surrender as the easiest course of action?  Do we fight them by playing the victim and therefore not really fight them at all?  Do we have someone else fight our battles for whatever reason we have them fight them?  Battles will come as they are a natural part of our existence.  But how will we fight them?  And how much does that choice dictate the outcome that we will live with?

 

 

We Are a Message - Sending a Message

You are a message.  You cannot live your life without someone, somewhere watching you.  Your existence is not solitary to the point that that existence does not impact another life.  Your's is not a life of isolation.  You are not insulated from the rest of the world in a manner that that world is not impacted by you.  You are a message, whether you like that or not.  And because you are, you might ask what kind of message you are sending.

Think about it.  The fact that we are a message to others positions us to change things.  Sometimes we feel inadequate, small, and something more of an anomaly in this infinite existence within which we find ourselves.  But because we are a message, we can touch other lives.  In fact, we can change other lives.  And in the changing, they can likewise go and change other lives themselves.  You are a message and because you are you might wish to consider what kind of message you're sending, for the quality of your life and that of generations to come will be effected by the message that you leave.

How Have We Come to This Point? The Rejection of God

How have we come to the point where the message of the Gospel is largely considered irrelevant in 21^st century America?  How is it that God is outmoded, outdated, antiquated, and has nothing of value to say to us as we live out our lives today?  How is it that the God Who created ‘all of this’ has been left behind by the very thing that He created?  How have we come to this point?

But maybe the question is not “how,” but “why.”  Why have we come to this point?  Why have we come to visualize God as some ancient artifact that might have worked for less educated people living out their lives in some primitive society hundreds, if not thousands of years ago?  Why have we relegated Him to a period of time long gone, and in doing so completely failed to recognize that times might change, but people don’t?  Why have we come to see God as entirely outmoded in light of our progressive philosophies, or our ever-shifting ethics, or our new morality?

God is most relevant thing in existence.  His principles apply to our world today probably more than any time in human history.  He alone holds the truths, the ideals, the values, and the principles that can assist us in navigating the profound challenges of our times and our lives.  The principles handed down to us in the Bible are entirely sound, uncompromisingly relevant, timely in ways that are mind-boggling, and sufficiently powerful to assist us in navigating the descending darkness of the times that we live in.  God and His principles are the most relevant thing that I can think of.

Am I Paying Attention? - Being Aware

Are we paying attention?  We think that we are.  We would tell others that we are.  We lead ourselves to believe that we've embraced opinions or points of view because (in our minds) we really took the time to understand the dynamics related to them.  We would say that we're informed, probably more than any generation before us.  We listen and we read and we analyze, so we say and so we think.  But are we paying attention?

Too often we're not paying attention at all.  Not really.  We're frequently embracing something because someone we admire is embracing it.  We're standing up for some cause because it looks good on the surface and we all too readily assume that if it looks good on the surface, everything underneath the surface must be good as well.  We're invested in something because a whole bunch of other like-minded people are invested in it, so with so many people invested it must be worthwhile.  The fact of the matter is, we're not paying attention.  And maybe what we need to do today is to pay attention to the fact that we're not paying attention and begin to recognize the incredible problems that that continues to create.

An Intimate Collision

We are empty.  Terribly empty.  We don't like to admit that...but we are empty.  And into that emptiness we throw all kinds of things...relationships, money, material wealth, alcohol, career pursuits, various belief systems, self-help gurus, bulging portfolios, and more.  We throw all kinds of things into the hole that's within us.

But the hole remains.  Despite how much we throw into it, the hole remains.  And have we ever considered how it is that we can throw so much stuff into a hole and yet never fill it up.  In fact, despite all of the things that we throw into it, it remains just as empty as if we'd never thrown anything into it in the first place.  But we don't learn that lesson all that well.  And therefore, we just keep throwing in as much stuff as we can get our hands on.

We are empty.  Horribly empty.  And that emptiness is only magnified by our panicked efforts to fill that hole, only to fall exhausted on the ground of our lives realizing that the hole is entirely untouched.  For whether we like to believe it or not, or whether it runs contrary to our cherished agendas, or whether it's vogue or not, only God can fill that hole.  Only God.

What I Work to Remember - They Are People

In the midst of their behaviors, I often forget that behind the behaviors are people.  When they rant about some cause or press some agenda down the throats of everyone around them, I forget that they are people.  When the worst of them triggers the worst of me and I wish things upon them that I should not wish upon them, I would be wise to remember that they are people.  When they respond with selfishness or ignorance and I sit pondering what's wrong with them, I need to remember that they are people...just like me.

It doesn't take long to become jaded.  We can move rather quickly to a position of hatred, bitterness and resentment.  And in doing so, we become contributors to the division and alienation that we say we hate.  Moreso, we become the people that we say we dislike, and in doing so we become a little less (or maybe a whole lot less) like God.  And so, maybe we need to think about things differently.  Maybe we need to realize that all of these people are 'people.'  That behind the behaviors, the choices, the rants and thoughtless behaviors, there are people who are just like us who are imperfect (just like us).  And maybe in realizing that, we can begin to close the gap instead of contributing to it.

 

 

Heralding a Hero - A Tribute to 911

What is a hero?  A real hero?  Not one cast of some script or fashioned as part of a fictional plot.  Not one that is created by political spins, or constructed by syrupy platitudes, or made larger-than-life by nighttime talk shows.  Not the Hollywood type, or those who are deemed heroic because they play a sport or have acquired some degree of social visibility.  None of these.  The question is, "What is a real hero?"

As we approach 911, we might want to ask that question.  We might consider that we have laid the mantel of 'hero' on many people who were nothing of the sort.  We have reigned down accolades on those who have only risked in an arena made safe, but never risked in one that was not.  We hold up individuals who read the script and play the part but never actually do the part.  And given that we have done that far too many times, maybe at the remembrance of 911 this is a time to ask, "What is a hero?"  Really.  Craig's podcast takes a thoughtful, yet direct look at that question so that we might celebrate true heroes.

We Are Better Than This

We are better than this.  We are better than who or what we've become.  We are better than the poor choices that we have made and the life of compromise that we are living.  We are capable of phenomenal things that we can barely imagine, if we can imagine them at all.  Yet, we stoop to lesser things.  We bow to the bane of compromise and we walk in the shadow of mediocrity.  We settle for the crumbs that we toss out to ourselves while not understanding that a meal of epic proportions is ours for the taking.

We live minimal, marginalized and menial lives not because we have to.  We live those lives because we choose to.  We live in the shadow of what we could be but often never become.  And the consequence of this minimized existence diminishes both ourselves and everything around us.  We are better than this.  In fact, we are far, far better than this.  It's not too late to understand who we are and to start living in the power of that person.  We are better than this and now is the time to step up to engage that marvelous reality.

Accountability - Choosing to Be Accountable

We don't like to be accountable.  We hate being called on the carpet or called out.  Often we prefer just to put our tail between our legs and sneak away to some place that no one will ever find us.  Or we choose to justify our actions, place blame, or write it off to a bad day or a bad week or a bad life.  We want to make excuses why it really wasn't all that bad, or that our intentions were good, or we were misinformed, or a hundred other excuses to keep us from having to be accountable.  We don't like to be accountable.

Being accountable means that we have to own our stuff.  We have to admit our mistakes, own up to our greed, face the music when we penned the lyrics, and simply say that we were wrong.  That's tough.  But it's needed.  We need to be accountable.  We need to own our mistakes.  We need to 'belly up to the bar' and admit that we made a poor choice.  And then we need to correct those errors despite the cost to us in doing so.  Look at our world today.  It's abundantly clear that we need to grow up and be accountable.  And that starts with each of us.

Shep - To Run With a Limp

We all have a limp that relentlessly dogs our steps, causing us at times to be dog-tired as we work against our limp in order to keep our lives sufficiently erect. For some of us, our limp is so slight and relatively minor that it’s really quite difficult to detect.  For others of us it’s blatantly obvious, causing us to lurch through life with unsteady and uncertain steps.  To whatever degree we limp, we all walk with a limp.  

There are those of us whose limp is clearly physical, rendering its effect on our cadence as painfully obvious.  Then there are those of us whose limp is emotional, or relational, or spiritual.  It might find its origins in a relationship gone bad, or a life gone nowhere, or hope gone away.  The possibilities are as endless as the ways in which each of us limp.  But we all walk with a limp. 

Shep– Running with a Limp

His name was Bob Shepherd.  My Dad called him “Shep” for short.  The name stuck with him throughout the length of their friendship, ultimately going to the grave with both of them.  Dad and Shep mutually shared an array of marvelous life experiences that made them the best of friends. 

Shep’s limp was polio.  His left leg hung a full three inches shorter than his right leg, profoundly throwing his body from left to right with a heavy pendulum-like cadence that should have toppled him with each step.  But Shep mastered his limp in a manner that his cadence was a match for anyone who would walk the road of the life with him.  Indeed, Shep walked with a limp.  But as Shep found out, a limp need not be limiting. 

The Assumption

Our limps carry an assumption.  And typically the assumption is that the limp will be limiting despite the limit of our efforts to make it otherwise.  Our goal is to limit how limiting we think our limp might be.  It’s all about minimizing the limp which casts the limp always and forever as a disability and a liability, thereby completely robbing it of possibility.  

Getting Close to Normal

Or we set about the task of defining“normal,” and we determine that whatever “normal” is, we’re not normal.  Then we determine exactly how far our limp has put us from “normal.”  It becomes a grand crusade to get as close to “normal” as we can, rather than understanding that we can create an entirely “new normal” that can be far more impressive than the bland “normal” that we’re chasing.   

Surrender

For some of us we surrender to our limp,feeling that the nature of our limp is forever beyond our ability to offset in any manner despite our most aggressive efforts to do so.  We grieve whatever loss our limp has thrust into our lives, and we chart a defeated future that’s now mapped out by whatever our limp happens to be. 

The Possibilities of the Limp

Is it possible that our limp is the very thing that allows us to run?  And without a limp, could we in reality run?  Have we been so entangled in assumptions, and so enslaved to some definition of normal,and have we embraced a defeated posture of surrender for so long that we’ve missed the potential inherent in the limp? Is a limp the very thing that distinguishes us from others in a way that gives us a powerful platform from which to influence others?  Does a limp give us distinctive experiences that others will never have the privilege of experiencing?  Could it be that such a glimpse dramatically expands our view of life, while our limp profoundly extends our experience of life?  If so, then our limp could very well be the greatest gift and the most profound opportunity that will beset this life of ours.  Like Shep, we can run with a limp. 

Limp and Legacy

Our limp could potentially be one of the greatest assets that we will ever possess. And so as we consider our limps, it is my hope that we see the tremendous possibilities in them and the privilege of having them.  Like Shep, may we master our limp in a manner that our cadence is a match for anyone who would walk the road of the life with us.  May we run with a limp in a way that we could never do so without one.

The Worst Slavery - Slavery to Ignorance

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

Those kinds of pictures have become our definition of slavery; the visual that creates a picture of what slavery is.  That definition is nearly exclusive, making our definition of slavery so incredibly tight that we can’t see any other kind of slavery at all.  And if we don’t see slavery, we assume freedom. That assumption in and of itself can be enslaving.

 

 

Slavery to Ignorance

 

Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”  Ignorance is being oblivious,to one degree or another, to the obvious. It’s not seeing what actually ‘is’ to the point that whatever it ‘is’that ‘is,’ isn’t . . . at all.  It’shaving no recognition of something that exists despite how very real and very powerful that thing might be.  It seems that kind of living can be freeing in some cases, and horrifically dangerous in others.  The worst kind of ignorance is when we’re ignorant that we’re ignorant. At that point slavery leaps out of tin-types and into our worlds. 

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

 

 

What Enslaves Us?

 

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

 

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

 

Ignorance in Action

 

Yet, we tuck these things in the file of ignorance and then we file it away in the filing cabinet of forgetfulness.  In reality, we walk with all of this stuff hanging on with claws embedded in our hearts, and roots entwining our souls.  Yet we ignore them.  We skip and cavort through life to some sort of fabricated tune whose verses sooth us with lyrics that all is good and our lives are squeaky clean and polished to a mirrored surface. 

Or we manipulate ourselves into believing that whatever good that we have is good enough.  That life is more about the business of survival which doesn’t afford us the larger luxury of introspection, personal evaluation and the sweaty rigor of change. We don’t see anyone else focusing on all that negative stuff and so we assume that it must not be all that bad or everyone else would be focusing on it . . . wouldn’t they?  We find some comfort in the belief that overall we’re good people and at least we try to do the good thing even if we don’t end up doing the good thing.  We create expansive and ornate rationalizations to justify ignorance, and we do a bang up job of creating them.  We lull ourselves into belief that in the end, all of that stuff really doesn’t matter all that much anyway and that it will sort of eventually fall off behind us and kind of blow off the road of our lives,  somehow getting lost somewhere in the wilderness of our journey . . . so we think.  Therefore, we settle in ignorance and let ignorance give all of these things space to enslave us.

 

 

Our Enslavement

 

We are a peculiar people indeed.  We tend to focus on the tasks that will either achieve our goals or keep our heads above water, whatever our situation might be.  We’re notorious for feeding,watering and carefully attending to all the superficial stuff, but we put the real stuff out of sight behind the impermeable veil of ignorance.  And we live as slaves to that stuff.  We work to tactfully or not so tactfully counter the real stuff and we futilely attempt to offset it by managing and manipulating the superficial things and focusing on the things that don’t hit us too hard or upset us all too much.  Yet all of our efforts to offset all of the things stored in ignorance are wholly insufficient.  We live trying to change things by ignoring them.  We attempt to resolve them by countering them with something else that isn’t as difficult or problematic dealing with.  We try to cheat ourselves to health and wholeness. 

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

 

 

Refute and Refuse Ignorance           

 

We refute and refuse ignorance by being honest about our weaknesses and failures. We acknowledge and bring to the forefront all of those things, we work to work through them with diligence and beat them by resolving them.  In that way our enslavement can truly end.

 

Uniqueness - Looking Beyond Labels to See Strengths

You ever notice that we seem to be on this relentless quest where we’re scrutinizing ourselves raw in order to ascertain what we think our flaws, our foibles, our weaknesses and our warts are?  We put ourselves under some sort of minutely dissecting microscope with skewed lenses in order to ferret out all of our little imperfections.  We incessantly crawl around on all fours with our eyes mere centimeters from the surface of our lives, scratching and picking and sorting so that everything that we are is entirely clean, socially acceptable, without cultural blemish and perfectly instep with whatever it is that we’ve chosen to determine our steps.  With our noses to the ground on an outrageously mad hunt for any and all imperfections we whittle away our lives being what we think we’re supposed to be, rather than being who we were created and designed to be.  Ever notice?

 

What Sets the Standard For Our Search?

There’s certainly a standard in our culture.  There are expectations that clearly outline who and what we’re supposed to be.  Those expectations are based on culturally acceptable norms that create “cookie-cutter” stereotypes.  Stereotypes perpetuate the cultural norms by encasing them in some kind of frozen blocks so that they automatically perpetuate themselves in any and all places. An unknown author wrote, “Stereotypes are devices for saving a biased person the trouble of learning.”  The worse bias that we can have is a bias about ourselves as it saves us the trouble of learning that we’re a whole lot more than we thought ourselves to be.  A bias also saves an incessantly busy culture the time of really looking deeply into itself in order to ascertain the wealth within it.  And so we press and contort ourselves in order to fit into whatever box the cultural stereotype has designed. 

Society too often creates a “one size fits all” kind of mentality.  There’s an assumption that there are slots to fill and we must fill the slots.  Find your place, get in it and stay there.  Figure out whatever the cadence is and march accordingly.  Find your box, move in,decorate it, set up shop and be happy. What color is your parachute, what’s your social standing, what’s your breeding and background, what’s your disposition, what’s your passion, what’s your career, and how’s your personality wired? Once you’ve figured all that out, set it aside, take a number, get inline and realize you’re just one of the crowd. 

In many cases, the standards of society are good, meaningful and productive. There are a large number of societal standards that are worthy of our emulation.  However, society too often sets standards for society, not the individual. Society often wants it clean, uncomplicated, tight and easy, so just find your place in line and get it in. Because that’s often the mindset, cultural expectations are designed to fulfill and achieve that mindset.  In succumbing to it, we lose our individuality and sacrifice the resources of that individuality.

 

Discovering Our Uniqueness

The balance that few people seem to achieve is one where we purposefully cultivate the core of who we are, while working to slough off the biasing goo of the culture.  It’s not about a blatant disregard for cultural norms or expectations at all.  Rather,it’s being committed to our uniqueness as a person rather than being rigorously force-fit into whatever the culture wants to force-fit us into.  It’s realizing that when we maximize who we are, we are then of maximum benefit to society and the world around us.  Yet, before we can be authentically “us” we must determine who or what that “us” is. In more effectively making that determination, there are a few thoughts you might want to start with:  

  

Understanding Our Limitations

First, healthy self-evaluation takes place when we’re frankly honest about our limitations.  Sometimes our limits should be exactly that .. . our limits.  Wisdom often involves knowing when to stop, when far enough is far enough, and when it’s legitimately time to invest our energies elsewhere. Limitations exist for reasons. It’s not about giving up or surrendering or being weak-willed or passively apathetic.  It has nothing to do with being sheepish, shy, insecure or outright scared.  Rather, limitations let us know when something is completed, that further work on our part is unnecessary, that anything beyond this point is squandered energy, and that we need to direct our resources toward the next place in our lives.

 

Developing Realistic Expectations

Second, effective self-evaluation takes place when we’re realistic about our expectations.  Our expectations can be too high, too low,entirely misdirected, or so vague that we couldn’t even tell someone what they were.  Expectations define what we expect of ourselves and they typically say volumes about how we feel about ourselves.  Lack of expectations either suggests a sloth-like laziness, a blatant ignorance about life, a disregard for the gift of life and the shot we have at it, or a glaring lack of self-confidence.  Realistic expectations cannot be the stuff of wildly irresponsible ideas or the product of fear-based barriers.  They should reflect the genuine capabilities of our uniqueness which will create the most balanced environment within which our uniqueness can flourish. 

     

Self-Evaluation that’s Outside of Our Vision

Third, healthy self-evaluation occurs when we view ourselves through the template of a belief system that calls us out, up and beyond our own humanity to believe in our ability to embrace something infinitely higher and terribly more profound than the lax designs of a mediocre culture.  It’s believing that the vision of who we can be is dramatically limited by our vision of who we can be.  It’s believing that something greater than us has something a whole lot greater in mind for us.  If we’re not careful, we forfeit vision for confining rubrics because they seem more reasonable and a whole lot more doable.  We then embrace a pathetic and unnecessary compromise that spreads the infesting germ of mediocrity throughout our lives.  We can kill the germ of mediocrity by looking back at ourselves through eyes of something a whole lot bigger than us that sees us as big as we really are.

 

We Are More

Few of us do any kind of self-evaluation with anything remotely resembling the kind of depth that unleashes us.  We are diminished by our own assessment of ourselves; an assessment that wholly abandons our uniqueness.  We rarely embrace a framework that even comes close to allowing us to see the immensity of who we are; that based on that understanding beckons us to be humbled in the stunning recognition of who we are, and that challenges us to draw upon the resources around us to build upon the immense resources within us.  We are more than we presume ourselves to be;much, much more.  

When the Challenges are Bigger Than Us

Most of the challenges that we face are far bigger than us.  They have a power and a vastness to them that far exceeds whatever resources we have to bring to whatever battle we're fighting this time around.  And while we might be able to make a dent in some of these things, and while we might be able to nudge them a bit in a better direction, we rarely have the kind of impact that we would want to have.

So why are the challenges in life typically bigger than what we have on hand to fight them?  Why is it that the effects that we can have on them are marginal at best and non-existent at worst?  Why have we been positioned with such minimal abilities in the face of such monstrous liabilities?  Could it be that these realities are the evidence of God and the resource of prayer that we have been given to engage this God?  Could it be that maybe prayer is the answer that we don't believe is the answer?  Is it possible that this antiquated act of coming before God is not antiquated at all?