Life Talk With Craig Lounsbrough

Who Are You Giving Yourself Away To? Who are you giving yourself away to?  To what propaganda have you come to subscribe?  To what bit of media polished bias or refined political spin have you succumb?  Who has your ear, and therefore holds the heart to which your ear is attached?  What are the voices that have methodically and patiently lulled you into some sort of comatose complacency where you no longer engage this rare, but incredibly precious thing that we call common sense?  What podium have you obediently sat in front of that has led you to believe that you cannot think for yourself, or maybe that you can, but that you don’t need to?  Who has told you that facts are irrelevant, and that the truth is simply an irritating obstacle to be quickly discarded if they don’t neatly fit on the preferred end of some ever-changing political spectrum?  Who are you giving yourself away to? We would likely say that we have not given ourselves to anyone.  That none of these things are happening, and if perchance they

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 greates

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.

Where Did All The Time Go? “Rush often results in waste and moments forever lost.  Attention to time is inattention to the life that fills that time.  So much can be lost.”  “Where did all the time go?”  We ask that all the time.  However, it’s not where the time went.  It’s what we were doing with the time while it was going. Think about this.  When it comes to time, we only get a certain amount of it.  We get this block of time that has a distinct beginning that we’ve already experienced.  We’re done with that part of it.  But as for the ending, we’re not all that certain when that’s going to show up.  All we know is that sooner or later, it’s going to show up.  And we can’t buy more time to push that date out.  Time’s not renewable so you can’t use it a couple of times over to stretch it out.  You can’t manufacture more of it.  You can’t store it away so you can go grab a bunch of it when you’re about ready to run out of whatever amount of time you had.  Time is what it is.  And whether we use it wisely, o

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 somet

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 convinc

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

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.

“When I’m at the bottom looking up, the main question may not be ‘how do I get out of this hole?’ In reality, the main question might be ‘how do I get rid of the shovel that I used to dig it?” We dig holes.  Lots of them.  With all kinds of shovels.  But the interesting thing is that we dig most of these holes without even recognizing that we’re digging holes right in the middle of digging them.  We dig a lot of holes and we have all kinds of shovels to dig them with.  We dig these holes through the decisions that we make, or the people that we tend to spend our time with, or the activities that we engage in, or the lifestyle choices that we’ve made, or the way that we spend our money, or the belief systems that we adhere to, or the habits that we develop, or the choices that we make to advance our careers, or the people that we marry and the people that we don’t.  We dig all kinds of holes with all kinds of shovels. And maybe what we should do with our lives is stop digging holes.  And maybe we should stop a

What Is Success and What Is It Not? “Success”.  People chase after this thing that we call “success.”  But in the pursuit of this elusive thing that we call “success”, maybe the better question is, “What is success”?  How do we define it?  How does the culture define it?  How do the people that we spend our time with, or live with, or work with, or play with define this thing that we call “success?” Certain things are considered more valuable to achieve, or we grant them more weight, or we give them precedence over other things.  There’s this pre-determined hierarchy of sorts that’s established by the culture, or by a certain industry, or a particular profession.  There are things that are granted an elevated status by virtue of their longevity, or the difficulty involved in achieving them, or the sacrifices that have to be made in order to accomplish them.  There are things that we define as success because few people achieve them, or maybe no one’s achieved them.  Whatever the case, there are an array of de

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-pla

There Is No God - Evidence There is no God.  It’s not an unfamiliar statement.  In fact, it permeates much of our modern thinking, which begs the question if our modern thinking is really either ‘modern’ or ‘thinking.’ I think that the mentality that ‘there is no God’ is centered primarily on the fact that we don’t want a God.  Therefore, out of convenience, we simply declare that there is none, for we fear that the experiences that we crave will be snatched from us, the pleasures that we wish to indulge in will be made taboo, that we will somehow be punished if things feel too good, and that this doting judge-like figure will frown on most everything that makes us happy.  So, we decide that we don’t want a God.  And subsequently, we declare that there is no God. Subsequently, we then become our own gods, for the absence of a God does not eliminate our need of one.  So, we fill the role.  But because we demanded that we be these little gods and become the captain of our own ships, sunken ships litter the seas

“The most critical time in any battle is not when I’m fatigued, it’s when I no longer care.” Too often we don’t care, or that’s what we tell ourselves.  We work really hard not to care because we’ve figured out that caring is just too risky, in whatever way it happens to be too risky for us.  We get the idea in our head that ‘not’ caring is just easier, because we don’t care.  Or it’s safer, because we don’t care.  We’re not in a position to get hurt, because we don’t care.  If things don’t go our way it doesn’t matter, because we don’t care.  If something or someone fails us, there’s no loss to us because we don’t care.  And this whole mindset of not caring is not about not caring at all.  It’s about protecting ourselves from the pain that we fear we’ll experience if we do care. But, by assuming this self-protective position, we’re doing something that we may not be thinking about at all.  We’re retreating.  Basically, we’re retreating from any situations that have caused us pain before, or from situations t

“In full uniform, the color guard marched by as part of the parade.  And as they did, he forced his horribly slumped and deeply aged body out of his worn wheelchair and stood to ram-rod attention.  He held a salute until the guard had passed, and then he feebly collapsed back into his wheelchair.  As I stared in ever-warming admiration, emblazoned across his hat I saw the words “WWII Veteran.”  And while I deeply admire his stirring passion for our country, I stood there wishing that my passion for the cause of Christ might someday be strong enough to lift me out of the many wheelchairs within which I sit.” Am I passionate for the right things?  Not just passionate.  But passionate in the right way.  Sure, there’s a lot of voices out there.  There’s a lot of causes out there.  There’s a lot of yelling, and screaming, and arguing, and hostile behaviors, and noisy propaganda, and a bunch of edgy people on more than one rant advocating for these causes.  On top of that, the causes themselves shift depending upon

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 anym

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 t

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’v

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 worl

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. 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

New It Does Not Mean Better 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