Life Talk With Craig Lounsbrough

We must take Christmas out of the cultural boxes into which we have thoughtlessly crammed it. We must free it of the confines of our stupidity, we must release if from the filthy hands of our greed that shaped each box, and it must be freed of the bane of special interests that attempt to seal these boxes tight. And once we’ve done all of that, we must burn every box to ash and cinders. Yet, the oddity of it all is that we really can’t keep Christmas in a box anyway. We might ignorantly presume such power, but it is only an assumption and nothing more. Despite our most robust efforts to ignore it, deny it, render it a fairy-tale, play it off as the invention of misty-eyed dreamers, and press it far off of the edges of a blind culture, Christmas remains what it is. It will forever remain the only rescue mission that set out with enough power to actually rescue us. No matter the propaganda and hype that we grant them, all other missions will fail…miserably. And I would hate to meet my own death realizing that I

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more. “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more. “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more. “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin

The Tragedy of Gutting Greatness Have we forgotten Christmas?  Or more tragically, have we never really known it at all?  Have we embraced some pathetic derivative that is but a thin and emaciated shadow of something that we have found intimidating and demanding because of how grand it is?  And so, do we diminish great stories out of our fear of them?  More frighteningly, do we then come to believe those stories as ‘the story?’ Have we diligently re-crafted and recast some original story, beneficently leaving a few scattered themes that we thought to be profound, yet sufficiently diminishing the story so that it could not demand something of us?  Have we come to understand that the adventure of wonder is welcomed by us when it is safely held within the imaginative bounds of fiction, but that we fear it should it be loosed into our reality? Have we discovered that we love great things, but we hold them in dread fear at the same time?  And have we come to understand that we fear them because they explicitly hig

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more. “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more. “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin

Christmas - We Forget We forget. In the middle of our own agendas, we forget. Consumed by the incessantly shifting tides of the culture, we forget. Caught up in the ever-changing maze of politically correct ideologies, we forget. With bills looming and jobs teetering and marriages faltering, we forget. With value systems crumbling and leadership charting a course to places dark and foreboding, we forget. With crime rising and hope dwindling and common sense disappearing, we forget. We forget. When we fix our eyes upon the world around us, we will forget. When we vest our hope in man-made institutions and root the entirety of our confidence in the strategies of men, we will forget. When we invest our lives in hoarding material wealth and exhaust our resources in the pursuit of successes that catch the eyes and admiration of those around us, we will forget. Oh yes, we will forget. We forget. When we demand our own way we become wayward. When we are swept up by the greed of our own minds we will be swept away by

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more. “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin

Welcome to LifeTalk Christmas Rescue “I’m not certain that the greatest thrill was actually being rescued. Rather, I think that the greatest thrill was finally realizing that I would be. And the cry of an infant two thousand years ago was that realization.” That’s Christmas. It’s our rescue. It’s our prison break. It eliminates our need to erase, or rewrite, or edit, or rip out parts of the book, or pretend that they never happened at all. Christmas eliminates all of that. How is that possible? It’s simple. God reversed Himself and became a human, reversing Himself even further by becoming a newborn human. He was born to an impoverished teenage couple in a barn that sat in the obscurity of a backwater town called Bethlehem that was located completely off the map of commerce or importance. He entered the world about as far from any kind of political stage, or religious hierarchy, or privileged status that He could find. And the endgame of His birth, of this thing that we call “Christmas” was the fact that thir

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more. “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more. “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin

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

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more. “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more. “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more. “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more. “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more. “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more. “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin

“The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is a novel about hope.  A novel about how incredibly devastating life can be, and yet how God can bring an incredible hope into the most devastating situations.  This story unapologetically and frankly embraces the harsh realities of life and allows us to walk alongside of people who are struggling with those realities.  And in sharing in their remarkable and poignant journey, we able to see through the pain and struggle and hopelessness of it all to finally understand where we can find abundant, enduring, and empowering hope.  Real hope.  Hope for a lifetime and more. “The Eighth Page – A Christmas Journey” is an inspirational and energizing story of hope lost and hope rediscovered.  This is a story for our time, and every time.  It’s a story for you, today, tomorrow, and forever.  Each day, this thirty-day podcast series called “Thirty Days of Hope” provides the listener a brief excerpt from this inspiring and moving book.  Tune-in each day through Christmas and begin