Craig D. Lounsbrough

If I were to be brutally honest with myself, how often is my journey actually a path designed to circumvent my journey?

At the moment that everything goes dark, the sunset in front of us becomes the whole story. But if we find courage enough to wait until tomorrow morning, we will suddenly come to understand that in reality yesterday__ sunset was only half of the story.

Tragedy descends, and in the carnage our enraged cynicism screams __f there was a God, He would not have allowed this!_ And somehow we__e conveniently forgotten that once upon a time He allowed us to tell Him to go away, and once upon that time we allowed ourselves to take Him up on that offer.

The world is shaken by major events, but it is __ransformed_ by slight subtleties. And while we may be far too small to create even one major event, we are just the right size to craft a thousand subtleties.

God__ absence in the carnage is due to one single rather unnerving fact; that at some time past He honored our request that He leave. And if we are not brutally honest with ourselves regarding that choice, it is we ourselves who have set the stage for the next tragedy.

Our experiences are the building blocks of the future hewn out of the granite of the present.

The road from __ere_ to __here_ is a map yet to be written with the pen I hold in my hand.

If we__e somehow become convinced that the script we followed __esterday_ can__ be edited, it will be incredibly difficult to tell the difference between __esterday_ and __omorrow_.

The road ahead is not some predetermined path that I am forced to trod, but it is a rich byway that I can help create.

You are not made in __our image_. You are, in fact, made in __od__ image_. Therefore, which one are you looking for when you look in the mirror?

We ask, __hy the need for God?_ Maybe the better question is __hy the need not to need Him?_ And could it be that that question in fact evidences our need for Him?

If I__e prayed, I never have to worry about being the first one to show up.

We can breathe in the sweet scent of a tepid summer__ meadow after the kiss of a warm rain, and in the very same moment we can stand utterly breathless underneath the expanse of untold galaxies that breech the very edges of the universe itself. Such are the privileges we enjoy because of God__ unimaginable imagination.

If I have found my journey to be a maddening tangle of wandering __abbit-trails,_ a labyrinth of incessantly circular passages to nowhere and back, and a plethora of assorted __ead-ends_ fraudulently disguised as paths of great promise, it can only be because I have mindlessly exchanged God__ compass for mine. Therefore, it would appear that another exchange might be in order.

To say that my existence is entirely inconsequential is to utterly ignore the amazing reality that life is a masterful story penned by a brilliant God who wrote me into the story in such a way that my absence would literally diminish the whole of the story.

We look around us and we find ourselves confused as to why the world has fallen into such deep darkness. And standing in this descending darkness, what we need to realize is that the farther we move from God, the darker everything gets. And no light of man can illuminate that kind of darkness.

In reality, is being sedentary a choice to run from our calling by not running after it?

With God, a mountain is only a road waiting to happen.