Life Talk With Craig Lounsbrough

Welcome to LifeTalk Thanks for joining us for this Thanksgiving Edition Here's some quotes drawn from today's podcast to help shape your attitude and enhance your sense of Thanksgiving: “Thanksgiving demands that we set aside the cultural narrative and be thankful for all of the things that the narrative says are not enough.” It’s not about the things that we possess as being enough. It’s that we have them in the first place. “If I am swallowed up in the bowels of negativity, and if the world seems eternally dark and forever foreboding it is likely that I have recklessly abandoned any notion of thankfulness. It is entirely likely that I have set the whole of my mind on what I don’t have, constructed the essence of my attitude around what hasn’t worked, and fashioned a vision for my future on the cold corpses of the many dreams that died horrific deaths. Yet, if I dare to be thankful for the fact that what I do have will always outweigh what I don’t, that everything that didn’t work places me one step closer t

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

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

Being Thankful - Greed or Gratitude We all have personal agendas, and typically we have quite a boatload of them.  Many times when it comes to personal agendas, we can become so entranced and subsequently driven by them that the actual cost of achieving them often becomes a secondary consideration, or maybe not even a consideration at all.  When we’re in a feverish pursuit of our agendas, we can, and we frequently will rob, pillage and/or discard many things along the way in order to achieve our agendas.  Oddly enough, we can even destroy the very things that allowed us to pursue those agendas in the first place.  In reality, this kind of self-pursuit is personal and cultural suicide in the making. It seems that’s we’ve done that with many aspects of our cultural traditions, values and foundational principles.  In the apparent insanity of 21st century living, we’re ruthlessly gutting out of our society the very things that raised our society as a nation unparalleled in all of human history.  In the wild and e

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

Thanksgiving.  To the destruction and detriment of those who live there, it will perish in an environment within which a sense of entitlement and greed rules the day.  Conversely, on the opposite end of that spectrum, a sense of thanksgiving will thrive and it will breathe life into any place where a heart of appreciation and gratitude refuses to give way to a brooding sense of entitlement, the scourge of greed, or any other lesser attitudes that keep company with such things.   But in whatever place we might find ourselves on this spectrum, we must understand that the remarkable power of Thanksgiving will live undiminished regardless of where we fall, simply because our determined adherence to it, or our blatant rejection of it cannot touch or in any way diminish something spun of things eternal. 

Flying with the geese.  Following the seasons instead of being left behind in whatever season that we are in.  Taking wing and launching ourselves off to new horizons, fresh goals, untainted opportunities, and unexplored places.  To live life as an ever-unfolding adventure that is always anticipating the next adventure.  We want to live life like this.  We really do.  We might fear it sometimes.  We might think that it takes too much energy or we don't have the time.  We might believe that we don't have the abilities to live a life like that.  We can think a lot of things, but we want to fly. At Thanksgiving, we need to be thankful for the fact that we can fly.  Maybe not like the geese that head south every year.  But we have opportunities to fly in different ways that are even more magnificent and breathtaking.  We are only relegated to the sidelines of life because we have put ourselves there.  Life does present us with opportunities that are beyond the scope of our own understanding.  But we have to take

Rich living has nothing to do with wealth...depending upon the kind of wealth we're referring to.  Rich living is found far more frequently in impoverished lives.  It is in these lives that the clutter of material wealth is absent so that these lives are free to see what is truly precious.  Life is not about the pursuit of 'stuff.'  Rather, it's about the pursuit of the everyday experiences that are handed to us without cost or obligation.  It's about 'being thankful that we can be thankful' and that such thankfulness is not based on possessions, but on the privilege we have to be possessed by life itself. Rich living means that we live with a sense of gratitude.  Life may be easy or it may be difficult, but we find a space for gratitude in either place.  It's recognizing that life is a privilege, even at those times when it doesn't necessarily feel that way.  It's an appreciate for the little things that we lose in the search of bigger things.  It's realizing that thankfulness is not about great accomplishme

Welcome to Day Ten of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” Today’s These is “The Loss of Hope” The Quote for Today Is This: “Therefore we do not lose heart.  Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.  For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.  So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 Hope.  Life drains us of it.  It almost seems that life is constantly on the hunt for what little bit of hope we might have left.  And life knows exactly what to do in order to home in on it and destroy it.  That might be a child gone rogue.  An unfaithful spouse.  A boss who’s passed you up for a promotion three different times.  Unexpected debt.  A medical issue that only gets worse the more it gets treated.  Promises broken.  A turn of

We Are More - Understanding Our Capacity “Whatever you see within yourself, let it be the whole of yourself.  For too often we have been brutalized by our own sense of inadequacy and we’ve been held hostage to the lesser choices born of such a debilitating sense of self.  Know this, that latent within you there lies more than ample resources begging to be called forth to smash the chains forged of such an incapacitating sense of self.  And it is my prayer that you would press against everything within you that would hold you back, and that you would raise whatever voice you have and extend that call.” You are more than you realize.  A lot more.  You’ve probably heard that before, and if you haven’t, you’re long overdue.  You are more than you realize.  But the thing is, we don’t feel that we are ‘more.’  If anything, the things that happened to us would suggest the opposite…that we’re less than what we hoped we were (and probably a whole lot less).  Whether that’s failure (in any of the million different ways

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

Welcome to Day Nine of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” Today’s Theme is “The Plague of Low Self-Esteem.” The Quote for Today Is This: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.  I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” Psalm 139:13-14 We have difficulty believing that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.”  That’s a hard one sometimes.  We look into the mirror or our decisions, and all that we see are the numerous cracks and spidery fissures in that mirror that speak to the destruction wrought by those decisions.  We glance into the mirror of our achievements, and what stares back at us are a host of failures so numerous that the mirror is packed tight with them.  We peer into the mirror of our relationships only to have no one peering back at us.  And if we wipe the mirror clean of all of that stuff and simply glance at

Dead-End Roads of Our Making We chart these paths.  We set these goals.  We ponder where we are, and from there we determine where we want to go.  There’s some sort of road that we’re walking, whether that’s a road of our own making, or it’s a road that everybody is walking, or it’s the road that culturally vogue or socially trending.  Sometimes that road is well defined and clear.  Sometimes there’s very little definition to it all, and we end up wondering if we’re really on any sort of road at all.  And then some of us are just plain lost in the woods.  “There’s some sort of road that we’re all walking.” Whatever kind of road that we’re on, it’s both amazing and frustrating how many of those roads end up at dead-ends.  It’s stunning that there are millions of people who are standing at the end of some road (or what they thought was a road) and it ends.  It just ends.  They had visualized it going somewhere great, or exciting, or meaningful.  It was the path to their dreams.  It was the road to a life-long r

Do We Search for the Truth? Do we search for the truth, or do we search for ways around the truth?  Do we even take the time to consider a question like that out of the long-held assumption that we are, in fact, looking for the truth because (we assume) that that’s the obvious thing to do?  What insanity would behoove us to do anything less?  But do we search for the truth, or do we search for ways around the truth?  Maybe we should consider the fact that there are a whole lot of reasons why we actually might stoop to something less. Truth be told, the truth may not be what we want it to be.  It may not support our agendas, or our desires.  In fact, it might actually render those things as erroneous and all-together ill-fated.  The truth may not support all of the things that we passionately wish to believe, or have talked ourselves into believing.  Or truth may dare to go so far as to actually call the entirety of those beliefs into question, and call us out for believing in them in the first place.  Do we s

Welcome to Day Eight of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” Today’s Theme is “The Painful Struggle of Infertility.” The quote for today reads this way: “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten— the great locust and the young locust, the other locusts and the locust swarm— my great army that I sent among you..” Joel 2:25   What many people are desperate to have are the very things that others recklessly throw away.  What is cherished, intimately longed for, and desperately sought after by so many is discarded by others without so much as a fleeting thought. Such is the agonizing dilemma of those facing the pain of infertility.  Having squarely set decades of dreams on the immense privilege of having a child, couples find their dreams brought to a jarring and often unexpected halt.  Facing the brutal possibility of being childless, these couples expend massive amounts of time, emotional energy, and personal resour

Thinking It's Over When It's Not It’s over…we tell ourselves.  It’s over.  Whatever it might be (or might have been) it’s gone and there’s no getting it back.  The loss is too big.  The obstacles are too daunting.  Things have changed so much that whatever we lost no longer has a place in the current reality that we’re living in.  We’re one person (just one person) trapped in a downward spiral that’s far more powerful than all of us put together.  The glass isn’t half empty.  The fact is, there is no glass.  We can’t pick up where we left off because where we left off...left. It’s over…so we think. In processing all of this for myself, I wrote this quote: “The last time I saw it, its hull was crushed and it laid helpless against the incessant swells that rolled up upon the shallows within which it laid canted and broken.  Yet, in the hands of a seasoned sailor who saw potential in the carnage, it was hauled out the swells, lovingly repaired, and the next year it pushed out past the swells that had held it hel

We Are a Mess We are a mess.  We are a mess because we are a people on a mad rant.  Sadly, we have become blinded to the fact that we are blinded by a host of pathetically self-serving agendas.  And the pathetic nature of these agendas are evidenced by the fact that they are unable to stand up to the slightest scrutiny despite how rigorous our justifications of those agendas might be.  We create a litany of agendas whose basis is indefensible, for any self-serving agenda will always be indefensible. Therefore, we shut down anyone who wishes to do something as simple as dialogue with us about those agendas.  The simple and potentially enriching exchange of differing ideas and perspectives is viewed as an inexcusably prejudiced and an entirely unwarranted threat.  And such a radicalized stance is based on the insecurities of an agenda that is too weak to entertain anything other than its own indefensible platform.  Therefore, we instantly shut down dialogue in order to side-step the painful reality that the age

Welcome to Day Seven of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” Today’s Theme is “The Plague of Addictions.”   The Quote for Today Is This: "Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control." Proverbs 25:28   Life is filled with pain.  Or maybe more accurately, our lives are engulfed in pain.  We’ve all run into it, or have had it run into us, or have had it run over us.  That pain can be physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual.  It can be a product of the people around us, or the person within us.  It can come to us in the form of circumstances beyond our control, or circumstances that we should have controlled.  We might have had nothing to do with it, or everything to do with it.  In whatever way it comes, pain comes to all of us. The perpetually debilitating nature of our pain gradually weakens our resolve to fight it.  Our belief that we can somehow beat it dissolves into some sort of mythical

How Do We Look at Time? “Time is the great intimidator, steadily stealing away precious seconds with no pause in the stealing.  And such thievery leads us to believe that in time, the pilfering of these seconds will eventually exhaust all such seconds, leaving us at the ‘end’ of everything.  Yet, God states that the seconds are actually the countdown to the ‘beginning’ of everything.” How do we look at time?  As a thief?  As something that moves way too fast?  As something that robbed our youth and is eroding our lives with every tick of the clock?  Do we see it as something that there’s never enough of?  Do we see it as something that moves faster the busier that we become, so there’s never any chance that we will ever be able to catch up?  Or, do we see it as something that drags when we’re bored, so much so that we’d gladly forfeit the time just to get out of the boredom?  If we’re tired of life, or frustrated with our circumstances, or if we just don’t care anymore, do we wish that time didn’t exist in th

Welcome to Day Six of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” Today’s Theme is “Discovering My Purpose.”   The Quote for Today Is This: “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails..” Proverbs 19:21   Purpose.  Without it, life has no meaning.  Without it, life is empty.  We can liberally pour all kinds of questionable things into our lives every day of our lives, but without purpose the emptiness remains despite the pouring.  In fact, pour in the wrong stuff and the emptiness becomes more empty. We are all created with an innate need for purpose that will not relent.  A sense that we matter.  A belief that in the chaos of life we have a purpose in the chaos.  A conviction that we are here because to ‘not’ be here is an unacceptable option.  A deep sense that we were created because not to be created was too great a mistake. Many can argue that life is random and happenstance.  Yet, that arg