Craig D. Lounsbrough

What I__e yet to realize is that each time I work to avoid that which I fear, I have in that very same action forfeited the blessings that my fear blinded me to. And I__e yet to realize that with God, the blessings will always and forever eclipse whatever I fear despite how absolutely imposing those fears might be

To live safely within the realm of possibility is to know nothing other than that which is possible. To live boldly within the realm of God is to experience everything that__ impossible.

I want to stand on the foundation of ethics and morals when the world around me would assault that foundation with all of its collective might, and in the standing I want to stand on the truth that that foundation will stand long after everything that has assailed it has itself has ceased to stand.

I can bow to fear and flee the pursuit of great things. I can bow to God and engage in the pursuit of making things great.

Denial is fear gone delusional. Acceptance is fear given to God. Engaging is fear overruled by God. Victory is fear banished by God.

A commitment to never getting knocked down is in reality a decision to never stand up.

With God, a mountain before me is soon to be a memory behind me.

To grow is not to timidly sit on some safe shore at water__ edge and clumsily grab whatever happens to float by me. Rather, it is to deliberately step into waters both calm and turbulent in order to wrestle great things to shore.

If the amount of times we get up is just one less than the amount of times that we've been knocked down, then we're spending our lives lying down.

Maybe I need to immerse the fabric of my soul in torrential nature of Christmas, and in doing so to finally understand that it is the very thing that can make the world what I so wish it were.

Will I live yearning for a world that I need not yearn for because the message of Christmas is entirely undaunted in its ability to handily penetrate and completely subjugate the very world that I doubt its ability to survive in?

It is my wish and most cherished hope that God would be pleased with my legacy, that lives would be changed by it, and that the world would be immeasurably better because I was privileged to leave a legacy at all. And if perchance I am fortunate enough to have these things come to pass, I can then rest in the fact that I have lived well.

I feign fullness, but in reality I am achingly empty. And it is because I too often sit at the table of the world instead of the feet of God.

If I see only my bias, I have surrendered to a single myopic lens through which to view the world. If I dare to surrender my bias, I will spend the rest of my life seeing the world and throwing away lenses.

It is not within my power to refuse the journey of life regardless of the nature of my fears or the depth of my selfishness, for the definitions of __ourney_ and __ife_ are indistinguishably synonymous. I can however sufficiently inhibit them and amply fight them to the point that I have accepted the journey, but the journey is now solely defined as my effort to forsake the journey.

No, I am not powerful nor do I wish to be, for it is God using my weakness that makes me potent and I would never wish to surrender that.

If I have not been both soothed by love and on the opposite extreme left devastated by it, I will never understand its power nor respect its majesty.

We__e making our decisions _ or so we think. Yet in truth, ignorance, greed, and the scourge of immediate gratification are often the things that are making them. So if we__e going to truly live well, maybe the first thing we need to decide is who__ deciding.