Life Talk With Craig Lounsbrough

Backwards - The Grand Reversal of Easter By Craig D. Lounsbrough   I am backwards.  I don’t think I’m backwards, I wouldn’t necessarily see myself as backwards, nor would I tell you that I’m backwards; but I’m backwards.  And the oddity of it all is that I actually see backwards as forwards.  From where I’m sitting it doesn’t look backwards at all.  However, in terms of how I conceptualize the realities of life as held against the limitations that I perceive myself as having, I’m backwards.  I’m backwards because I have tediously assessed the realities of the existence within which I am forced to operate, and I have concurrently determined the permanently fixed limitations that define my humanity as I live within that existence.  And based on the conclusions I have drawn in these two areas, I have done a rather splendid job of setting the parameters for my existence by configuring (to the best of my ability) what’s possible and what’s not. In the end, this determination that I have made regarding that which i

“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?  You are not your own; you were bought at a price.  Therefore honor God with your body. I Corinthians 6:19-20 Life is precious.  Therefore, the loss of it goes deep.  There are losses that are a natural part of our existence.  They hurt, but at least they make sense.  But then there are the losses that don’t make sense.  The losses that didn’t need to happen.  The losses that were premature, unnecessary, avoidable, and entirely out of step with life as we know it (or would like to know it). Suicide is one of these.  This loss was a choice.  In all likelihood it involved the convergence of many things dark and weighty; hopelessness, despair, life gone wrong, self-hatred, incessant failures, the inability to find a niche, dreams smashed, relationships lost, faith gone.  And the pressing compilation of such things tips the scales and renders death preferable to life.  At some point of darkest desperat

“…for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.’” Romans 3:23 Failure.  It’s having set out to do something, or not do something, and having failed to achieve the goal either way.  It’s falling short.  It’s having missed the mark, or having pulled out of the race long before we came anywhere close to the mark.  It’s the dream that we couldn’t breathe life into, or the fear that we couldn’t breathe the life out of.  It’s the relationship that we couldn’t hold because we were not worth being held.  It’s the thing that puts us in our place because we foolishly thought that we might be better than that place.  It’s falling down and finding no reason to get back up. Failure is a stark message regarding our ability or lack thereof.  It is the undeniable evidence of what we feared might be true, that we are in fact inadequate or incompetent or whatever we feared that we might be.  It reminds us of our misdirected efforts to elevate our place in life, and it assigns us the very station that we worked so

“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.’” Psalm 139:14 One of the worst things is not knowing who you are.  And probably a close second to that is to hate what you do know.  And right behind that there’s the effort to create something that you think you’ll like in order to solve both of those problems. But all of this misses the only battle that’s worth fighting, and the only effort that will insure success.  Life is not about creating ourselves.  Rather, it’s about discovering ourselves.  It’s not about assuming some presumed right to make ourselves what we’re not.  Rather, it’s about the privilege of discovering who we already are.  And that journey is one of the most profound journeys that we are each privileged to take. Yet we live in a world bent on creating what cannot be created.  Certainly, we can mimic many things, but the mimicking will never make us those things.  We stand by and watch those committed to becoming what they are not

"Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Four Did you ever have one of those surreal moments when it seems like something snaps in your head and suddenly you see everything like you never saw it before?  Have you experienced those times when things unexplainably shift and they don’t look at all the same as they did only a moment ago?  When what was entirely familiar is no longer familiar in quite the way that it was before? A lot of things can trigger these moments . . . an argument, a child leaving the home, a death, a job loss, a divorce, a birthday, unexpected contact from a long-lost friend or any number of similar events.  In the middle of whatever this is, you’re suddenly able to see the reality of your life with a stunning, nearly razor-sharp clarity that you’ve never had before.  It’s kind of like you were blind and you didn’t know it and in the briefest nanosecond, for the briefest nanosecond you were granted stunningly perfect vision.  And with that perf

“Even if my father and mother abandon me, the LORD will hold me close.’” Psalm 27:10 There are many things that are meant to be forever.  There are those things whose permanence in our lives is never questioned because they are designed to be permanent.  Their role in our lives had nothing of a temporary nature built into them.  Therefore, we have no reason to doubt their permanence.  As such, we never stop to consider what life would be like without them because such a thought is entirely at odds with their permanence.  Yet, we live in a world where permanence can be traded for lesser agendas and what should never have left us does. When a parent abandons us, the immense internal conflict of their supposed permanence as held in juxtaposition against their absence rocks our world to dark places.  In our desperate efforts to correlate the irreconcilable discrepancies of permanence as held against abandonment, we rationalize the loss of the parent or we work to suppress the pain by denying the loss altogether.

Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Three The concept of sacrifice seems more suited to novels or epic movies.  It appears more an ideal; a concept that when observed from a safe distance seems wonderfully heroic, deeply inspiring and chivalrous in a way that stirs up something powerful in us that seems to be forever held hostage despite the fact that it gets stirred.  Sacrifice, as we watch it displayed from afar, awakens some internal passion that chafes against our souls in its quest to be unleashed within us. Somehow sacrifice seems to be something that is entirely right, that is likewise entirely lost.  There are those things that we believe exist yet are lost to mankind; the things we are ever in search of not because we are caught up in some sort of shallow fascination with them.  Rather, there are those things that we know to be authentically real whose absence must be remedied by their discovery.  There are those things that we are made for, yet which

Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part Two Forgiveness often seems to be one of those things that’s a genuinely nice idea, but not really a life liberating reality.  Life is full of nice ideas; those trite sayings, gentle stories and brave concepts that would make life a whole lot better if they were really real.  Nice ideas often seem to be spun of the threads of idealism and the fabric of fanciful thinking.  The reality is that they don’t really seem to work in the real world.  Sometimes the very things that we wish were true simply dissolve and disintegrate when the reality of life hits them.  Forgiveness seems to be one of those things. Sometimes the greatest, most profound truths seem to be the very things that are completely removed from the reality of the lives that we live.  In reality, it’s not that they don’t fit or are idealistic or naïve or far-fetched.  Most often it’s simply the fact that we don’t know how to incorporate them.  Sometimes the greates

Obstacles to Prayer LifeTalk “I want to live a life where prayer is the first thing that I do, the second thing, the third thing, and the last thing after the prayer has been answered.” Craig D. Lounsbrough Many of the obstacles to prayer are things that we have not given sufficient attention to, or we think that they’re somehow normal, appropriate, or of no real concern. These are the things that present themselves as rather casual issues that are of little importance. But they can (in fact) be major obstacles to an effective prayer life. In this podcast we’re going to outline a handful of these destructive factors that too often lay hidden in our lives. And in wondering how or why our prayer lives seem so ineffectual or hollow, we might ask if any of these factors have found a place of residence in our lives.   Obstacles to Prayer Sin. Sin is an intentional living outside of the will of God that places us at odds with who God created us to be. Sin is described as “anything that separates us from God.” If we

"Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone - Simple Truth's for Life's Complex Journey" - Part One We yearn for security.  There is an inherent need deep within the fiber of our being that desires to be able to lean on and lean into the things around us, knowing with steeled assuredness that they will hold us firm and steady.  We want life to be safe because we have a passion to engage life.  And to engage life out to its furthest edges, we must of necessity step out of ourselves and into that which is around us.  We have to step up, step off and step out.  Any real journey is of necessity a journey beyond ourselves.  A robust journey unapologetically takes us outside of all that we are able to keep safe, into that which we cannot.  To do that, we by nature need some degree of safety in the endeavor. Not only do we naturally yearn to lean out into life, life at many junctures demands it, and a real journey is not possible without it.  Life frequently arrays itself before us in a manner that forces us to trust; to mod

The odds that are we’ve never met, and if we have, I hope that I was able to leave something with you in the meeting as that is my passion and my calling. My life has been devoted to helping people.  You know, you start out with a vision to help people, and that vision is often pretty romanticized.  In your mind you envision changing people lives, and because you are, you envision changing the world.  It all becomes kind of heroic, and valiant, and courageous, and all of that. But you soon discover that helping people (truly helping them), will ask everything of you.  It’ll drain you.  At times it will drive you to despair.  You will look pain, and loss, and abuse, and hopelessness, and shattered lives, and addictions…you will look all of that stuff in the face, and you will find yourself questioning your ability to do anything about it at all.  Sooner or later, helping people will leave you with some level of trauma, and there will come a time (more than one time) that helping people make you ask if the worl

The question of purpose is simple, direct, but inherently complicated. The question demands bravery. It rises on the belief that we have an utterly indispensable role to play in our own existence because it is not just our own existence. Fulfilling our purpose has an equally critical role to play in the existence of others. It is our part in this ever-unfolding corporate story that we have been granted an indispensable part in.  What “Purpose” Tells Us: First, We’re More Than Just the Sum Total of Our Existence The fact that we have a purpose evidences the fact that we are more than just the sum total of whoever it is that we are. A purpose says that we have a much larger role in this thing that we call life than just the living out of our individual lives.  Life is bigger than any of us will ever be as an individual. Purpose tells us that we’re specifically designed to engage every bit of that expanse. A purpose tells us that we are far more than just the sum total of our existence because we are called to d

You know, I grew up with a lot of dreams.  A lot of things that I wanted to do.  We all have dreams.  Maybe your dream was to have a great marriage.  Maybe it was to start a company that changed a community, or a nation, or maybe the world.  Maybe it was to raise solid kids, or travel, or write a book, or invent something revolutionary that made life better for other people, or live in some particular place, or achieve some level of financial comfort, or whatever it might have been.  And as you grow older, you actually find yourself kind of refining those dreams.  You tweak them.  You roll them over in your head.  You begin to adjust them ‘here and there’ to fit the world as your understanding of the world matures and sharpens and grows and expands.  And as that refining thing happens, you begin to figure out how these dreams might actually work.  How you might actually be able to pull all of that stuff off.  It’s a really neat kind of thing.  And in thinking out loud, I would guess that, at some level, you’v

“You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.” - Henry David Thoreau “Who am I?” The question seems a bit overused these days. In our culture, I tend to think it’s less about thoughtfully unearthing who we are. Rather, I think it’s more about creating something that’s culturally acceptable and that adheres to whatever trend is currently trending in the culture. It’s the creation of a self suitable to the world rather than discovering who we are as both in and above the world. And so we might ask, how do we not know? How could we wake up every day and go to bed every night with this person that we are and still not know who we are? How is it that we walk through the myriad array of dynamics and demands of life and living, and somehow not see ourselves in the act of dealing with those things? How have we lived with ourselves yet missed ourselves in the living? Well, one answer is that we don’t want to see. We don’t want to see because we fear that if we actually look at wh

LifeTalk Love – A World Without It “Love is the essence of our humanity expressing itself in actions of sacrifice so profound that we risk not surviving those expressions.” Complacency is a tragic hallmark of our lives. We’ve certainly got bunches of it. In fact, as the old saying goes, we’ve got it “in spades.” Complacency is conceived in the bosom of familiarity, where something becomes so commonplace that we errantly render it as ‘common.’ We’ve yet to beat this tendency that we have to assume that the more we have of something, the less it’s inherent value. And so we end up taking great things, important things, even critical things for granted. And it’s at that point that we begin to lose the very things that we can’t live without because we become complacent. Diluting of Love One of the things that we become complacent about is love. We blithely toss around the idea of love in a manner that paints it as something of a magical storyline. It seems that far too often we’ve relegated it to the penmanship of

How many times have you felt that there’s just no use?  There’s just no sense in going on.  You know, we’ve made way too many mistakes.  Or the hole that we’ve dug, or the hole that misfortune dug is just too deep.  And it really doesn’t matter who dug it anyway because, either way, we’re not getting out it.  We failed out of college, or we didn’t go to begin with.  Or our marriage went away.  Or our addiction won’t go away.  Or our career goals always stall no matter how much we’ve invested in what we’re doing.  The medical issues just keep happening.  We can’t hold onto a friend to save our lives, or our family just can’t get along long enough to actually look like a family.  The bills never stop.  It’s always bad news.  Our self-esteem is shot, our dreams are dead, the kids won’t call us, and we’re dreading tomorrow because it’s going to be the exact same thing all over again.  How many times have you felt that there’s just no use? And when we’re at that point, life doesn’t really matter all that much anym

People ask me, “Is there any hope?”  And there have been times (more than one), where I’ve found myself asking the same question.  “Is there any hope?” And I often ask myself, “What kind of world do we live in?  How dark has it all become?  How bad must it be that we somehow find ourselves driven to some point, or some place in our lives that’s so desperate that we actually find ourselves asking that kind of question?”  And I’ll tell you what, if you’re asking that question it’s because you’re in a really dark place.  And I know how dark they are because I’ve been there…and so have you. Think about it for a minute.  Without hope, what have we got?  What have we got?  If we can’t apply some feeling of hope to our future, or a marriage that’s hanging by a thread, or a disease that could go really wrong really fast, or a child who’s gone rogue, or a career that teetering on the edge of some abyss, or an addiction that’s eaten up someone’s life or someone’s family…if there’s no hope that you can apply to any of t

The Self That I Long to Believe In Believing in a New Start Some of us don’t believe in new starts. We may feel that we’re not worthy of a new start. Or, we may feel that we just don’t have what it takes to pull off a new start. But, what would we actually do with a new start, if it were possible? Not something that looks new because we’ve cleaned it up in order to make it look new, when it’s not.  Not some radical make-over of something that’s radically old so that it looks new, but it’s not. Not some tedious restoration that’s going to temporarily erase the footprints of time and grant something old a few more years of life until it eventually shows it real age again. Because that stuff’s born of the belief that we’re not worthy of something really new, and that we’re just not smart enough to actually create something that’s different than whatever it is that we’ve got, and whoever it is that we are. New. How do we make something new? Well, here five brief ideas on what you need to do in order begin making

LifeTalk Reshaping Our Understanding of Prayer Hi, I’m Craig Lounsbrough. Welcome to LifeTalk. Thanks for joining us today. You know, I think that we would like prayer to be a real thing. Whether you believe in it or not, I believe that most of us would like it to be true. We all have those difficult and devastating points in life when we would love to have something that would connect us to something bigger than we are. Something to get us out of the mess that we can’t get ourselves out of. Regardless of what you happen to believe, I believe that most of us would like prayer to be true. And so, out of that hope, maybe we need to take a minute and revisit prayer. Whether you tend to believe in it or not, maybe we need to ask what it really is. Maybe we need to consider abandoning all lesser ideals and see if we can embrace prayer as the potent and indispensable power that handily moves everything that would dare to step in its path. And if prayer is actually that powerful, how do we get ourselves there? To ac

In the Footsteps of the Few The Power of a Principled Life By Craig D. Lounsbrough Are you where you want to be in life? Are you even close? Where have your dreams gone and has your hope gone with them? Have you found yourself someplace so far removed from whatever vision it was that you had for your life that you're convinced that there's no way back (if you even remember where 'back' might be)? This is the story of so many. So very many. And this story ends up becoming the tale of so many lives for the whole of their lives. "In the Footsteps of the Few" helps us understand how to live a bold life. A courageous life. A solid life. A life of dreams reclaimed and hope revived. This book takes a fresh and principled look at life and how to live it in a manner that's robust and incredibly enriching. Get your copy of "In the Footsteps of the Few" at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold. Take a moment and review a selection of Sample Chapters at https://craiglpc.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/In-th