Life Talk With Craig Lounsbrough

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: “Running from what we fear is like throwing a bunch of stuff in the bed of a truck and somehow thinking that driving the truck will distance us from what’s laying in the bed.” Follow all of Craig's daily quotes on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram.

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.

Slavery as an institution is pretty far removed from the minds of most of us residing here in 21st 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 the chasm of time 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, lynching’s, 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.  Slavery is seen as a physical captivity that coerces a forced service to an enslaving master.  That’s how we view it.  That definition is nearly exclusive, making our definition of slave

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, whi

Defined By Our Deficits “Any deficit that you have can never stand against the asset that that deficit is waiting to become.” Craig D. Lounsbrough You know, we come to define ourselves more by what we lack than by what we possess. We define ourselves by the successes that we haven’t had, the relationships that didn’t work, the careers that never happened, and the dreams that never got off the ground because they never made it to the runway. All of these things tell us everything that we are not. The assets that we don’t have. The confidence that we lack. The intelligence that is never intelligent enough. The talents that we don’t possess, and the determination that is never sufficiently determined. We see ourselves as a sad compilation of everything that we are not. These deficits result in shattered relationships. Shuttered opportunities. Job losses. Financial failures. Addictions. Upended careers. Friendships that went up in flames and the charred remains of families that fell to the same fate. The shame

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

Common sense is a ‘common’ phrase that is in reality far from common.  To add insult to injury, common sense also seems to weigh in a trite bit light on ‘sense’ as well.  It might be proper to say that common sense is neither common nor does it make much sense anymore.  Today, common sense commonly lacks sense and we are the poorer for it. It seems rather apparent that some things in life should simply ‘be’ without any thought about whether they should ‘be.’  We would define those as the common things.  If we tinker with the idea of “common” for a moment, it would imply something that just ‘is’ because it has a place in life that’s uncontested, blatantly obvious, globally useful, intrinsically beneficial and it’s as cleanly natural as sunshine and rose petals.  ‘Common’ defines those things whose existence we simply presume without questioning what they are or what role they play.  They just ‘are’ because they’re supposed to be and we accept them as such.    Common Sense It seems that common sense should be c

Great things scare us, as they should.  If something doesn't scare us then it's probably not all that great.  All of us are called to great things.  Those things will likely be different for each of us.  However, in whatever way they are great, they are great.  We are not here to pass through this existence as some distant observer of whatever's going on in this existence.  Our lives are not passive and our role in the lives of others is not passive either.  Whether large or small, we are here to do great things. However, our fear often keeps us from doing great things.  The task is too large.  We don't have the knowledge or the time.  Our resources are far too inadequate.  The task would be better left to others who could do it better than how it would be left if we did it.  Great things are for those 'other' people.  We might be called to do a few 'good' things, but great things are beyond the scope of who we are.  Nonetheless, we are called to great things, and to avoid them or miss them would be one of th

Rescue.  It is hard to admit that we need to be rescued.  We think ourselves to be smart enough, cunning enough, strategic enough, and enough of whatever it is that we need to be enough of to save ourselves.  We tediously craft an endless array of things to rescue us from the things that we previously crafted to rescue us that ended up stranding us.  We add problem to problem.  Dilemma to dilemma.  Disappointment to disappointment.  The very effort to dig ourselves out of the holes that we’ve dug only serves to dig them that much deeper.  We preach the commitment to the effort as the victory because the victory that we promised never materialized.  Therefore we are left having to save face and salvage the failure by believing that we’re accomplishing something by at least having tried.  We fancy ourselves as rather ingenious, but the outcome of our supposed ingenuity is anything but genius, even though we proclaim it as such.  Our efforts to rescue ourselves only serves to enhance our need to be rescued.   Re

The gift of Christmas (the gift of God’s Son) empowers us to do all of what we were designed to do, but will fail to God unless God empowers us to do it. It is the liberation from everything that we were ‘not’ designed to be and not designed to do. It is the opportunity and the power to finally, finally be our authentic selves. And then, how about the durability of Christmas? These things that Christmas does…but how long do they last? “Have we ever consider the boldness of Christmas? For to craft such a daring story and to do so in a manner that it is sufficiently sturdy to stand up under the relentless scrutiny that is certain to be brought to bear against such a story is boldness indeed. And when God pens a story He does so not fearing scrutiny, but inviting as much of it as any one of us can muster up, for God does nothing that is not bold. Such is God and such is Christmas.” What God writes and what God does has no expiration date attached to it. There’s no last page. No period. What He writes and what He

Rarely do we rise to the pinnacle of our capabilities.  However, all too often we readily descend to the dismal pit of our inabilities.  We’re remarkably human, but we’re terribly primal at the same time.  We have the ability to access an intellect that has no equal in all of creation, yet we defer to something more animalistic that’s all too common in all of creation.  And that primal, animalistic side of us is more often than not the “primary” side of us.  And that’s primarily a problem because “we are better than this.” It seems that we’re relatively slow to think and dreadfully quick to react.  We’re sluggish to methodically strategize our actions, while we’re reflexively quick to strike out in some sort of impulsive reaction.  Rather than draw upon the expanse of our intellect and the depth of our wisdom, particularly in the difficult times, we too often grab the closest thing to us and start swinging. Too often we’re not prudent and we’re anything but judicious.  We’ve too easily abandoned our intellect

We quite naturally and quite appropriately presume that to live in the world, we must understand the world.  We know quite well that to navigate this complicated and frequently fragile existence of ours, as well as have any hope of emerging on top in some form or another, we must understand what we’re navigating.  If we don’t understand the terrain around us, and if we’re not acutely aware of the nuances both large and small that cut across it we risk not only being irreparably lost, but we also risk being destroyed in being lost.  Such a perspective is certainly sound. However, we feel that we must do far more than just understand the world that we live in.  Knowledge is information, but it is not necessarily transformation.  In reality, having knowledge alone is to live as nothing more than an alien with knowledge.  Yet, to keep up with the world, or to get to a place where the world has to keep up with us, we have to be far more than aliens.  We must throw off that which is alien and become more of that wh

We always have, and we always will have the intrinsic need to believe in something.  Life is a journey whose demands will always exceed whatever personal assets we might possess in an attempt to meet those demands.  Life always has and life always will require more of me than I have within myself to give it.  All of my accumulated resources meticulously gathered and shrewdly coordinated in the most strategic manner possible will always fall achingly short of meeting even the most primitive and pared down demands of living life.  And because that’s the case, I’ve got no alternative but to extend myself outside of myself and believe in things that are bigger than me.  I not only need to believe, I want to believe.  I want to believe, especially in a world that seems to be falling apart in places that I never believed it would fall apart.  In the midst of all of the unnerving unraveling that I am helpless to stop, there are things I’d like to believe to calm my heart and steady my soul.  There’s some sustaining

I am only one.  That’s all I am.  I am only one and I will always be only one.  I was born as one, I will live as one, and on the day of my death I will die as one.  In this journey that we all call life, I am and will always be completely restricted and wholly limited to being one and only one.  And all of those daunting realities strike me as miserably pathetic and colossally discouraging.  Sadly, I am only one. I am only one in a mammoth sea of surging and foaming humanity within which my main and often single goal is simply to survive.  The winds will blow and the tides will roll in whatever way they spuriously and often callously choose to blow and roll.  And whatever choice they make will dictate the ways that I will go because I’m far too small to swim against them, and far too weak to even dare chart a different course from theirs.  I am only one, and being one doesn’t appear to be enough. I am only one, and because I am, even the reality of my existence is of little note.  In the span of this minute,

Integrity - To Understand and Live It Integrity.  You’ve heard that “Integrity is doing the right when nobody’s watching.”  It’s not about being a crowd pleaser, or working to get some sort of edge.  It’s not agenda driven, other than we do the right thing for no other reason than it’s the right thing…and that’s not an agenda.  That’s a conviction.  It’s not about the cost of doing the right thing, or the long-term effects, or the short-term effects, or whether it will be popular or not so popular.  It’s not about the response of a person, or an organization, or a certain cultural group, or some philosophical leaning, or anything like that at all.  It’s doing the right thing for no other reason than it’s the right thing.  That’s it. Now, a lot of people ask what the right thing is.  And in our culture, the right thing is too often based on the wrong criteria (or at least a terribly skewed one).  In the culture today, the right thing is typically based on its level of acceptance, whether that’s in our social g

At times, the innumerable dialogues regarding the state of our nation appear to be less dialogues and more something akin to agenda mongering and rights crusading.  It seems that we have hijacked the solemn rights and sacred liberties afforded us and have forced them into servitude around our ego-centric agendas and myopic special interests.  The altar of self is where nations perish.  And on that altar we have too often found ourselves tediously picking apart the fabric of liberty and meticulously editing the founding principles of this nation so that we might justify those agendas and rationalize those interests in the name of the very freedom we are abusing. In response to these actions, leaders and heralds of debatable origins spout bold platitudes and chart even bolder courses that often have little substance and are void of the balance achieved through the merging of wisdom seasoned by time, the vision gifted through deep struggle, and the astuteness afforded by heritage.  It seems that we are adrift on

It's Not About Being Ordinary It’s not about being ordinary, because we all are.  In talking about myself, I’m about as ‘ordinary’ as they come.  But, it’s not about being ordinary.  It’s about recognizing that being ordinary does not limit us to ordinary things.  That’s the beauty of it.  We’re all ordinary, which gives us everything that we need to be extra-ordinary.  God granted you and He granted me all of the elements, all of the ingredients (if you will) to do what we never thought we could do.  You come packaged with resources that (if used correctly) can accomplish things that are greater than the sum total of those resources.  And if there’s some tragedy in all of that, it’s that people don’t use them correctly, and therefore they never accomplish the great things that were theirs to accomplish. The incredibly disappointing thing is that people look at who they are through the lens of who ‘they’ are.  And through that lens (which is incredibly limiting) we don’t see all that we are.  We have this vag

The majesty of our humanity and the capabilities laid out within us are nothing short of marvelous; so much so that we are barely cognizant of it.  All of us run thick with untapped potential.  We are rich with possibility and formidably equipped to tease the cusp of the impossible and to overcome it in the teasing.  The essence of our being is immense beyond words and the breadth of it eclipses any syntax to frame it all.  Despite the incomprehensible complexity of it all, the entirety of this essence is precisely consolidated and ingeniously joined so that the full measure of it might be released without any of it wasted or missed in the releasing.  We are crafted to enhance all that exists around us and to make everything immeasurably more than what is.  We are marvelous in ways so grand that such marvel escapes us although it resides right within each of us.  Indeed, we are created in just this way. This potential is not something of muse, as we might presume it to be since we tend to see so little of it.

We Like Things to Be New New.  We like new things, or things to be new, or to do away with the old to make a place and a space for something new.  The idea of ‘new’ is appealing.  And because it is, we chase it.  But ‘new’ does not mean ‘better,’ and I think that quite often we associate the two way too much.  We tend to automatically think that if something is ‘new,’ the fact that it’s ‘new’ somehow guarantees that it’s ‘better.’  Certainly, some things that are ‘new’ are clearly ‘better.’  But many are not.  And at some level we know that.  But I think that we rather casually (and maybe unconsciously) associate that which is ‘new’ as somehow, someway, through some degree of some sort of magical thinking, as always being ‘better.’  However, ‘new’ does not mean ‘better.’ And because there’s this natural association of ‘new’ as being ‘better,’ we often focus on making something new, or doing something new, or trying something new, or inventing something new without really being thoughtful about whether this ‘n

“Right now, it’s Saturday for me.  I’m between what was and what is yet to be, living squarely between a death of sorts and the unknown of the ‘what next?’  It is my Saturday.  If the ‘yet to be’ is nothing more than what is transpiring right now, my future will be shrouded in the thick cold of bitter hopelessness.  A shift in a slightly different direction, and there may be jubilation.  Either way, right now it’s Saturday for me.”   An Intimate Collision  Ever been in the “in-between?”  You know, something’s gone (whatever that is), but whatever’s coming next hasn’t showed up yet.  Or, life shut down in one place and it hasn’t opened up someplace else.  Or, there’s this huge hole in our lives where some ‘thing’ or ‘someone’ used to be, and now that ‘it’ or ‘they’ are gone, we’re waiting for what’s going to show up and settle in that gaping hole within us.  We lost a friend, or we lost a job, or we lost a home, or we lost a parent, or we lost our confidence, or we a lost a goal, or we lost a sense of self, or