Craig D. Lounsbrough

There are consequences to ignoring consequences that are a consequence of my blatant unwillingness to learn from my consequences.

Betrayal dressed in love and trimmed with the facade of good intentions is the most barbaric of all betrayals.

It__ not so much about the cards you__e dealt; it__ a whole lot more about whether you play them well, or play them at all.

The wisdom to be on the throne of one__ life must surpass the wisdom of the one being ruled, otherwise I will squander the whole of my life in the most appalling ways. By virtue of that reality, I would be wise to get out of the chair and invite God to have a seat.

Every life is a canvas and every interaction is a brush, therefore we__ be wise to consider how we handle the paint.

Loving those who hate us means wantonly setting the stage and orchestrating the situation in a way that__ sure to result in a production of great personal calamity. But to not love them is an even greater calamity.

In the midst of our worried searching we recklessly abandon the treasures that life has bestowed upon us in the mad hunt for that which we wish to bestow upon ourselves.

It was the greatest, most intricate, most ingenious and most costly rescue mission in all of human history.

Christmas is not a story birthed of a humanized god for it simply doesn__ fit into the rubric of such an emaciated plot.

Maybe the greatest hope of Christmas is that what it purports to be is exactly what it is.

Shrewdly crafted political agendas, innately complex philosophies, man-made religions, governments and regimes of every sort, and all the endless volumes of man-manufactured wisdom and penned prose all completely failed to redeem mankind and make us better. When the best of our efforts failed to redeem the worst of our behaviors, God declared enough as enough and a baby was born.

Christmas was a response of the choice of mankind to take its existence into its own hands and chart its own course, liberally scripting its own ethics, crafting its own moral system, and choosing to believe that it was the creator and therefore master of its fate. Christmas is a response to mankind reeling off the pages of history and splattering the blood of lives and generations wasted along its free-wheeling course.

Christmas seems to say that paradise lost and longed for does not have to be paradise given up on.

Christmas is God being relentless to the point that He would die in that relentlessness.

Christmas is a response to bring mankind back, to restore some original intent that could never be even remotely restored by any effort of mankind regardless of how grand or majestic any such effort might be.

There__ something inherently majestic about Christmas that seems to have been abandoned by us; something flippantly cast aside, something that was foolishly abandoned and was tragically forgotten in the abandonment.

If Christmas is a universally comprehensive and keenly clandestine rescue mission strategically crafted by God Himself eons before the rescue was necessary, it would naturally follow that if it is doomed to anything, it is doomed to incontestable success.

Christmas was about understanding that servanthood would win the hearts of men for eternity, where raw power might win them only for a moment, if at all.